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The Monks of Mount Athos
註釋"Jacques Valentin, a young Frenchman, went with two friends to spend several months on Mount Athos because he was curious about the men who choose to live there. A place which has been holy for so long; a place on which for over a thousand years no female creature has been allowed to set foot; it has always inspired an especial reverence in members of the Orthodox Church, and curiosity in others. Valentin and his friends wanted to find out for themselves what spirit prevailed there. They trudged over the hard, wild country from monastery to monastery, growing thin on the austere hospitality provided in them, making a film when it was permitted, and talking to as many monks as they could. Jacques Valentin has no pretensions. He simply describes what they saw and heard, and how, light-hearted and moderately sceptical young men that they were, they began to glimpse the true meaning of monastic life. The result is a fresh and attractrive book. It is not easy to forget, for example, their meetings with Father Nicholas, one of the hermits who live in tiny huts clinging to a cliff at the tip of the peninsula, striving night and day for direct union with God. It is a distinction of this book that its agreeable, inquisitive tone does not disguise the reverence with which these young travellers came to listen to a message from a world so remote and strange to them"--Publisher's description, p. [2] of dust jacket.