Water comes out of a mountain that had none

SUBIACO, Roman Italy, around 520 AD — High above the town of Subiaco, three monasteries stood on bare crags. There was not a drop of water up there.

So the monks climbed down to the lake on the floor of the valley, filled what they had carried down, and hauled it back up. They did it every day, and it took most of the day. The slope was so steep that they thought the climb could kill them.

The lake was the nearest water they had, and the whole place was named after it: Sublaqueum (beneath the lake).

One day the monks talked it over and went to Saint Benedict of Nursia together, all of them saying the same thing. They asked him to move their three houses down the mountain, beside the water. The answer was his to give, because he had built the twelve monasteries above Subiaco and put a superior in charge of each one. He answered them kindly, and he said no.

A climb nobody saw

That night St. Benedict took St. Placid by the hand. St. Placid was a boy of about seven, given to him by a Roman family to bring up in his own house. In the dark the two of them walked up to the top of the rock where the three houses stood. Nobody went with them, and nobody was told.

On the top St. Benedict prayed for a long time. Then he picked up three stones and stacked them one on top of another, on the spot where he had prayed. He walked back down to his own monastery.

The next day the monks came to him again with the same complaint. “Go your way to the rock, and in the place where you find three stones laid one upon another, dig a little hole, for almighty God is able to bring forth water in the top of that mountain, and so to ease you of that great labour which you take in fetching it so far,” St. Benedict told them.

They climbed, and they found the three stones where he had said they would be. The rock around them was wet, covered all over in drops of water. They dug a hollow in the stone with a spade, and it filled the moment it was open. The water came so fast that it spilled over and ran away down the mountain, from the top of it to the bottom, and it is running still.