XXXVIII. Till now we were chastised (only) with rumours and signs; but for the future who is able to tell of the affliction that surrounded our land on all sides? In the month of Adar (March) of this year the locusts came upon us out of the ground, so that, because of their number, we imagined that not only had the eggs that were in the ground been hatched to our harm, but that the very air was vomiting them against us, and that they were descending from the sky upon us. When they were only able to crawl, they devoured and consumed all the Arab territory and all that of Ras-'ain and Tella and Edessa. But after they were able to fly, the stretch of their radii was from the border of Assyria to the Western Sea (the Mediterranean), and they went northwards as far as the boundary of the Ortaye. They ate up and desolated these districts and utterly consumed everything that was in them, so that, even before the war broke out, we could see with our own eyes what was said of the Babylonian, "The land is as the garden of Eden before him, and behind him a desolate wilderness." Had not the providence of God restrained them, they would have devoured human beings and cattle, as we have heard that they actually did in a certain village, where some people had put down a little baby in a field, while they were working; and before they got from one end of the field to the other, the locusts leaped upon it and deprived it of life. Presently after, in the month of Nisan (April), there began to be a dearth of corn and of everything else, and four modii of wheat were sold for a dinar. In the months of Khaziran (June) and Tammuz (July) the inhabitants of these districts were reduced to all sorts of shifts to live. They sowed millet for their own use, but it was not enough for them, because it did not thrive. Before the year came to an end, misery from hunger had reduced the people to beggary, so that they sold their property for half its worth, horses and oxen and sheep and pigs. And because the locusts had devoured all the crop, and left neither pasture nor food for man or beast, many forsook their native places and removed to other districts of the north and west. And the sick who were in the villages, as well as the old men and boys and women and infants, and those who were tortured by hunger, being unable to walk far and go to distant places, entered into the cities to get a livelihood by begging; and thus many villages and hamlets were left destitute of inhabitants. They did not, however, escape punishment, not even those who went to far off places; but, as it is written concerning the Children of Israel, "Whithersoever they went out, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil," so also it fared with them; for the pestilence came upon them in the places to which they went, and even overtook those who entered into Edessa; about which I shall tell (you) presently to the best of my ability, though no one, as I think, is able to describe it as it really was.