Nitrianadj.

1684 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) 14 613 There is a town in Ægypt called Nitria which gives its name to the nitrian Desert.

1867 C. M. Yonge Pupils of St. John ix. 149 Christians..are said to have preferred the Nitrian valley because of the words of Jeremiah—‘though thou wash thee with nitre’.

1888 Dict. National Biogr. XIII. 325/2 The most celebrated discovery which Cureton made among the Syriac manuscripts in the Nitrian collection was that of the famous Epistles of St. Ignatius to Polycarp.

1892 I. G. Smith Christian Monasticism vii. 186 In the famous monastery of St. Gall, in Switzerland, as in the Nitrian monasteries of the fifth century, the whip..was suspended from a pillar in the chapter-house.

1904 J. O. Hannay Wisdom of Desert 6 At the end of the fourth century the Nitrian mountains were dotted over with hermits' cells.

1958 L. Durrell Balthazar iv. 80 His mind winged away like a swallow across the dunes into the Nitrian desert itself.

2002 Weekend Austral. (Nexis) 3 Aug. 13 The desert fathers in the Nitrian desert never left their holy habitations, and while people came out to them, and some stayed on, the call of the world they had abandoned never pulled them back.