The life of St Onuphrius the Great
He left the monastery secretly one night, and after a journey of some six or seven miles found a cave in the wilderness, where an older hermit he met there instructed him in the discipline of that life before Onuphrius pressed on to a solitude entirely his own. He remained in that isolation for sixty years, sustained at first on what wild plants he could find, and later by a date palm bearing fruit and a spring that rose beside his cell; tradition holds that an angel also brought him Holy Communion every Saturday and Sunday, the one provision in the account that was not simply of that place. His only recorded visitor was Paphnutius, another ascetic of the Egyptian desert, who found him near the end of his life, his hair and beard grown long from decades without shelter or clothing, and who recorded what he saw and heard as the only witness to a life spent otherwise in total isolation. Onuphrius told Paphnutius that his own death was near, and the next day, after a final prayer, he reposed; Paphnutius buried him and carried the account of his life back to the wider Church, the sole record of a man the desert itself had otherwise kept hidden.
