Mahomet—so say his followers—once read upon the wing of a locust: ‘We are the army of God; we lay ninety-nine eggs; and if we laid a hundred, we should devour the whole earth and all that grows upon its surface.’ ‘O Allah!’ exclaimed the terrified prophet, ‘Thou who listenest patiently to the prayers of Thy Servant, destroy their young, kill their chieftains, and stop their mouths, to save the Moslems’ food from their teeth!’ Scarce had he spoken when the angel Gabriel appeared, saying, ‘God grants thee part of thy wishes.’ And, indeed, as all true believers know, this prayer of their prophet, written on a piece of paper, and enclosed in a reed which is stuck in the ground, is sure to preserve a field or an orchard from locust devastation.
As a locust host advances, its columns are sometimes seen rising in compact bodies as if propelled by a strong gust of wind; then, suddenly sinking, they disperse into smaller battalions, not unlike vapours floating about a hill-side at early morn, and when slightly agitated by a breeze; or they resemble huge columns of sand or smoke, changing their shape every minute.
Onward they come—a dark continuous cloud
Of congregated myriads, numberless;
The rushing of whose wings is as the sound
Of a broad river headlong in its course,
Plunged from a mountain summit; or the roar
Of a wild ocean in the autumn storm,
Shattering its billows on a shore of rocks!—Southey.
During their flight numbers are constantly alighting—an action which has not inaptly been compared to the falling of large snow-flakes. It is, however, not until the approach of night that the locusts encamp. Woe to the spot they select as a resting-place! The sun sets on a landscape green with all the luxuriance of tropical vegetation; it rises in the morning over a region naked as the waste of the Sahara!
The locust is fierce, and strong, and grim,
And an armèd man is afraid of him;
He comes like a wingèd shape of dread,
With his shielded back, and his armèd head;
And his double wings for hasty flight,
And a keen unwearying appetite.
He comes with famine and fear along;
An army a million, million strong.
The Goth and the Vandal, and the dwarfish Hun
With their swarming people, wild and dun,
Brought not the dread that the locust brings,
When is heard the rush of their myriad wings.
From the deserts of burning sand they speed,
Where the lions roam, and the serpents breed.
Far over the sea, away, away!
And they darken the sun at noon of day.
Like Eden the land before they find,
But they leave it a desolate waste behind.
The peasant grows pale when he sees them come,
And standeth before them, weak and dumb,
For they come like a raging fire in power,
And eat up a harvest in half an hour;
And the trees are bare, and the land is brown,
As if trampled and trod by an army down.
There is terror in every monarch’s eye,
When he hears that this terrible foe is nigh;
For he knows that the might of an armèd host
Cannot drive the spoiler from out his coast:
That terror and famine his land await,
And from north to south ‘twill be desolate.
Thus the ravening locust is strong and grim,
And what were an armèd man to him?
Fire turneth him not, nor sea prevents,
He is stronger by far than the elements.
The broad green earth is his prostrate prey,
And he darkens the sun at noon of day.—Mary Howitt.