ending
catastrophe, and we shot outside. For ten minutes, in the farmhouse,
once so calm, there was the sound of running footsteps, and indistinct
voices lost in the sudden panic. From the shade of the dormitories, the
servants rushed outside banging and clanging anything that came to
hand; sticks, forks, flails, copper cauldrons, basins, saucepans. The
shepherds blew their horns, others blew their conches or their hunting
horns; a fearfully discordant racket, soon overlaid by the shrill
voices of the Arab women ululating as they rushed out from nearby
caves. Sometimes, setting up a great racket and a resonant vibration in
the air is enough to send the locusts away, or at least to stop them
coming down.

So, where were they then, these awful creatures? In a sky vibrant with
heat, I saw nothing except a solitary cloud forming on the horizon, a
dense, copper-coloured, hail-cloud, but making a din like a storm in a
forest. It was the locusts. They flew en masse, suspended on their
long, thin wings and despite all the shouting and effort, they just
kept on coming, casting a huge, threatening shadow over the plain. Soon
they were overhead. The edges of the cloud frayed momentarily and then
broke away, as some of them, distinct and reddish, peeled off from the
rest like the first few drops of a shower. Then, the whole cloud burst
and a hailstorm of insects fell thick, fast, and loud. As far as the
eye could see, the fields were completely obliterated by locusts. And
they were enormous; each one as big as a finger.

Then the killing began to a hideous squelching sound like straw being
crushed. The heaving soil was turned over using harrows, mattocks, and
ploughs. But the more you killed, the more of them there were. They
swarmed in waves, their front legs all tangled up, their back legs
leaping for dear life--sometimes into the path of the horses harnessed
up for this bizarre work. The farm dogs, and some from the caves, were
released onto the fields, and fell amongst them crunching them in a
frenzy. Then, two companies of Turks following their buglers came to
the aid of the colonists, and the massacre changed complexion
completely.

They didn't crush the locusts, they burnt them with a wide sprinkling
of gunpowder.

I was drained by all this killing and sickened by the smell, so I went
back into the farmhouse, but there were almost as many in there. They
had come in through the open doors and windows and down the chimney