Page:Folk-lore of the Holy Land.djvu/133

Greek Convent of St Onuphrius, erected in recent years over a number of rock-cut sepulchres containing many human bones.

Amongst the peasantry of Silwân there exists a very curious tradition that the human remains in the above-mentioned sepulchres are those of Christian hermits massacred during the persecution carried on by the insane Fatemite Khalìfeh El Hâkim bi amr Illah, whom to this day the Druzes worship as a god, and who, in the fifteenth year of his reign (4.p. 1010), compelled his Christian secretary, Ibn Khaterìn, to write the following fatal order to the Governor of Jerusalem: “The Imâm commands you to destroy the Temple of the Resurrection, so that its heaven may become its earth, and its length may become its breadth.” The order was only too literally executed, and Ibn Khaterìn, in his grief and despair, because he had been forced to write this sentence, “smote his head on the ground, broke the joints of his fingers, and died in a few days.”^[1]

The caves in Wad er Rabâbeh were at that time the abode of a population of monks and holy men who spent their time in fasting and prayer. Now it happened that El Hâkim needed money, so sent orders to the Mutesarrif of Jerusalem to make everybody pay a tax. The Mutesarrif and his Council wrote back to say that it was impossible to do that, since there were large numbers of poor religious men in the land, who, though Christians, lived like dervishes in bare caves, and had no means wherewith to pay a tax, however small. On receiving this