Paphnutius († _c._ 390), a monk of Egypt, came across Onophrius on his wanderings and wrote a life of him. Onophrius told him that he had been in the desert seventy years. Originally he dwelt in the Thebaid with about a hundred monks, but hearing of Elijah and John the Baptist, he decided that it was more meritorious to dwell alone in the desert, so he wandered away, led by an angel, and met a hermit who urged him to go five days further where he reached “Calidiomea” (perhaps a corruption of _calybem_, a hut), near which stood a palm tree where he remained. He suffered from hunger and thirst, from cold and heat, and lived on dates, his clothes gradually dropping from him. He took Paphnutius into his hut, and they were conversing together when a sudden pallor overspread his countenance, and he intimated that Paphnutius would bury him. He died there and then, and Paphnutius tore a piece off his own cloak, in which he wrapped him and laid him in a crevice in the rock.[144] Onophrius was perhaps the unnamed hermit who was visited by a monk of Raithou, “where stood seventy palm trees in the place which Moses reached with the people when he came out of Egypt.” This monk described how, on his wanderings, he came to a cell in which he found a dead monk whose body dropped to dust when he touched it. In another place he came upon a hermit who had lived in an ascetic community at Heroöpolis, but he associated with a professed nun, and yielded to temptation, whereupon he fled into the distant desert where, as time went on, his hair grew and his clothes dropped from him.[145] Of similar appearance was the hermit whom Postumianus was bent on seeing when he went from Italy into Sinai some time before 400. In the _Dialogues_ of Severus the words are put into his lips: “I saw the Red Sea and I climbed the height of Mount Sinai (jugum Sina Montis), the summit of which almost touches heaven and cannot be reached by human effort. A hermit was said to live somewhere in its recesses, and I sought long and much to see him, but was unable to do so. He had been removed from human fellowship for nearly fifty years and wore no clothes, but was covered with bristles growing on his body, but of divine gift he knew not of his nakedness.”[146] Another hermit who was drawn to Sinai was Silvanus, a native of Palestine, “to whom on account of his great virtue, an angel was wont to minister. He lived in Sinai and afterwards founded, at Gerari (? Gerra), in the wadi, a very extensive and noted cœnobium for many good men, over which the excellent Zacharias, afterwards presided.”[147] Like other hermits, Silvanus shared his cell with a youthful disciple, and cultivated a garden that was surrounded by a wall and served by a water conduit. Various anecdotes told of him bear witness to his good sense and humility.