home, and raise and roof the citadel. Already the ships
had been hauled up high and dry on the shore, the crews 20
were busied with marriage and tilling the new country, and
I was appointing laws to live by, and houses to dwell in—when
suddenly there came on the human frame a wasting
sickness, shed from the whole tainted expanse of the sky,
a piteous blight on trees and crops, a year charged with 25
death. There were men leaving the lives they loved, or
dragging with them the bodies that burdened them,
while Sirius baked the fields into barrenness, the herbage