Behind the screen looms the curve of the apse; on the thick columns and along the walls under the low cupolas are inscriptions in exquisite lettering — Coptic and Arabic. The impression is a confusion of dark misty colour, out of which gleam patches of crimson and blue from the paintings — St. George's cloak and our Lady's mantle. If you assist at a liturgy you see the clergy moving in and out of the haikal door in their shabby, gaudy vestments; the incense fills the dark vault with clouds of blue smoke, and the strange wailing goes on with clashing cymbals and jangling bells. They sing chant after chant in the ancient tongue which they do not understand themselves; but the ghosts of their fathers know it, Rameses II would know it, and the heavenly powers whom they address know it. Then, in the same way as the colours of the holy icons gleam from the gloom around, so out of the Coptic come familiar fragments of Greek; suddenly you realize that what they are singing is: "Agios o Theos, agios ischyros, agios athanatos, o stavrotheis di' imas (memory of Peter the Dyer!) eleison imas." So here amid the dirt and the incense smoke, while Coptic and Greek roll around the haikal screen, you may dream of the mighty men who once lived here, Pachomius and Pambo, Antony star of the desert, and Paul, the first hermit, Athanasius fleeing from the sword of Constantius. For the sake of these glorious memories, for the sake, too, of the long line of their martyrs under Islam, we can feel nothing but respect, wish nothing but good to the people of Christ in Egypt. They have stood for his name so faithfully during the long, dark centuries now past. May they stand for it always in happier ages to come. May they confess it (honouring the all-holy Lady Theotókos) no longer, please God, in unhappy isolation, but joined again to the Church which acknowledges him throughout all the world, the evil done to them by Dioscor and the Cat being at last undone. So may God again say: "Vidi arnictionem populi mei qui est in Aegypto et descendi liberare eos."
Summary
The Copts are the Monophysite Church of Egypt. There are over half a million of them, under their Patriarch and about fifteen
