hom two lions,
fiercely contending, drove away with their talons, as if from some
sacred deposit therein enshrined. Towards whom the two brethren,
fortifying themselves with the sign of the holy cross, ascended.
Whereupon the lions, as having fulfilled the term of their guardianship,
retired; and left to the brethren a sight which they beheld with
astonishment, and not without tears.

'For in the open grave lay the body of Philammon the abbot: and by his
side, wrapped in his cloak, the corpse of a woman of exceeding beauty,
such as the Moors had described. Whom embracing straitly, as a brother
a sister, and joining his lips to hers, he had rendered up his soul
to God; not without bestowing on her, as it seemed, the most holy
sacrament; for by the grave-side stood the paten and the chalice emptied
of their divine contents.

'Having beheld which things awhile in silence, they considered that
the right understanding of such matters pertained to the judgment seat
above, and was unnecessary to be comprehended by men consecrated to God.
Whereon, filling in the grave with all haste, they returned weeping
to the Laura, and declared to them the strange things which they had
beheld, and whereof I the writer, having collected these facts from
sacrosanct and most trustworthy mouths, can only say that wisdom is
justified of all her children.

'Now, before they returned, one of the brethren searching the cave
wherein the holy woman dwelt, found there neither food, furniture, nor
other matters; saving one bracelet of gold, of large size and strange
workmanship, engraven with foreign characters, which no one could
decipher. The which bracelet, being taken home to the Laura of Scetis,
and there dedicated in the chapel to the memory of the holy Amma, proved
beyond all doubt the sanctity of its former possessor, by the miracles
which its virtue worked; the fame whereof spreading abroad throughout
the whole Thebaid, drew innumerable crowds of suppliants to that holy
relic. But it came to pass, after the Vandalic persecution wherewith
Huneric and Genseric the king devastated Africa, and enriched the
Catholic Church with innumerable martyrs, that certain wandering
barbarians of the Vandalic race, imbued with the Arian pravity, and made
insolent by success, boiled over from the parts of Mauritania into
the Thebaid region. Who plundering and burning all monasteries, and
insulting the consecrated virgins, at last arrived even at the monaster