The air
grew thick and stifling. There were dense and frightful fogs. Wine
fermented in the casks. Fiery meteors appeared in the skies. A gigantic
pillar of flame was seen by hundreds descending upon the roof of the
pope's palace at Avignon. In 1356 came another earthquake, which
destroyed almost the whole of Basle. What with famine, flood, fog,
locust swarms, earthquakes, and the like, it is not surprising that many
men deemed the cup of the world's sins to be full, and the end of the
kingdom of man to be at hand.
An event followed that seemed to confirm this belief. A pestilence broke
out of such frightful virulence that it appeared indeed as if man was to
be swept from the earth. Men died in hundreds, in thousands, in myriads,
until in places there were scarcely enough living to bury the dead, and
these so maddened with fright that dwellings, villages, towns, were
deserted by all who were able to fly, the dying and dead being left
their sole inhabitants. It was the pestilence called the "Black Death,"
the most terrible visitation that Europe has ever known.
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