We were standing in one of the caverns. I looked up.

"I cannot get you up there," he went on, - "but I have climbed
up by means of a rope. There are other rooms there, and one is
a chapel - I mean, it was one, - with arches cut to the
windows and doorways, and frescoed walls, full of figures of
saints. Through another hole in another ceiling, like this, I
got up into still a third set of rooms, like the ones below.
Into those nobody had come for many a year; the dust witnessed
it. Back of one room, the chapel, was a little low doorway;
very low. I crept through - and there in the inner place, lay
piled the skeletons of the old hermits; skulls and bones, just
as they had been laid while the flesh was still upon them; the
dust was inches deep. A hundred feet higher up there are more
caverns. No, I should not like to take you - though the
Abyssinian devotees come to them every spring. Yet higher than
those, far up, near the top of the mountain, I have explored
others, where I found still more burial caves like the one
just here above us. Chapels and frescoes were up there too."

"And difficult climbing, Mr. Dinwiddie."

"Very difficult. Broken stairs and dizzy galleries, and deep
precipices, with the vultures floating in air down below me."

"What a place for men to live!"

"Fitter for the doves and swallows which inhabit the old
hermits' houses now. Yet not a bad place to live either, if