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AN ARMENIAN MONASTERY 187
Rain was falling, the day uncommonly gloomy, and
the gorge, never a place of brightness, was now a
dark throat between rocks. Just where all things
seemed most gloomy stood the monastery, a small
huddle of whitewashed buildings planted in the face
of the cliff. As a monastery it must have been one
of the smallest ; and though more accommodation
than visible may have existed in excavations—after
the manner of Cappadocia, — yet by no such arrangement
could you imagine that many brethren lived
here. The portion clear of the cliff was no greater
than a cottage, and completely occupied a scanty
ledge half-way between river and summit. Walls
and roofs merged into cliff. The sun, you thought,
could scarcely reach this human abode. The only
way of human approach was along a narrow horizontal
path in the face of rock.
In this place lived no Asiatic type of those jolly
friars who make such a figure in English tradition.
Monks they might be called, but each man who devoted
himself to retirement in this situation must
have been at heart an anchorite. He might qualify
his solitude with the company of a few others like
unto himself, but the true spirit of community life
was absent. Imagine a dozen gloomy religious enthusiasts
cooped up in caves hanging between sky
and river, with little of sunlight, still less of stirring
air, no exercise possible, a breviary — known
by heart—as their chief book, the offices of their
Church their only fixed employment, and you do not
have an attractive picture of monastic life in this
place. Better, you believe, with all its overstated
abuses, the religious houses amid fat meadows, drawing
fat rents ; and better, too, the boisterous brotherhood
who could tell
you ale to a nicety, and produced
Friar Tucks and Friar Johns, and, after all, have left
pleasant names and picturesque buildings and not
unpleasant memories in the land. When you look
at the monks occupying these Cappadocian monasteries—
pallid, tousle -headed, heavy -eyed men — you