what more about the last struggle between the Young Church and the
Old World.

CHAPTER I: THE LAURA

In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian Era, some three
hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on
the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand.
Behind him the desert sand-waste stretched, lifeless, interminable,
reflecting its lurid glare on the horizon of the cloudless vault of
blue. At his feet the sand dripped and trickled, in yellow rivulets,
from crack to crack and ledge to ledge, or whirled past him in tiny jets
of yellow smoke, before the fitful summer airs. Here and there, upon the
face of the cliffs which walled in the opposite side of the narrow
glen below, were cavernous tombs, huge old quarries, with obelisks
and half-cut pillars, standing as the workmen had left them centuries
before; the sand was slipping down and piling up around them, their
heads were frosted with the arid snow; everywhere was silence,
desolation-the grave of a dead nation, in a dying land. And there he
sat musing above it all, full of life and youth and health and beauty--a
young Apollo of the desert. His only clothing was a ragged sheep-skin,
bound with a leathern girdle. His long black locks, unshorn from
childhood, waved and glistened in the sun; a rich dark down on cheek and
chin showed the spring of healthful manhood; his hard hands and sinewy
sunburnt limbs told of labour and endurance; his flashing eyes and
beetling brow, of daring, fancy, passion, thought, which had no sphere
of action in such a place. What did his glorious young humanity alone
among the tombs?

So perhaps he, too, thought, as he passed his hand across his brow, as
if to sweep away some gathering dream, and sighing, rose and wandered
along the cliffs, peering downward at every point and cranny, in search
of fuel for the monastery from whence he came.

Simple as was the material which he sought, consisting chiefly of the
low arid desert shrubs, with now and then a fragment of wood from some
deserted quarry or ruin, it was becoming scarcer and scarcer round Abbot
Pambo's Laura at Scetis; and long before Philammon had collected his
daily quantity, he had strayed farther from his home than he had ever
been before.

Suddenly, at a turn of the glen, he came upon a sight new to him....a
temple carved in the sandstone cliff; and in front a smooth platform,
strewn with beams and mouldering