The Black Death seems to have come to Europe from Africa by ship in 1348. The harbingers of the epidemic began in 1347 with earthquakes and floods in China and Egypt; in far-away China the earth opened and swallowed men. Frightful portents appeared in the sky (of course I am simply quoting this nonsense from Hecker and his mediævalists) and the seasons changed, summer becoming winter. At that time, according to Hecker, the sheet of ice was formed which has since prevented men from looking upon the coast of Greenland; there were unequalled rains and the floodgates of heaven were opened in a more than Noachian deluge. Vast swarms of locusts appeared and died; and the want of the crops which they had devoured thrust man, whose hold upon the earth is always so feeble, to the edge of that slight precipice which generally protects him from the Valley of Starvation. The earth opened, and into the crevasses men fell, never to be seen again; from the crevasses arose a horrid stench. Into this world, even more starved and terrified by the adventure of living than was common in the Middle Ages, the rat and the bacillus pestis made their death-dealing plunge. The epidemic which they brought seems to have been carried from the sultry delta of the Nile by ship to Greece and Italy; four fugitives—and unknown numbers of rats and fleas—fled to find safety in Marseilles, carrying their own destruction with them. Thence the plague went to Avignon, at that time the residence of the pope; and ultimately to England where it landed in the southwest counties, taking half a year to crawl to London. As acutely noted by Procopius, plague always spreads inland from the shores of the sea, and we now know that it spreads just so fast as the rat can run and no faster. In 1348 they knew nothing about rats and bacteria, but attributed everything to bad air or evil spirits; and they noted that there was a continuance of southerly winds, which of course in Greece and Italy are hot winds and may possibly have spread the plague by bringing the ships and their contained rats. In Germany they had some story about a dense pestiferous fog which smelt abominably and so was obviously the cause of the Black Death. It is difficult to say how much truth there was in these stories of fog, though they are too numerous and too well attested to be utterly ignored; they have naturally been seized upon by historical novelists in search of the dramatic and anxious to show that in 1348 everything was different from things as they are to-day. Possibly they accounted for the preponderance of pneumonic plague.