must go and see.

Filled with such fearful questionings, half-inarticulate and vague,
like the thoughts of a child, the untutored youth went wandering on,
till he reached the edge of the cliff below which lay his home.
It lay pleasantly enough, that lonely Laura, or lane of rude
Cyclopean cells, under the perpetual shadow of the southern wall of
crags, amid its grove of ancient date-trees. A branching cavern in
the cliff supplied the purposes of a chapel, a storehouse, and a
hospital; while on the sunny slope across the glen lay the common
gardens of the brotherhood, green with millet, maize, and beans,
among which a tiny streamlet, husbanded and guided with the most
thrifty care, wandered down from the cliff foot, and spread
perpetual verdure over the little plot which voluntary and fraternal
labour had painfully redeemed from the inroads of the all-devouring
sand. For that garden, like everything else in the Laura, except
each brother's seven feet of stone sleeping-hut, was the common
property, and therefore the common care and joy of all. For the
common good, as well as for his own, each man had toiled up the glen
with his palm-leaf basket of black mud from the river Nile, over
whose broad sheet of silver the glen's mouth yawned abrupt. For the
common good, each man had swept the ledges clear of sand, and sown
in the scanty artificial soil, the harvest of which all were to
share alike. To buy clothes, books, and chapel furniture for the
common necessities, education, and worship, each man sat, day after
day, week after week, his mind full of high and heavenly thoughts,
weaving the leaves of their little palm-copse into baskets, which an
aged monk exchanged for goods with the more prosperous and
frequented monasteries of the opposite bank. Thither Philammon
rowed the old man over, week by week, in a light canoe of papyrus,