But what a number of people, of black veils, are in this hovel, where
the air can scarcely be breathed, and where the barbarous music, mingled
with wailings and cries, deafens you! And what an air of antiquity marks
all things here! The defaced walls, the low roof that one can easily
touch, the granite pillars which sustain the shapeless arches are all
blackened by the smoke of the wax candles, and scarred and worn by the
friction of human hands.

At the end of the crypt there is a very sacred recess round which a
crowd presses: a coarse niche, a little larger than those cut in the
wall to receive the tapers, a niche which covers the ancient stone on
which, according to tradition, the Virgin Mary rested, with the child
Jesus, in the course of the flight into Egypt. This holy stone is sadly
worn to-day and polished smooth by the touch of many pious hands, and
the Byzantine cross which once was carved on it is almost effaced.

But even if the Virgin had never rested there, the humble crypt of St.
Sergius would remain no less one of the oldest Christian sanctuaries in
the world. And the Copts who still assemble there with veneration have
preceded by many years the greater part of our Western nations in the
religion of the Bible.

Although the history of Egypt envelops itself in a sort of night at the
moment of the appearance of Christianity, we know that the growth of the
new faith there was as rapid and impetuous as the germination of plants
under the overflow of the Nile. The old Pharaonic cults, amalgamated at
that time with those of Greece, were so obscured under a mass of rites
and formulae, that they had ceased to have any meaning. And nevertheless
here, as in imperial Rome, there brooded the ferment of a passionate