The ascent to the convent is over a steep and rugged road leading through a deep defile, which it took us forty minutes to accomplish from the valley below. We found the building deserted, and entirely destitute of gates or doors. A row of dilapidated apartments surround a triple court, at the end of which is the church, a very substantial edifice, differing little in its internal arrangement from that already described at Mar Behnâm, and above this is a small chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. The annexed is a correct plan of the church.
We found the following epitaph in Carshooni (i.e. Arabic written in Syriac characters), over the remains of Gregory bar Hebræus and his brother, who are buried in the Beit Kaddeeshé, to the north of the sacrarium.
"This is the grave of Mar Gregory John, and of Mar
Barsoma his brother, the children of the
Hebrew, on Mount Elpep."[1]
To which are added two lines in Syriac, said to have been penned by Gregory himself during his lifetime. They run thus:—
"O net of the world, in the year 1536[2] thou didst catch me;
But my hope is that in 1597 I shall not be in thee."
Then again in Carshooni:—
"He reached the Lord on the 30th of August."
The scoffer Gibbon, contrary to his wont, bears this testimony to a Christian Bishop: "Some strangers of merit have been converted to the Monophysite faith, and a Jew was the father of Abulpharagius, Primate of the east, so truly eminent both in his life and death. In his life, he was an elegant writer of the Syriac and Arabic tongues, a poet, physician and historian, a subtle philosopher, and a moderate divine. In his death, his funeral was attended by his rival, the Nestorian Patriarch, with a train of Greeks and Armenians, who forgot their disputes, and mingled their tears over the grave of an enemy."
H
