"Yes," said Mr. Dinwiddie, when I said my thought aloud, -
" 'Skin for skin; all that a man hath will he give for his
life.' But when the conscience knows that heaven is not to be
bought that way, then there is no other motive left that will
use up all a man's energies but the love of Christ
constraining him."
"The trouble is, Mr. Dinwiddie, that there is so little of
that."
"So little!" he said, - "even in those of us who love most. I
do not mean to say that this love had no share in determining
the actions of those who used to live here; perhaps they
thought to get nearer to Christ by getting nearer to the
places of His some time presence and working in human flesh."
"And don't you think it does help, Mr. Dinwiddie?" I said.
He turned on me a very deep and sweet look, that was half a
smile.
"No!" he answered. "The Lord may use it, - He often does, - to
quicken our sense of realities and so strengthen our
apprehension of spiritualities; but just so He can use other
things, even remote distance from such and all material helps.
Out of that very distance He can make a tie to draw the soul
to Himself."
"There must have been a great many of those old Christians
living here once?" I said.
"Yes," said Mr. Dinwiddie. "On this face of the mountain there
are thirty or forty caves - I think there are many more in the
gorge of the Kelt, round on the south face. Do you see that
round hole over your head?"
We were standing in one of the caverns. I looked up.
"I cannot get you up there," he went on, - "but I have climbed
up by means of a rope. There are other rooms there, and one is
a chapel - I mean, it was one, - with arches cut to the
windows and doorways, and frescoed walls, full of figures of
saints. Through another hole in another ceiling, like this, I
got up into still a third set of rooms, like the ones below.
Into those nobody had come for many a year; the dust witnessed
it. Back of one room, the chapel, was a little low doorway;
very low. I crept through - and there in the inner place, lay
piled the skeletons of the old hermits; skulls and bones, just
as they had been laid while the flesh was still upon them; the
dust was inches deep. A hundred feet higher up there are more
caverns. No, I should not like to take you - though the
Abyssinian devotees come to them every spring. Yet higher than
those, far up, near the top of the mountain, I have explored
others, where I found still more burial caves like the one
just here above us. Chapels and frescoes were up there too."