# The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 3/Chapter 3

Between the Nile and the Red Sea lay the desert of the Thebaid, and the remote monastery of St. Anthony is now reached after two days' camel ride from the station Beni Suef. The desert of Scete where Arsenius lived—the desert where Philammon the hero of "Hypatia" learned to be a monk—is on the Upper Nile. What was Nitria is now Wadi el Natrun, and is reached by three days' camel ride from the Pyramids, or via Khatadba, one of the stations on a loop of the Cairo-Alexandria railway. The shrines of the hermits are in the hands of the Copts, a simple Christian people, said to be the lineal descendants of the ancient Egyptians. The Coptic Church is an Eastern one, and it is the lineal descendant of the Church of Egypt that flourished in the first centuries of Christianity. Only whereas the Church of Egypt was a brightly living church, the Coptic Church is going on in a tradition. What is valuable in the Coptic Church to-day is that it has slept through many centuries unchanging, that it has never been rich and pompous, never erudite, ​never pleasure-loving. It has withstood the Arabs through dwelling in the wilderness and fortifying its churches and monastery walls and being hard. It has never had the opportunity to thrive. So it has preserved the traditions and something of the spirit of early Christianity, and in the half-ruined temples of the desert you may see the stigmata of Christ.
I had some difficulty finding out about the monasteries: no one goes to Egypt to visit Christian shrines, so my desire to know where the ancient hermits had lived sounded strange and unwonted in the ears of most people. But at length, through the Bishop of Jerusalem and Marcus Bey Simaika, the leader of the Coptic community in Cairo, I got a letter from the Patriarch and full directions as to how to reach the desert shrines. I chose to go to Nitria.
Out of sight of the grey triangles of the Pyramids, out of sight of everything, and over the even, empty desert, white, yellow, burning, rose-lined on the horizon, glaring . . . heat and light beat upward from the sand on which and into which the terrible and splendid sun drives its armies all day. The air is so dry and light that one seems to have lost weight. There is a feeling of unusual exhilaration.
I came on horseback to an oasis, not a bountiful ​and delectable oasis with shade of palm trees, fruit to pluck above the head, and cold water bubbling from a spring below, but a poisonous marsh overgrown with reeds full of reptiles and blood-sucking flies. There are good and evil oases. This was the marsh that gave its name to Nitria—the soda marsh. The hermits chose it because it was even worse than the desert. My black horse prances along on somewhat doubtful turf, and then once more to the loose and heavy sand blown into waves and undulating like the sea. On the horizon lies the strange blunt silhouette of the first of the monasteries, and without a trace to follow, we plunge through the sand towards it. We come up to it at last, an enigmatical-looking building which has the shapelessness and silence of a ruin. How silent it is! What a deathly and unearthly silence! It seems hardly possible that human beings are living there. The cream-coloured walls are lined, patched, broken, gigantic. It is a rectangular fortress. There is but one entrance, and that is a small one and heavily barred. There are no steps in the sand; if yesterday had any footfalls the wind has smoothed them away, and the breathless silence is one which it seems almost possible to hold in one's hand.
From the high yellow battlement an old loose rope hangs down, and is evidently connected with a bell.
Jingle-jangle-jangle! I ring the bell and wait ​expectantly. There is a long silence and I ring again, jingle-jangle, jangle-jangle-jangle! Then some one comes and laboriously undoes the little door, and a dishevelled, bare-footed monk appears. I present the letter which I bear from the Patriarch, and am admitted. The monks are pleased; all shake hands. I sit on one divan, and five of them on another. One novice washes my hands, another brings me a glass of a brown-coloured drink—it is medlar juice and water, and is full of the fibre of the fruit. This finished, he brings me a glass of pink sugar water, then coffee all round, thimble-fulls of sweet coffee. The abbot, a fine-looking fellow with regular features, broad face, black moustache and beard, and with an open space showing the freshness of the lower lip, is talkative. He has a towel wrapped round his brows for turban, and fingers black beads as he talks. Next to him is a comfortable-looking monk in a blue smock and white knitted skull-cap on his head. Next to him, an old fellow with wizened bare legs and feet, old yellow rags on his grizzled head, ragged black cassock over his grey underclothes.
"What do you do all day?" I asked.
"Pray, read, sing," they answered.
"What do you think of the war?"
"The war does not touch us. If they come and kill us, we don't mind, but we pray each day that God will bring it soon to a close."
"If the Arabs come, what will you do?"
​"If they shoot at us we will throw bread to them, that will be our reply."
"Do you have many visitors?"
"Not many."
"Do the Russian pilgrims come here to pray?"
"Yes, some."
"Are you content to live out here in the Sahara whilst all sorts of great events are happening in the world, and content to have no news and never mix with the people of the city? In England we're too busy, one couldn't escape to a place like this even if one wanted to."
The abbot gave me a remarkable reply:
"I think there is room for everybody: one seeks money, that is his way; another prays, that is his way; another does his duty and ploughs, that is his way. There are many ways. You know of Martha and Mary. Martha was right, but Mary's good part was right also."
How touching it was for me to get this true reply in this remote monastery, and to hear of Martha and Mary in the first half-hour of conversation with the monks. My mind was preoccupied with the ideas of Martha and Mary, and here was this simple Coptic abbot using almost the same terms to express himself as I might use myself.
There were in this monastery about sixteen monks, and in the desert altogether there may be about one hundred and fifty. Once there were thousands of holy men and hundreds of monasteries. ​There was gold in the monasteries, there were jewels and pictures. Not an inch of the little desert temples but was covered with Byzantine fresco.
