And when the fifth angel sounded, I saw where a star had fallen from heaven to earth. This star was entrusted with the key of that shaft which leads to the abyss.

So it opened the shaft which leads to the abyss, and smoke rose from the shaft as smoke rises from a great furnace, till the smoke rising from the shaft darkened both the sun and the air.

And out of the smoke a swarm of locusts spread over the world, endowed with such power for mischief as scorpions have on earth;

they were not to injure the grass on the land, the green things that grew there, or the trees; they were to attack men, such men as did not bear God’s mark on their foreheads.

These they had no power to kill, only to inflict pain on them during a space of five months; such pain as a man feels when he has been stung by a scorpion.

(When those days come, men will be looking for the means of death, and there will be no finding it; longing to die, and death will always give them the slip.)

The semblance of these locusts was that of horses caparisoned for war; on their heads they wore a kind of circlet that shone like gold, and their faces were like human faces;

they had hair like women’s hair, and teeth like lions’ teeth.

They wore breastplates that might have been of iron, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of chariots, drawn at full speed by many horses into battle.

It was their tails and the stings in their tails that made them like scorpions, and with these they were empowered to do men hurt for a space of five months. And they fought under a king;

their king was the angel of the abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, in Greek Apollyon, that is, in Latin, the Exterminator.✻

Of the three woes that were pronounced, one is now past; the two others are still to come.

And when the sixth angel sounded, I heard a voice that came from the four corners of the golden altar which stands in the presence of God.

It said to the sixth angel, as he stood there with his trumpet, Release the four angels who are imprisoned by the great river, the river Euphrates.

So these were released, four angels who were waiting for the year, the month, the day, the hour, when they were to destroy a third part of mankind.

And the muster of the armies that followed them on horseback (for I heard their muster called) was twenty thousand armies of ten thousand.

This is what I saw in my vision of the horses and of their riders; the riders had breastplates of fiery red, and blue, and brimstone yellow, and the horses’ heads seemed like the heads of lions, with fire and smoke and brimstone coming out of their mouths.

This fire, this smoke, this brimstone that came out of their mouths were three plagues, from which a third part of mankind perished.

The power these horses have to do mischief lies in their mouths and in their tails; their tails are like serpents, with serpents’ heads, and they use them to do hurt.

The rest of mankind, that did not perish by these plagues, would not turn away from the things their own hands had fashioned; still worshipped evil spirits, false gods of gold and silver and brass and stone and wood, that can neither see, nor hear, nor move.

Nor would they repent of the murders, the sorceries, the fornications, and the thefts which they committed.