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WHEN We were living in a monastery in Syria after our first infancy in
the faith, and when after we had grown somewhat we had begun to long for
some greater grace of perfection, we determined straightway to seek Egypt
and penetrating even to the remotest desert of the Thebaid, to visit
very many of the saints, whose glory and fame had spread abroad everywhere,
with the wish if not to emulate them at any rate to know them. And so we
came by a very lengthy voyage to a town of Egypt named Thennesus, whose
inhabitants are so surrounded either by the sea or by salt lakes that they
devote themselves to business alone and get their wealth and substance by
naval commerce as the land fails them, so that indeed when they want to
build houses, there is no soil sufficient for this, unless it is brought by
boat from a distance.
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