At the end of the fourth century, on the banks of the Nile, there unfolded an extraordinary epic: one after another, men left fertile an uninhabited regions of the Delta and disappeared farther into the desert. Founders of Christian eremitism, these heroes of asceticism and virtue earned a reputation far beyond the ordinary as much by their lifestyle as by their maxims (or apothegms) which have been translated into all languages and distributed throughout the Christian world. Deprivation, silence, contemplation, and prayer -- such was the program of these monks for whom the desert did not fail to set many traps -- because it isn't enough to simply isolate oneself in order to meet and to come to know God.