Exchanging his Turkish boots for the bishop's sandals, made of hair, to avoid a fatal slip on the smooth, narrow ledges of the mountain, he set off early on the 18th.

An hour and a half brought him to the summit.
Retiring to a sequestered corner, where he could feast his eyes with the prospect, his thoughts went back to the period when the Nestorians traversed Asia, and, for more than a thousand years, preached the Gospel in Tartary, Mongolia, and China.

Though the flame of vital piety was almost quenched on their altars, his faith anticipated the day when those glens would reecho the glad praises of God; and down he sped, over cliffs and slippery ledges, to the large village of Lezan, on the banks of the noisy Zab.

Scarcely had he entered it, when a young man, the only one he had ever seen from this remote region, from whose eyes he had removed a cataract a year before, came with a present of honey, and introduced him at once to the confidence of the people.

He became so thronged with the sick from all the region, that he had to forbid more than three or four coming forward at once.
Leaving Lezan, he went up to Ashita, where he became the guest of a priest, reported to be the most learned of living Nestorians, who had spent twenty years in copying, in beautiful style, the few works of Nestorian literature; but even he had not an entire Bible.