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, [1685] 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, [1686] 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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Footnotes:

[1685] It is very doubtful whether Cassian ever carried out the intention, of which he here speaks, of visiting the Thebaid. So far as we can trace the course of his wanderings, he does not seem to have penetrated farther into Egypt than the desert of Scete.

[1686] Thennesus, a town at the Tanitic mouth of the Nile near Lake Menzaleh. For the description of the neighbouring country compare Conference VII. c. xxvi.