Mar Saba

View of Mar Saba, an Orthodox Christian monastery built on a cliff edge overlooking the Kidron Valley, in the the Judaean desert. The book describes it as follows:

The immediate approach to the Convent is striking. “It was night,” says one of its describers, “when after having descended into the bed of a ravine, where the Kidron passes to the Dead Sea, and arriving at the foot of the Mountains of St Saba, we saw the Convent above us, by the uncertain light of the moon. It looked a lofty and colossal structure, rising in stories or terraces, one above another, against the sides of the mountain to its summit, and there crowned with towers. We ascended flights of steps, climbed up a ladder, crept through a small door only large enough to admit one at a time, and found ourselves in an antechamber, surrounded by above a hundred Greek pilgrims.”