impunity.

_Sunday_.--I went to a large unfinished new Coptic church this morning.
Omar went with me up to the women's gallery, and was discreetly going
back when he saw me in the right place, but the Coptic women began to
talk to him and asked questions about me all the time I was looking down
on the strange scene below. I believe they celebrate the ancient
mysteries still. The clashing of cymbals, the chanting, a humming unlike
any sound I ever heard, the strange yellow copes covered with stranger
devices--it was _wunderlich_. At the end everyone went away, and I went
down and took off my shoes to go and look at the church. While I was
doing so a side-door opened and a procession entered. A priest dressed
in the usual black robe and turban of all Copts carrying a trident-shaped
sort of candlestick, another with cymbals, a lot of little boys, and two
young ecclesiastics of some sort in the yellow satin copes (contrasting
queerly with the familiar tarboosh of common life on their heads), these
carried little babies and huge wax tapers, each a baby and a taper. They
marched round and round three times, the cymbals going furiously, and
chanting a jig tune. The dear little tiny boys marched just in front of
the priest with such a pretty little solemn, consequential air. Then
they all stopped in front of the sanctuary, and the priest untied a sort
of broad-coloured tape which was round each of the babies, reciting
something in Coptic all the time, and finally touched their foreheads and
hands with water. This is a ceremony subsequent to baptism after I don't
know how many days, but the priest ties and then unties the bands. Of
what is this symbolical? _Je m'y perds_. Then an old man gave a little
round cake of bread, with a cabalistic-looking pattern on it, both to
Omar and to me, which was certainly baked for Isis. A lot of closely-
veiled women stood on one side in the aisle, and among them the mothers
of the babies who received them from the men in yellow copes at the end