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approach was an alternative to the net-ascent. It was withdrawn at night-fall up a channel of rock, and the foundation remained as immune as St. Barlaam from the outside world. From below it looked just as forbidding and inaccessible. A flight of steps and a little doorway at the base now lead through a narrow cavern cut through the rock to the beginning of the stairs. They finally brought us, out of breath and with thumping hearts, into the entrance to the monastery—a vast arched and dusty place. It was traversed by mote-speckled sunbeams that fell on old wind-lasses and baskets and piles of winter firewood. Through the rickety floorboards, vertiginous vistas dropped to the dim vegetation that still flourished on the unhewn rock face enclosed by the tower’s three projecting walls. A slanting lane led away, through great pillars and high semi-circular arches, over changing levels of flagstone and cobble into what might have been the purlieu of a town of immense age mysteriously poised here above the level of the clouds. But the narrow thoroughfares—except on one side, where the Platylithos , or the “Broad Rock” of the monastic charters, swelled into a small hill—advanced into the sky. The monastery buildings, in spite of the four churches they contain, were crammed into a compass smaller than a village green.
    Worm-eaten semantra and heavy iron hoops and arcs for the same purpose were suspended on chains under a colonnade along the flank of the main church—the Metamorphosis, or the Transfiguration of Our Saviour, from which the monastery, with the name of Meteora (since extended to include the entiremountain colony), takes its name. It is not only the greatest of the monasteries, but it is built on the highest rock, and it enjoyed or arrogated to itself some sort of primacy over the rest of the Meteora: a privilege or pretension that was contested now and then by sharp and unseemly battles between monks of the rival foundations.
    Scholarship and the recording of history played a less important part in Eastern monasticism than it did in the West. Records about the Meteora are scarce. Contemporary documents are surprisingly uninformative, and the outlines of their story must be pieced together from the occasional notes of a more historically-minded monk in the mildewed monastic libraries and from the Synodal Judgements and, above all, the chysobuls of founders and benefactors. These voluminous documents inscribed on parchment and appended with heavy seals, are drawn up in Rumanian in the case of Moldo-Wallachian voivodes, and those—the vast majority—in Greek are a tortuous maze of Byzantine abbreviations and ligatures ending, when they are from an emperor, with complex and calligraphic vermilion signatures sprinkled with gold dust and cinnabar.
    The first ascetic of the Meteora appears to have been the hermit Barnabas who, in A.D. 985 founded the little skete of the Holy Ghost in the rocks above Kastraki, something over a mile south of St. Barlaam. Many zealots followed his example during the eleventh century, and, by 1162, they had formed a miniature Thebaid centred on the skete of Dupiani or Stagoi, [2] where the scattered athletes of God would congregate for Mass on Sundays. In the fourteenth century, monasteries began to appear on the loftier summits and the Meteora slowly changed into the phenomenon they have remained ever since. Perhaps the first impulse was the advent of St. Athanasios the Meteorite.The details of his life are based principally on an anonymous and undated manuscript from the library of the Transfiguration. He was born in 1305 in Neopatras on Mount Othrys. Captured by the Grand Company of the Catalans who were ravaging central Greece, he travelled to Athos, Byzantium and Crete. Finishing his novitiate in Mount Athos under the tutelage of a venerable monk called Gregory, Athanasios and his instructor left the Holy Mountain in flight from an invasion of the