[Texdolley]

Well, there is a good reason for being a hermit and cloistered if you know what to do with all that silence. Mystics and yogis in caves in Himalayas use it to turn their concentration inwards to perceive the inner worlds. However, you need to be initiated to known how to do this.

Thus Peter the Reader and his cohorts in the desert had not the first clue about how to reach the inner worlds. By having a metaphorical story made literal, and the second initiation being taken away from them, if they did turn their concentration inwards they would have just found empty blackness.

So they must have been extremely bored just staring out at all that desert sand, day after day after day ... and what better to break that boredom on a Saturday night than to go out on the town in Alexandria and rape, skin alive and murder the most famous female philosopher they could find? They probably rounded it off with a chicken tikka masala and a few beers afterwards... as you do.