In the deserts of Egypt and Syria between the third and fifth centuries, ammas and abbas withdrew into the silence of the wilderness in loose communities of cells, where they learned to pray without ceasing and to answer a question with a single sentence. Those sentences, carried from elder to disciple and disciple to elder, were gathered over generations into the Apophthegmata Patrum, a book of desert wisdom that has lost none of its freshness or strangeness across seventeen hundred years.