In the antechamber we found a phenomenally stupid monk presiding over the sale of the indispensable tapers, and the offerings which the devout are expected to deposit, on emerging, as a memento of their visit.  These offerings lay like mountains of copper before him.  The guide had taken himself off somewhere, and the monk ordered us, and the five Russians who were also waiting, to go in alone and “call to the monk in the cave.”  We flatly declined to take his word that there was any monk, or to venture into the dangerous labyrinth alone, and we demanded that he should accompany us.

“No guide—­no candles, no coppers,” we said.

That seemed to him a valid argument.  Loath to leave his money at the mercy of chance comers, he climbed up and closed the iron shutters of the grated window,—­the cliff descended, sheer, one hundred and two feet to the Dnyepr at that point,—­double-locked the great iron doors, and there we were in a bank vault, with all possible customers excluded.  Luckily, the saints in these caverns, which differed very little from those in the former, were labeled in plain letters, since the monk was too dull-witted to understand the simplest questions from any of us.  At intervals we were permitted a hasty glimpse of a cell, about seven feet square, furnished only with a stone bench, and a holy picture, with a shrine-lamp suspended before it.  Ugh!  There were several sets of chrism-dripping saintly skulls in these catacombs, also,—­fifteen of the ghastly things in one group.  I braced my stomach to the task, and scrutinized them all attentively; but not a single one of them winked or nodded at me in approval, as a nun from Kolomna, whom I had met in Moscow, asserted that they had at her.  I really wished to see how an eyeless skull could manage a wink, and hoped I might be favored.

After traversing long distances of this subterranean maze, and peering into the “cradle of the monastery,” St. Antony’s cell, the procession came to a halt in a tiny church.  There stood a monk, actually, though we might have wandered all day and come out on the banks of the Dnyepr without finding him, had we gone in without a guide.  Beside him, denuded of its glass bell, stood one of the miraculous skulls.  The first Russian approached, knelt, crossed himself devoutly, and received from the priest the sign of the cross on his brow, administered with a soft, small brush dipped in the oil from the skull.  Then he kissed the priest’s hand, crossed himself again, and kissed the skull.  When we beheld this, we modestly stood aside, and allowed our companions, the other four Russian men, to receive anointment in like manner, and pass on after the monk, who was in haste to return to his bank vault.  As I approached the priest, he raised his brush.

“We are not Orthodox Christians, batiushka,"* I said.  “But pray give us your blessing.”

* Little father.