Locusts
By Alphonse Daudet
Translated by James F. Gaines
Before returning to my mill, here’s another memory of Algeria…
The night I arrived in that farm on the outskirts of the Sahara, I couldn’t sleep. The new landscape, the disruption of the trip, the barking of the jackals, and then that sapping, oppressive heat – complete suffocation – as if the mesh in my mosquito netting could not allow the passage of a single breath of air. When I opened the window at dawn, a heavy summer fog floated in the air, scarcely drifting along and fringed at the edges with pink and black. It hovered like a cloud of gunpowder over a battlefield. Not a leaf fluttered, and in the beautiful gardens that spread out below me, everything had the same sullen mood, the same immobility of foliage waiting for a thunderstorm: the grapevines aligned on the exposed slopes that made for sweet wines, the European orchard tucked into a shady corner, the orange and mandarin trees in long, calibrated rows. Even the banana trees with their shoots of tender green, always waving in the slightest breeze that tousled the fine, light fronds, stood at attention silent and straight as the plumes of a cavalry regiment. (more…)