Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vol. LIV: Augustini Epistulae Pars I

my judgment had wavered. For when he was ignorant of both your homeland and your name, it seemed to carry only so much more weight, that he asserted the same things which another had already indicated. Finally, the full weight of the truth erupted; for a constant multitude of travelers reported that Rufinus was in Nitria and had journeyed to the blessed Macarius. Here indeed I loosened all the reins of belief and then I truly grieved that I was sick. And unless the weakened strength of my body had fettered me with a kind of shackle, neither the heat of midsummer nor the sea, always uncertain for sailors, would have been able to resist me as I proceeded with pious haste. You should believe me, brother, that not so does a sailor tossed by a storm look for a port, not so do fields parched for rain desire it, not so does a mother sit by the curved shore anxiously waiting for her son. cf. Horace, Odes IV 5, 14

3. After a sudden whirlwind pulled me from your side, after an impious tearing-away separated me from you, as I was clinging to you with the glue of charity, then the dark rain-cloud stood over my head, then there were seas on all sides and on all sides the sky. At last, wandering in the uncertainty of travel, when Thrace, Pontus, and Bithynia, and the entire journey through Galatia or Cappadocia, and the land of the Cilicians had broken me with fervent heat, Syria occurred to me like a most faithful port to a shipwrecked man. Where, having experienced every kind of illness that could be, and having lost one of two eyes,