The life of St Mark of Athens
Tradition holds that he remained there alone for ninety-five years, without once laying eyes on another human being.
The story remembers his first thirty years as the hardest by far: barefoot through bitter winters and scorching summers, he lived on whatever plants the desert offered, and at times, the tradition says, on nothing but dust and bitter seawater. After those thirty years, the same tradition holds, grace visibly changed his circumstances: angels are said to have begun bringing him food, and hair grew long across his body, shielding him from the extremes of weather that had tormented him before.
None of this would be known at all had a monk named Serapion not stumbled upon him near the very end of his long life. Mark lived only long enough afterward to tell Serapion the story of his years alone before he died, leaving that single telling as the whole record of a life the desert had otherwise kept entirely to itself.
