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CHAPTER XXVIII

THE LOCUSTS AND THE DAY OF THE LORD

JOEL i.-ii. 17

OEL, as we have seen, found the motive of his prophecy in a recent plague of locusts, the appear

ance of which and the havoc they worked are described by him in full detail. Writing not only as a poet but as a seer, who reads in the locusts signs of the great Day of the Lord, Joel has necessarily put into his picture several features which carry the imagination beyond the limits of experience. And yet, if we ourselves had lived through such a plague, we should be able to recognise how little license the poet has taken, and that the seer, so far from unduly mixing with his facts the colours of Apocalypse, must have experienced in the terrible plague itself enough to provoke all the religious and monitory use which he makes of it.

The present writer has seen but one swarm of locusts, in which, though it was small and soon swept away by the wind, he felt not only many of the features that Joel describes, but even some degree of that singular helplessness before a calamity of portent far beyond itself, something of that supernatural edge and accent, which, by the confession of so many observers, characterise the locust-plague and the earthquake above

all other physical disasters. One summer afternoon, upon the plain of Hauran, a long bank of mist grew rapidly from the western horizon. The day was dull, and as the mist rose athwart the sunbeams, struggling through clouds, it gleamed cold and white, like the front of a distant snow-storm. When it came near,

it seemed to be more than a mile broad, and was dense enough to turn the atmosphere raw and dirty, with a chill as of a summer sea-fog, only that this was not due to any fall in the temperature. Nor was there the silence of a mist. We were enveloped by a noise, less like the whirring of wings than the rattle of hail or the crackling of bush on fire. Myriads upon myriads of locusts were about us, covering the ground, and shutting out the view in all directions. Though they drifted before the wind, there was no confusion in their ranks. They sailed in unbroken lines, sometimes straight, sometimes wavy; and when they passed pushing through our caravan, they left almost no stragglers, except from the last battalion, and only the few dead which we had caught in our hands. After several minutes they were again but a lustre on the air, and so melted away into some heavy clouds in the east.

Modern travellers furnish us with terrible impressions of the innumerable multitudes of a locust-plague, the succession of their swarms through days and weeks, and the utter desolation they leave behind them. Mr. Doughty writes: "There hopped before our feet a minute brood of second locusts, of a leaden colour, with budding wings like the spring leaves, and born of those gay swarms which a few weeks before had passed over and despoiled the desert. After forty days these

1 Arabia Deserta, p. 307.

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also would fly as a pestilence, yet more hungry than the former, and fill the atmosphere." And later: "The clouds of the second locust brood which the Aarab call 'Am'dan, pillars, flew over us for some days, invaded the booths and for blind hunger even bit our shins." It was "a storm of rustling wings." "This year was remembered for the locust swarms and great summer heat." 3 A traveller in South Africa says: "For the space of ten miles on each side of the Sea-Cow river and eighty or ninety miles in length, an area of sixteen or eighteen hundred square miles, the whole surface might literally be said to be covered with them." In his recently published book on South Africa, Mr. Bryce writes :-5

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"It is a strange sight, beautiful if you can forget the destruction it brings with it. The whole air, to twelve or even eighteen feet above the ground, is filled with the insects, reddish brown in body, with bright, gauzy wings. When the sun's rays catch them it is like the sea sparkling with light. When you see them against a cloud they are like the dense flakes of a driving snow-storm. You feel as if you had never before realised immensity in number. Vast crowds of

men gathered at a festival, countless tree-tops rising along the slope of a forest ridge, the chimneys of London houses from the top of St. Paul's-all are as nothing to the myriads of insects that blot out the sun above and cover the ground beneath and fill the air whichever way one looks. The breeze carries them swiftly past, but they come on in fresh clouds, a host of which there is no end, each of them a harmless

1 Arabia Deserta, p. 335.

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2 Id., 396.

Barrow, South Africa, p. 257, quoted by Pusey.

3 Id., 335.

Impressions of South Africa, by James Bryce: Macmillans, 1897.

creature which you can catch and crush in your hand, but appalling in their power of collective devastation."

And take three testimonies from Syria: "The quantity of these insects is a thing incredible to any one who has not seen it himself; the ground is covered by them for several leagues." "The whole face of the mountain 2 was black with them. On they came like a living deluge. We dug trenches and kindled fires, and beat and burnt to death heaps upon heaps, but the effort was utterly useless. They rolled up the mountain-side, and poured over rocks, walls, ditches and hedges, those behind covering up and passing over the masses already killed. For some days they continued to pass. The noise made by them in marching and foraging was like that of a heavy shower falling upon a distant forest."3 "The roads were covered with them, all marching and in regular lines, like armies of soldiers, with their leaders in front; and all the opposition of man to resist their progress was in vain." Having consumed the plantations in the country, they entered the towns and villages. "When they approached our garden all the farm servants were employed to keep them off, but to no avail; though our men broke their ranks for a moment, no sooner had they passed the men, than they closed again, and marched forward through hedges and ditches as before. Our garden finished, they continued their march toward the town, devastating one garden after another. They have also penetrated into most of our rooms: whatever one is doing one hears their noise from without, like

1 Volney, Voyage en Syrie, I. 277, quoted by Pusey.

2 Lebanon.

Abridged from Thomson's The Land and the Book, ed. 1877, Northern Palestine, pp. 416 ff.

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the noise of armed hosts, or the running of many waters. When in an erect position their appearance at a little distance is like that of a well-armed horseman."

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Locusts are notoriously adapted for a plague, "since to strength incredible for so small a creature, they add saw-like teeth, admirably calculated to eat up all the herbs in the land." They are the incarnation of hunger. No voracity is like theirs, the voracity of little creatures, whose million separate appetites nothing is too minute to escape. They devour first grass and leaves, fruit and foliage, everything that is green and juicy. Then they attack the young branches of trees, and then the hard bark of the trunks. "After eating up the corn, they fell upon the vines, the pulse, the willows, and even the hemp, notwithstanding its great bitterness." 4 "The bark of figs, pomegranates and oranges, bitter, hard and corrosive, escaped not their voracity." "They are particularly injurious to the palmtrees; these they strip of every leaf and green particle, the trees remaining like skeletons with bare branches." " "For eighty or ninety miles they devoured every green herb and every blade of grass." " "The gardens outside Jaffa are now completely stripped, even the bark

' From Driver's abridgment (Joel and Amos, p. 90) of an account in the Journ. of Sacred Lit., October 1865, pp. 235 f.

2 Morier, A Second Journey through Persia, p. 99, quoted by Pusey, from whose notes and Driver's excursus upon locusts in Joel and Amos the following quotations have been borrowed.

* Shaw's Travels in Barbary, 1738, pp. 236-8; Jackson's Travels to Morocco.

Adansson, Voyage au Senegal, p. 88.

"Chénier, Recherches Historiques sur les Maures, III., p. 496. Burckhardt, Notes, II. 90.

"Barrow, South Africa, p. 257.

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