As the people lay cowering in their fear, there was plenty to occupy their minds. They would remember the first dreadful threat, not yet accomplished, to slay their firstborn; and the later assertion that if pestilence had not destroyed them, it was because God would plague them with all His plagues. They would reflect upon all their defeated duties, and how the sun himself was now withdrawn at the waving of the prophet’s hand. And then a ghastly foreboding would complete their dread. What was it that darkness typified, in every Oriental nation—nay, in all the world? Death! Job speaks of “The land of darkness and of the shadow of death; A land of thick darkness, as darkness itself; A land of the shadow of death without any order, And where the light is as darkness” (x. 21, 22). With us, a mortal sentence is given in a black cap; in the East, far more expressively, the head of the culprit was covered, and the darkness which thus came upon him expressed his doom. Thus “they covered Haman’s face” (Esther vii. 8). Thus to destroy “the face of the covering that is cast over all peoples and the veil that is spread over all nations,” is the same thing as to “swallow up death,” being the visible destruction of the embodied death-sentence (Isa. xxv. 7, 8). And now this veil was spread over all the radiant land of Egypt. Chill, and hungry, and afraid to move, the worst horror of all that prolonged midnight was the mental agony of dire anticipation. In other respects there had been far worse calamities, but through its effect upon the imagination this dreadful plague was a fit prelude to the tenth, which it hinted and premonished.