CHAPTER XXVII

PTOLEMY

[1] AGAIN another monk, Ptolemy by name, lived a life difficult, even impossible, to describe. He dwelt beyond Scete in a place called Climax. The place which bears this name is one in which no one can live because the well of the brethren is eighteen miles away. He then, carrying a number of pots brought them there, and collecting the dew with a sponge from the rocks during the months of December and January—for there is a plentiful fall of dew then in those parts—he made this suffice during the fifteen years he lived there. [2] And he became a stranger to the teaching of holy men and intercourse with them, and the benefit derived therefrom, and the constant communion of the mysteries, and diverged so greatly from the straight way that he declared these things were nothing; but they say he is wandering about in Egypt up to the present day all puffed up with pride, and has given himself over to gluttony and drunkenness, speaking no (edifying) word to anyone. And this disaster fell on Ptolemy from his irrational conceit, as it is written: “They who have no directing influence fall like leaves.”