Years passed by, bringing, from time to time, minor shocks which destroyed hundreds in different locations, but which passed with but little notice amid so many greater disasters, and wars and rumors of wars. Antioch had been gradually rebuilt, and was more splendid than ever before. The first quarter of the sixth century was past. The time of the great festival of the Ascension was at hand, A. D. 526. From all the country round came people flocking to the celebration, to witness the pageantry and procession. Without a moment’s warning, a great earthquake came, as fearful as the shock four hundred and eleven years before. The destruction was vastly greater. The tottering walls crushed thousands in the crowded streets. Every avenue and alley became a death-trap. There is not, in all the pages of history, record of an earthquake of greater destructiveness. Gibbon estimates the number of victims at two hundred and fifty thousand. [Illustration: MASSIVE ARCHITECTURE WRECKED, ASIA MINOR.] Nor was Antioch the only sufferer. The number of victims at other points in Asia Minor might be fifty thousand more. The whole sixth century is noted for the unusual number of appalling disasters of this sort which occurred at different places in the then known world. Probably a million people perished during this period in earthquakes alone. Such unwonted havoc may well cause us to wonder what manner of convulsions were occurring in the great volcanic regions of the Pacific and the then unknown western world. If the same general rule prevailed then that has been noticeable in more recent periods; if great convulsions were then, as now, comparatively synchronous, it would be difficult to form any adequate idea of the magnitude of the disturbances. In 742 there was a tremendous earthquake in Egypt and Arabia, which overturned scores of cities and villages, rent mountains asunder, buried people in the wrecks of their dwellings, tossed the sea to and fro, swallowed up towns, wiped out thriving seaports, and numbered its dead by many tens of thousands. Four years later Jerusalem and all Syria experienced a dreadful shock, which made terrible havoc. In 823, Central Europe was shaken and Aix-la-chapelle nearly destroyed. In 860 Persia and Syria were again shaken; and in 867, Antioch, after its three centuries of comparative rest, was again ravaged by the destroyer. This shock extended to Mecca, which was fearfully rent. Part of a mountain in Syria was hurled into the sea. The century closed with a fearful convulsion in far distant India, wherein no less than one hundred and eighty thousand people were killed. Western Syria suffered again in 1169 and 1202. All the cities of the Mediterranean coast were shaken to pieces, with the usual terrible loss of life. The valleys of the Lebanon district were upheaved and altered throughout their whole extent. [Illustration: RUINS NEAR CAIRO.]