A test of faith challenges the souls of all who make the perilous pilgrimage to Abuna Yemata Guh, the monolithic cave church in northern Ethiopia that towers 400 feet above the valley floor.
It was in the fifth century that the Christian priest Father Yemata from Egypt supposedly walked into the Tigray region in the African country and, according to local legend, established a monastery high on a rocky spire, either to reach divine heights or else escape the reach of foes. The church was somehow hewn directly out of the living sandstone, while the spire itself offers protection in the form of sheer cliffs on all sides….