inquire after Constantine, and could hear no tidings of him nor his family, they consulted together, and with one consent surrendered the city to Amrou, paying down for their security two thousand pieces of silver, and delivering into his hands all that Constantine had been obliged to leave behind him of his property. Thus was Caesarea lost in the year of our Lord 638, being the seventeenth year of the Hegira and the fifth of Omar's reign, which answers to the twenty-ninth year of the emperor Heraclius. After the taking of Caesarea all the other places in Syria which as yet held out, namely, Ramlah, Acre, Joppa, Ascalon, Gaza, Sichem (or Nablos), and Tiberias, surrendered, and in a little time after the people of Beiro Zidon, Jabalah, and Laodicea followed their example; so that there remained nothing more for the Saracens to do in Syria, who, in little more than six years from the time of their first expedition in Abu-Beker's reign, had succeeded in subduing the whole of that large, wealthy, and populous country. Syria did not remain long in the possession of those persons who had the chief hand in subduing it, for in the eighteenth year of the Hegira the mortality in Syria, both among men and beasts, was so terrible, particularly at Emaus and the adjacent territory, that the Arabs called that year the year of destruction. By that pestilence the Saracens lost five-and-twenty thousand men, among whom were Abu Obeidah, who was then fifty-eight years old; Serjabil Ebn Hasanah, formerly Mahomet's secretary; and Yezid Ebn Abu Sofian, with several other officers of note. Kaled survived them about three years, and then died; but the place of his burial--consequently of his death, for they did not use in those days to carry them far--is uncertain; some say at Hems, others at Medina. FOOTNOTES: [66] Those of Medina are called by that name because they helped Mahomet in his flight from Mecca. [67] Those that fled with him are called Mohajerins; by these names the inhabitants of Mecca and Medina are often distinguished. SARACENS CONQUER EGYPT DESTRUCTION OF THE LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA A.D. 640 WASHINGTON IRVING