It was some three weeks after his return from his journey, and the
fierce blaze of the sun continued. The storm that had broken over the
town had left no results of coolness or moisture, for the ground had
been baked hard, and the rain had been too short and swift to penetrate
it. And what the withering heat had spared of green leaf and shrub a
deadlier blight had swept away. The locusts had lately come up from
the south and the east, in numbers exceeding imagination, millions on
millions, making the air dark as they passed and obscuring the blue
sky. They had swept the country of its verdure, and left a trail of
desolation behind them. The grass was gone, the bark of the olives and
almonds was stripped away, and the bare trees had the look of winter.

The first to feel the plague had been the cattle and beasts of burden.
Without food to eat or water to drink they had died in hundreds. A
Mukabar, a cemetery, was made for the animals outside the walls of the
town. It was a charnel yard on the hill-side, near to one of the town's
six gates. The dead creatures were not buried there, but merely cast on
the bare ground to rot and to bleach in the sun and the heated wind. It
was a horrible place.

The skinny dogs of the town soon found it. And after these scavengers
of the East had torn the putrefying flesh and gnawed the multitude of
bones, they prowled around the country, with tongues lolling out, in
search of water. By this time there was none that they could come at
nearer than the sea, and that was salt. Nevertheless, they lapped it, so
burning was their thirst, and went mad, and came back to the town. Then
the people hunted them and killed them.

Now, it chanced that a mad dog from the Mukabar was being hunted to
death on a day when Naomi, who had become accustomed to the tumult of
the streets, had first ventured out in them alone, save for her goat,
that went before her. The goat was grown old, but it was still her
constant companion and also it was now her guide and guardian, for the
little dumb creature seemed to know that she was frail and helpless. And
so it was that she was crossing the Sok el Foki, a market of the town,
and hearkening only to the patter of the feet of the goat going in
front, when suddenly she heard a hundred footsteps hurrying towards her,
with shouts and curses that were loud and deep. She stood in fear on the
spot where she was, and no eyes had she to see what happened next, and
she had