Evening grew to night as I plodded past these woods or struggled through them.  The temptation was to go into the wood and walk on firmer soil—­but the thickets were many, and not a furlong did it profit me.  Then there were thorns, you must know, and abundant long-clawed creepers that grasped the legs and kept them fixed till they were tenderly extricated by the hand.  When I came to the pine-wood it was night, and the many stars shone over the sea.  I walked easily and gratefully over the soft pine needles, and I constantly sought with my eyes for the monastery domes.  The moonlight through the pines looked like mist, and the forest climbed gradually over rising cliffs.  Far away on the dark cape I saw the flash of the lighthouse....

No houses, no people, only a faint cart-track.  That track bade me hope.  I would follow it in any case.  At last, suddenly, I thought I saw the cloud of white smoke of a bonfire.  It was the far-away monastery wall, high and white, with a little lamp in one window.  I bore up with the distance, forms grew distinct in the night; I entered the monastery by a five-hundred-yard avenue of cedars.

I met a novice in a long smock.  He took me to the guest-rooms of the monastery, and there, to my joy, I was accommodated with a bed—­the first for many weeks.  I was introduced to a very fat and ancient monk who carried at his belt a bunch of keys.  Though very stupid, and, as I learnt afterwards, quite illiterate, he was the spirit of hospitality.  He kept the larder, and very gladly brought me milk and bread and cheese, roast beef, wine, and would apparently have brought me anything I asked for—­all “for the love of God”:  no monastery charges anything for its hospitality.

After my supper I was glad to stretch my limbs and sleep.  I opened my window and lay for a while looking at the mysterious dark masses of the cedars and listening to the low sobbing of the waves.  In the monastery buildings I heard the turnings of heavy keys.  I slept.  Next morning at sunrise I had breakfast in the refectory, and the abbot deigned to come in and talk about Pitsoonda.  His was an ancient and beautiful monastery, built by the same hand that erected St. Sophia at Constantinople, Justinian the First.  It was indeed a replica of that famous building, a fine specimen of Byzantine architecture.  It had changed hands many times, belonging to the Greeks, the Turks, the Cherkesses, and finally to the Russians.  Here formerly stood the fortified town of Pitius, scarcely a stone of which was now standing, though many were the weapons and household implements that had been found by the monks.  It was now the scene of the quiet life of twenty or thirty brethren.  No one ever visited them or sought them from without.  Steamers never called—­only occasional feluccas came in bringing Caucasian tribesmen from neighbouring villages, and there was no carriage-way to any town.