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337 The people, terrified, could hardly breathe; the Evil Wind clutched them, does not grant them another day. . . Mouths were drenched in blood, The source of the unseen death was a cloud that appeared in the skies of Sumer and "covered the land as a cloak, spread over it like a sheet." Brownish in color, during the daytime "the sun in the ho- rizon it obliterated with darkness." At night, luminous at its edges ("Girt with dread brilliance it filleth the broad earth") it blocked out the moon: "the moon at its rising it extinguished." Moving from west to east, the deathly cloud—"enveloped in terror, casting fear everywhere"—was carried to Sumer by a howling wind, "a great wind which speeds high above, an evil wind which over- whelms the land." It was not, however, a natural phenomenon. It was "a great storm directed from Anu ... it hath come from the heart of En- lil." The product of the seven awesome weapons, "in a_ single spawning it was spawned . . . like the bitter venom of the gods; in the west it was spawned." The Evil Wind, "bearing gloom from city to city, carrying dense clouds that bring gloom from the sky." was the result of a "lightning flash:" "From the midst of the mountains it had descended upon the land, from the Plain of No aba 2. of the baleful storm was; Mighty offspring, valiant sons were the heralds of the pestilence. single spawning" the seven awesome weapons created by Anu. "uprooting everything, upheavaling everything" at the place of the blast. The ancient descriptions are as vivid, as accurate as mod- ern eyewitness descriptions of an atomic explosion: As soon as the "awesome weapons" were launched from the skies, there was an The Nuclear Holocaust heads wallowed in blood .. . The face was made pale by the Evil Wind. An evil blast heralded the baleful storm. An evil blast the forerunner The two valiant sons—Ninurta and Nergal—unleashed "in a Sa ne ne ee Te eel