But the Saracen came and murdered the cultured clergy, and tore away the jewels, as was fit, and rolled down many a wall, wrecked many an altar. There was a sixty years' gap in the Christian history of the desert. Then a wilder type of Christian took possession, Arabs who had been converted, or enslaved Copts who had forgotten their own language and learned that of their masters. They brought Arabic gospels and liturgies. They repaired some of the ruins of the old monasteries and churches, and they put up Arabic inscriptions and painted out the old Coptic frescoes and hieroglyphics with frescoes of their own conception. They built round their temples impregnable fortress walls with draw-bridges at a height of forty feet above the level of the desert. They withstood sieges and persisted . . . to this day.
The abbot showed me round the monastery. The buildings were all a patchwork of ruins and repairs and changes. The frescoes had been white-washed out in nearly every part. The old stained glass, broken and shapeless, was mortared in with new glass. And yet there was a real odour of antiquity in the place. The patterns in the ikons were but dust patterns, and the face of the Virgin crumbled away as the abbot took the picture down to show me. In a niche here and there left by ​accident were the original frescoes in wonderful purple and crimson, pictures of the choric saints, their faces and bodies all of that unearthly and mystical shape and colour by which the early Christians loved to represent citizenship of heaven and denial of the world.
The lectern had a nail on which to fix the candle. The communion cup was swathed in the oldest vestments of the monastery. In an ordinary cupboard with easy-swinging wooden door I was shown the mummies of the sixteen Patriarchs of the Coptic Church. Sixteen Patriarchs in a cupboard, each wrapped in his robes and tied up compactly! The Abbot unwrapped one a little and showed me the dried brown flesh. The seventeenth Patriarch, he from whom I had my letter, will find a place in this cupboard in his turn.
In one of the churches I was shown the box with the sacred remains of Macarius, the primitive hermit in whose name the monastery had been founded.
They showed me the books from which the service is read, all hand-copied volumes. I wondered especially at a copy of the New Testament, written ages ago in Coptic and now spattered on every page and every paragraph with new and ancient spots of candle grease.
From the vault of one of the churches hang seven old dusty ostrich eggs by long strings. A monk explained to me that as the ostrich looks to its egg as the most precious thing in life, so they look to ​God in their prayers—at least, the egg is to remind them.
We went into the fortress church, the only entrance to which is at a height of forty feet by a bridge from the outer rampart. They showed me how the bridge could be drawn in and the monks be secure from assault of arms. Up on the ramparts a novice had his duty beside a pile of bread and a stoup of water. When Bedouin beggars ring the monastery bell, he lowers them bread and water in a basket. "We give away twice as much as we eat ourselves," said the Abbot, showing me the bakery. Here were hundreds of wheaten loaves in long stone receptacles, good bread, but made dirty so that the monks should not get to prize it. They showed me illuminated books a thousand years old, showed me the scrivener's cell where among many quills a monk still copies the Scriptures day by day. They showed me one chapel the whole floor of which was covered with chillies drying, showed me the long room where every evening all the monks gather about the Abbot to read the gospel and discuss its meanings, showed me the massive doors, two feet thick, of wood and iron, meant to resist the Arab. In one room was a small cask, and the Abbot took a tin mug and drew me a little wine—communion wine. I drank half; he finished.
The monks were most kind, simple and loving. It was an amusing spectacle at lunch. I lunched; every one else waited on me. A beautiful Abyssinian ​boy washed my hands, two monks shelled eggs all the time and filled my plate, two others stripped cucumbers for me, another kept helping me to hot milk soup in which slabs of sugar were dissolving. The Abbot stood above me with a feather-brush waving the flies off me. Every one was talking. There was especial interest in the questions which the Abyssinian boy who had washed my hands was continually trying to put. He was a beautiful stripling who could have been posed for Christ Himself, but for the fact that he was black. He was tall and gentle, with large liquid eyes. He was not a monk, but a pilgrim stranded in the desert. He had been on his way to Jerusalem, and had been turned back from Port Said because of the War. He was anxious to hear from me whether I knew of any way of getting to Jerusalem now. The Abbot was the only one who knew Abyssinian, and he interpreted. Alas! I could give him no hope of getting through to the Holy Sepulchre.
I lunched, and slept a little, and the brethren of the monastery slept. Then my horse was brought out to me and I rode away across the sand. Before going, I went to the western side of the monastery and looked out over the Desert. Thousands of miles it went on, level, empty, burning, and yet mysterious. Some Coptic hermits have wandered forth into its mystery and are living the antique life of the anchorite out there. At least, so the Abbot told me, though he couldn't say where they are or ​how they live. Only now and again, at rare intervals, some one of them comes back to the monastery to communion and then disappears once more.
I rode away to Bir Hooker, where I stayed the night. That is on the other side of the salt marshes. There an enterprising British company is producing thousands of tons of caustic soda annually. The antique hermits chose this spot in the Desert because of the death-dealing odours which intensified their denial of the world, but in another era, behold British business men doing in the way of trade and worldly gain or duty what these others do in the name of denial of the world. As the Abbot said: There are various ways of serving God, the way of Martha and the way of Mary.
Still, the manager of the caustic soda works, a shrewd and circumspect Scotsman of Protestant temperament, would like to have the sixteen Patriarchs buried decently and, if he could, spend three days in each of the monasteries tidying up. "It's not showing due respect to the dead," said he, "nor is it sanitary, nor decent. I've nothing to say against the monks; they are simple and kind and hospitable. But they're just wasting their lives. They're doing nothing, making nothing."
The manager would show the monks how they ought to keep house. But better still, he would clear them all out. They are very good, very kind, there is nothing against them, but what are they ​doing, he asks. Their lives are pure waste. They don't produce caustic soda.
I go to my room to sleep, and then at midnight come out again to see the full moon flooding the vast plain of sand with light, and to realise once more the breathless and perfect stillness of the desert.