difference between summer and winter. In spring of course the
solitary date-palm here and there threw out its spathe of young
green leaves, to add to the number of those which, grey or brown,
hung drooping down the stem, withering but not decaying for many a
year in that dry atmosphere; or perhaps the accacia bushes looked
somewhat gayer for a few weeks, and the Retama broom, from which as
well as from the palm leaves he plaited his baskets, threw out its
yearly crop of twigs; but any greenness there might be in the
vegetation of spring, turned grey in a few weeks beneath that
burning sun; and be rest of the year was one perpetual summer of
dust and glare and rest. Amid such scenes they had full time for
thought. Nature and man alike left it in peace; while the labour
required for sustaining life (and the monk wished for nothing more
than to sustain mere life) was very light. Wherever water could be
found, the hot sun and the fertile soil would repay by abundant
crops, perhaps twice in the year, the toil of scratching the ground
and putting in the seed. Moreover, the labour of the husbandman, so
far from being adverse to the contemplative life, is of all
occupations, it may be, that which promotes most quiet and wholesome
meditation in the mind which cares to meditate. The life of the
desert, when once the passions of youth were conquered, seems to
have been not only a happy, but a healthy one. And when we remember
that the monk, clothed from head to foot in woollen, and sheltered,
too, by his sheepskin cape, escaped those violent changes of
temperature which produce in the East so many fatal diseases, and
which were so deadly to the linen-clothed inhabitants of the green
lowlands of the Nile, we need not be surprised when we read of the
vast longevity of many of the old abbots; and of their death, not by
disease, but by gentle, and as it were wholesome natural decay.