minutest details, and to sketch the age, its manners and its
literature, as I found them-altogether artificial, slipshod, effete,
resembling far more the times of Louis Quinze than those of
Sophocles and Plato. And so I send forth this little sketch, ready
to give my hearty thanks to any reviewer, who, by exposing my
mistakes, shall teach me and the public somewhat 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,