"It would be useless," replied the old man, in a tone of discouragement. "The finger of the Unknown is in all this; our vain formulae cannot prevail against that mysterious power. Submit, and let us return to our sanctuaries to study this new god, this Lord, who is more powerful than Ammon Ra, Osiris, and Typhon. The learning of Egypt has been overcome, the riddle of the sphinx cannot be answered, and the vast mystery of the great Pyramid covers nothingness only." As the Pharaoh still refused to let the Hebrews go, all the cattle of the Egyptians were smitten with death; the Israelites lost not a single head. A wind from the south arose and blew all night long, and in the morning when day dawned, a vast red cloud concealed the whole of the heavens. Through the dun-coloured fog the sun shone red like a buckler in the forge, and seemed to have lost its beams. The cloud was different from other clouds, it was a living cloud; the noise of its wings was heard; it alighted on the earth, not in the shape of great drops of rain, but in shoals of rose, yellow, and green grasshoppers, more numerous than the grains of sand in the Libyan desert. They followed each other in swarms like the straw blown about by the storm; the air was darkened; they filled up the ditches, the ravines, the streams; they put out by their mere mass the fires lighted to destroy them; they struck against obstacles and then heaped up and overcame them. If a man opened his mouth, he breathed one in; they found their way into the folds of the clothing, into the hair, into the nostrils; their dense columns made chariots turn back; they overthrew the solitary passer-by and soon covered him. Their formidable army, springing and flying, marched over Egypt from the Cataracts to the Delta, over an immense breadth of country, destroying the grass, reducing the trees to the condition of skeletons, devouring plants to the roots, leaving behind but a bare earth trodden down like a threshing-floor. At the request of the Pharaoh Mosche made the scourge cease. An extremely violent west wind carried all the grasshoppers into the Sea of Weeds; but the Pharaoh's obstinate heart, harder than brass, porphyry, or basalt, would not relent. Hail, a scourge unknown to Egypt, fell from Heaven amid blinding lightning and deafening thunder, in enormous stones, cutting, bruising, breaking everything, mowing down the grain as if with a scythe. Then black, opaque, horrifying darkness, in which lights were extinguished as in the depths of the airless passages, spread its heavy clouds over the land of Egypt, so fair, so luminous, so golden under its azure sky, where the night is clearer than the daytime in other climes. The terrified people, believing themselves already shrouded in the impenetrable darkness of the sepulchre, groped their way or sat down by the propylaea, uttering plaintive cries and tearing their clothes.