(This) disease was so powerful that it spread from the ill to the healthy like fire among dry or oily materials.
It was so bad that it could be communicated not only through speaking or associating with the sick, or anything else they had touched.
The pestilence spread so efficiently that, not only did it pass from person to person, but if an animal touched the belongings of some sick or dead person
Such experiences or others like them gave birth to a variety of fears and misconceptions among the living, and the cruel strategy (they pursued) was to avoid
even flee the sick and their belongings.
They thought that by doing so they could stay healthy themselves.
\"There were some who thought moderate living and the avoidance of excess had a great deal to do with avoiding illness, so they lived apart from others in small groups. They congregated and shut themselves up in houses where no one had been sick, partaking moderately of the best food and the finest wine, avoiding excess in other ways as well, trying their best not speak of or hear any news about the death and illness outside, occupying themselves with music and whatever other pleasures they had available.\"
This tribulation struck with fear in the hearts of men and women that one brother abandoned another, uncles left nephews, sisters left brothers, often wives left their husbands, and fathers and mothers left their children, as if they were not even theirs.
Nor were these dead honored with tears, lights or compassions. Sunk to the level that people were disposed of much as we would now now dispose of a dead goat.
Thus it became clear that what the wise had never learned to suffer with patience when, in the natural course of things, it struck less dramatically and less often, became a matter of indifference even to the simple thanks to sheer scale of this misfortune.