A VISITATION.
The plague of locusts, one of the most awful visitations to which the
countries included in the Roman empire were exposed, extended from the
Atlantic to Ethiopia, from Arabia to India, and from the Nile and Red Sea
to Greece and the north of Asia Minor. Instances are recorded in history
of clouds of the devastating insect crossing the Black Sea to Poland, and
the Mediterranean to Lombardy. It is as numerous in its species as it is
wide in its range of territory. Brood follows brood, with a sort of family
likeness, yet with distinct attributes, as we read in the prophets of the
Old Testament, from whom Bochart tells us it is possible to enumerate as
many as ten kinds. It wakens into existence and activity as early as the
month of March; but instances are not wanting, as in our present history,
of its appearance as late as June. Even one flight comprises myriads upon
myriads passing imagination, to which the drops of rain or the sands of
the sea are the only fit comparison; and hence it is almost a proverbial
mode of expression in the East (as may be illustrated by the sacred pages
to which we just now referred), by way of describing a vast invading army,
to liken it to the locusts. So dense are they, when upon the wing, that it
is no exaggeration to say that they hide the sun, from which circumstance
indeed their name in Arabic is derived. And so ubiquitous are they when
they have alighted on the earth, that they simply cover or clothe its
surface.
This last characteristic is stated in the sacred account of the plagues of
Egypt, where their faculty of devastation is also mentioned. The
corrupting fly and the bruising and prostrating hail had preceded them in
that series of visitations, but _they_ came to do the work of ruin more
thoroughly. For not only the crops and fruits, but the foliage of the
forest itself, nay, the small twigs and the bark of the trees are the
victims of their curious and energetic rapacity. They have been known even
to gnaw the door-posts of the houses. Nor do they execute their task in so
slovenly a way, that, as they have succeeded other plagues so they may
have successors themselves. They take pains to spoil what they leave. Like
the Harpies, they smear every thing that they touch with a miserable
slime, which has the effect of a virus in corroding, or, as some say, in
scorching and burning it. And then, as if all this were little, when they
can do nothing else, they die;—as if out of sheer malevolence to man, for
the poisonous elements of their nature are then let loose, and dispersed
abroad, and create a pestilence; and they manage to destroy many more by
their death than in their life.
Such are the locusts,—whose existence the ancient heretics brought forward
as their palmary proof that there was an evil creator, and of whom an
Arabian writer shows his national horror, when he says that they have the
head of a horse, the eyes of an elephant, the neck of a bull, the horns of
a stag, the breast of a lion, the belly of a scorpion, the wings of an
eagle, the legs of a camel, the feet of an ostrich, and the tail of a
serpent.
And now they are rushing upon a considerable tract of that beautiful
region of which we have spoken with such admiration. The swarm to which
Juba pointed grew and grew till it became a compact body, as much as a
furlong square; yet it was but the vanguard of a series of similar hosts,
formed one after another out of the hot mould or sand, rising into the air
like clouds, enlarging into a dusky canopy, and then discharged against
the fruitful plain. At length the huge innumerous mass was put into
motion, and began its career, darkening the face of day. As became an
instrument of divine power, it seemed to have no volition of its own; it
was set off, it drifted, with the wind, and thus made northwards, straight
for Sicca. Thus they advanced, host after host, for a time wafted on the
air, and gradually declining to the earth, while fresh broods were carried
over the first, and neared the earth, after a longer flight, in their
turn. For twelve miles did they extend from front to rear, and their
whizzing and hissing could be heard for six miles on every side of them.
