THE LOCUSTS
Just one more souvenir of Algeria and then—back to the windmill!…
I couldn't sleep the night I arrived at the farm of the Sahel. Maybe it was the new country, the stress of the voyage, the barking jackals, on top of the irritating, oppressive, and completely asphyxiating heat. It felt as though the mosquito nets were keeping the air out with the insects…. As I opened my window at first light, I saw a heavy summer mist, slow-moving, fringed with black and pink, and floating in the air like smoke over a battle field. Not a leaf moved in the lovely gardens stretched out before me, where, the well-spaced vines, that gave such sweet wine, were enjoying full sunshine on the slopes. There were also European fruit trees sheltered in a shady spot, and small orange and mandarin trees in long, closely packed lines. Everything had the same gloomy look about it, with that certain limpness of leaf waiting for the storm. Even the banana trees, those great, pale-green reeds, usually on the move as some light breeze tangles their fine, light foliage, stood straight and silent in their symmetrical plumage.
I stayed there for a while looking at this fabulous plantation, where seemingly all types of the world's trees could be found, each one giving exotic flowers and fruit, in its proper season. Between the wheat fields and the massive cork-oaks, a stream shone, and refreshed—the eye at least—on an airless morning. As I approved the fineness and order of it all: the beautiful farm with its Moorish arcades and terraces, brilliantly white in the dawn, and its surrounding stables and barns, I recalled that it was twenty years since these brave settlers set up home in the valley of the Sahel. At first, they found only a workman's shack, and ground haphazardly planted with dwarf palms and mastic trees. Everything was yet to be done; everything to be built. At any time, there could be an attack from Arabs. They had to leave the plough out for cover in case of a shoot-out. Then there was the sickness, the ophthalmia, the fevers; and the failed harvest, the groping inexperience, and the fight against a narrow-minded administration—always putting off its prevarications. What a world of work, and fatigue, and having to watch their backs all the time!
Even now, despite the end of the bad times, and the hard-won good fortune, both the settler and his wife were up before anyone else on the farm. At an ungodly hour they could be heard coming and going, overlooking the workers' coffee, in the huge kitchens on the ground floor. Shortly afterwards, a bell was rung and the workmen set out for the day's work. There were some Burgundy wine-growers, Kabyle workers in rags and red tarbooshes, bare-legged Mahonian terrace workers, Maltese, and people from Lucca; men from many places and therefore more difficult to manage. Outside the door, the farmer curtly gave out the day's work to everyone. When he was finished, this fine man looked up and scrutinised the sky anxiously. Then, he noticed me at the window:
—Awful growing weather, he told me, here comes the sirocco.
In fact, as the sun rose waves of hot, suffocating air came in from the south as though an oven door had briefly opened. We didn't know where to put ourselves or what to do. The whole morning was like this. We took coffee sitting on mats in the gallery, without finding the will power to move or speak. The dogs, stretched out, hoping the flagstones would keep them cool, looked utterly washed out. Lunch picked us up a bit; it was a generous if singular meal, and included carp, trout, wild boar, hedgehog, Staouëli butter, Crescian wines, guavas, and bananas. All in all, an improbability of delicacies which nevertheless reflected the complex variety of nature which surrounded us…. We were just about to get up from the table, when shouts rang out from behind the closed French window, shouts that guaranteed that we would soon experience first-hand the furnace-like heat in the garden:
—Locusts! Locusts!
My host paled, as any man would who had been told of an impending 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. On the woodwork and curtains, already stripped, they crawled, fell, fluttered, and climbed up the white wall, casting huge shadows making them look even uglier. And there was just no getting away from the awful stench.
Later, we had to do without water with our meal as the tanks, basins, wells, and fish ponds were all covered over with dead locusts. In the evening, in my room, where many had been killed, I heard a buzzing under the furniture, and the cracking of wing cases, which sounded like plant pods bursting in the sweltering heat. Naturally, I couldn't sleep again. Besides, everybody else was still noisily busy all over the farm. Flames were spreading over the ground from one end of the plain to the other; the Turks were still in their killing fields.
The next day, opening my window, I could see that the locusts were gone. But what total devastation they left behind. There wasn't a single flower, or a blade of grass; everything was black, charred, and eaten away. Only the banana, apricot, peach, and mandarin trees could be recognised by the outline of their stripped branches, but lacking the charm and flourish of the leaves which only yesterday had been their living essence. The rooms and the water tanks were being washed out. Everywhere, labourers were digging into the ground destroying the locusts' eggs. Each sod of soil was carefully examined and turned over. But it broke their hearts to see the thousands of white, sap-filled roots in the crumbling, still-fertile soil….