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….