The bright sun, though hidden by them, illumined their bodies, and was
reflected from their quivering wings; and as they heavily fell earthward,
they seemed like the innumerable flakes of a yellow-coloured snow. And
like snow did they descend, a living carpet, or rather pall, upon fields,
crops, gardens, copses, groves, orchards, vineyards, olive woods,
orangeries, palm plantations, and the deep forests, sparing nothing within
their reach, and where there was nothing to devour, lying helpless in
drifts, or crawling forward obstinately, as they best might, with the hope
of prey. They could spare their hundred thousand soldiers twice or thrice
over, and not miss them; their masses filled the bottoms of the ravines
and hollow ways, impeding the traveller as he rode forward on his journey,
and trampled by thousands under his horse-hoofs. In vain was all this
overthrow and waste by the road-side; in vain their loss in river, pool,
and watercourse. The poor peasants hastily dug pits and trenches as their
enemy came on; in vain they filled them from the wells or with lighted
stubble. Heavily and thickly did the locusts fall: they were lavish of
their lives; they choked the flame and the water, which destroyed them the
while, and the vast living hostile armament still moved on.
They moved right on like soldiers in their ranks, stopping at nothing, and
straggling for nothing: they carried a broad furrow or wheal all across
the country, black and loathsome, while it was as green and smiling on
each side of them and in front, as it had been before they came. Before
them, in the language of prophets, was a paradise; and behind them a
desert. They are daunted by nothing; they surmount walls and hedges, and
enter enclosed gardens or inhabited houses. A rare and experimental
vineyard has been planted in a sheltered grove. The high winds of Africa
will not commonly allow the light trellis or the slim pole; but here the
lofty poplar of Campania has been possible, on which the vine plant mounts
so many yards into the air, that the poor grape-gatherers bargain for a
funeral pile and a tomb as one of the conditions of their engagement. The
locusts have done what the winds and lightning could not do, and the whole
promise of the vintage, leaves and all, is gone, and the slender stems are
left bare. There is another yard, less uncommon, but still tended with
more than common care; each plant is kept within due bounds by a circular
trench round it, and by upright canes on which it is to trail; in an hour
the solicitude and long toil of the vine-dresser are lost, and his pride
humbled. There is a smiling farm; another sort of vine, of remarkable
character, is found against the farm-house. This vine springs from one
root, and has clothed and matted with its many branches the four walls;
the whole of it is covered thick with long clusters, which another month
will ripen:—on every grape and leaf there is a locust. Into the dry caves
and pits, carefully strewed with straw, the harvest-men have (safely, as
they thought just now) been lodging the far-famed African wheat. One grain
or root shoots up into ten, twenty, fifty, eighty, nay, three or four
hundred stalks: sometimes the stalks have two ears apiece, and these again
shoot into a number of lesser ones. These stores are intended for the
Roman populace, but the locusts have been beforehand with them. The small
patches of ground belonging to the poor peasants up and down the country,
for raising the turnips, garlic, barley, watermelons, on which they live,
are the prey of these glutton invaders as much as the choicest vines and
olives. Nor have they any reverence for the villa of the civic decurion or
the Roman official. The neatly arranged kitchen-garden, with its cherries,
plums, peaches, and apricots, is a waste; as the slaves sit round, in the
kitchen in the first court, at their coarse evening meal, the room is
filled with the invading force, and news comes to them that the enemy has
fallen upon the apples and pears in the basement, and is at the same time
plundering and sacking the preserves of quince and pomegranate, and
revelling in the jars of precious oil of Cyprus and Mendes in the
store-rooms.
They come up to the walls of Sicca, and are flung against them into the
ditch. Not a moment’s hesitation or delay; they recover their footing,
they climb up the wood or stucco, they surmount the parapet, or they have
entered in at the windows, filling the apartments, and the most private
and luxurious chambers, not one or two, like stragglers at forage or
rioters after a victory, but in order of battle, and with the array of an
army. Choice plants or flowers about the _impluvia_ and _xysti_, for
ornament or refreshment, myrtles, oranges, pomegranates, the rose and the
carnation, have disappeared. They dim the bright marbles of the walls and
the gilding of the ceilings. They enter the triclinium in the midst of the
banquet; they crawl over the viands and spoil what they do not devour.
