The present occupants of Mars Saba, about seventy in number, are all hermits.

They wear a coarse robe, an ugly, brimless stove-pipe of a hat, and go without shoes.

They eat nothing whatever but bread and salt; they drink nothing but water.

As long as they live they can never go outside the walls, or look upon a woman--for no woman is permitted to enter Mars Saba, upon any pretext whatsoever.
Some of those men have been shut up there for thirty years.

In all that dreary time they have not heard the laughter of a child or the blessed voice of a woman; they have seen no human tears, no human smiles; they have known no human joys, no wholesome human sorrows.