Macarius of Alexandria  

"Palladius tells us ( p. 173) that a gnat once bit Macarius, and that as the bite gave him pain, he put forth his hand and killed the insect. Having done this he despised himself because he had killed the gnat, and as a punishment for his weakness he condemned himself to go and sit naked for six months at Scete, where the "gnats” were so savage and strong that they could pierce the skin of a pig. Macarius departed to Scete, and when he came back six months later, his skin was so much bitten and swollen, and so much like the "hide of an elephant", that his friends only knew him by his voice. Palladius does not tell us the exact situation of the spot where Macarius sat naked for six months, and he does not say at what time of the year he was there, but everyone who knows Egypt will feel certain that Macarius went to the place in June or July and stayed there until nearly the end of the year . At that time the whole of the neighbourhood of Nitria and Scete towards the north is plagued with a species of large insect which attacks men and women and bites viciously, especially newcomers, making the ankles, feet, hands, and face to swell, and to become covered, in the case of white men, with hard red lumps, which often fester and cause serious illness . These “gnats” are most ferocious when the inundation is at its height in the Delta, i.e., during the month of October, and they breed in in the shallow, brackish waters which lie at a distance of a few miles from Scete they seem to be specially attracted by the eyelids, and are, I believe, the cause of many of the diseases of the eye which are still so common in the more northerly parts of the Delta. The puffy, swollen body of a dark-skinned native who had been subjected to the attacks of such " gnats” for six months, would undoubtedly resemble the lumpy hide of the elephant, and this description is most apposite. We may take another example of the accuracy of the writer of an interesting narrative in dealing with local details. "--The Book of Paradise: Being the Histories and Sayings of the Monks and Ascetics of the Egyptian Desert (1904) by E. A. Wallis Budge