scouragement.
"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