Unrelaxed by success and by enjoyment, onward they go; a secret mysterious
instinct keeps them together, as if they had a king over them. They move
along the floor in so strange an order that they seem to be a tesselated
pavement themselves, and to be the artificial embellishment of the place;
so true are their lines, and so perfect is the pattern they describe.
Onward they go, to the market, to the temple sacrifices, to the baker’s
stores, to the cook-shops, to the confectioner’s, to the druggists;
nothing comes amiss to them; wherever man has aught to eat or drink, there
are they, reckless of death, strong of appetite, certain of conquest.
They have passed on; the men of Sicca sadly congratulate themselves, and
begin to look about them, and to sum up their losses. Being the
proprietors of the neighbouring districts, or the purchasers of its
produce, they lament over the devastation, not because the fair country is
disfigured, but because income is becoming scanty, and prices are becoming
high. How is a population of many thousands to be fed? where is the grain,
where the melons, the figs, the dates, the gourds, the beans, the grapes,
to sustain and solace the multitudes in their lanes, caverns, and garrets?
This is another weighty consideration for the class well-to-do in the
world. The taxes, too, and contributions, the capitation tax, the
percentage upon corn, the various articles of revenues due to Rome, how
are they to be paid? How are cattle to be provided for the sacrifices and
for the tables of the wealthy? One-half, at least, of the supply of Sicca
is cut off. No longer slaves are seen coming into the city from the
country in troops with their baskets on their shoulders, or beating
forward the horse, or mule, or ox, overladen with its burden, or driving
in the dangerous cow, or the unresisting sheep. The animation of the place
is gone; a gloom hangs over the Forum; and if its frequenters are still
merry there is something of sullenness and recklessness in their mirth.
The gods have given the city up; something or other has angered them.
Locusts, indeed, are no uncommon visitation, but at an earlier season.
Perhaps some temple has been polluted, or some unholy rite practised, or
some secret conspiracy has spread.
Another and a still worse calamity. The invaders, as we have already
intimated, could be more terrible still in their overthrow than in their
ravages. The inhabitants of the country had attempted, where they could,
to destroy them by fire and water. It would seem as if the malignant
animals had resolved that the sufferers should have the benefit of this
policy to the full; for they had not got more than twenty miles beyond
Sicca when they suddenly sickened and died. Thus after they had done all
the mischief they could by their living, when they had made their foul
maws the grave of every living thing, then they died themselves, and made
the desolated land their own grave. They took from it its hundred forms
and varieties of beautiful life, and left it their own fetid and poisonous
carcases in payment. It was a sudden catastrophe; they seemed making for
the Mediterranean, as if, like other great conquerors, they had other
worlds to subdue beyond it; but whether they were overgorged, or struck by
some atmospheric change, or that their time was come and they paid the
debt of nature, so it was that suddenly they fell, and their glory came to
nought, and all was vanity to them as to others, and “their stench rose
up, and their corruption rose up, because they had done proudly.”
The hideous swarms lay dead in the moist steaming underwoods, in the green
swamps, in the sheltered valleys, in the ditches and furrows of the
fields, amid the monuments of their own prowess, the ruined crops and the
dishonoured vineyards. A poisonous element, issuing from their remains,
mingled with the atmosphere, and corrupted it. The dismayed peasant found
that a pestilence had begun; a new visitation, not confined to the
territory which the enemy had made its own, but extending far and wide, as
the atmosphere extends, in all directions. Their daily toil, no longer
claimed by the produce of the earth, which has ceased to exist, is now
devoted to the object of ridding themselves of the deadly legacy which
they have received in its stead. In vain; it is their last toil; they are
digging pits, they are raising piles, for their own corpses, as well as
for the bodies of their enemies. Invader and victim lie in the same grave,
burn in the same heap; they sicken while they work, and the pestilence
spreads. A new invasion is menacing Sicca, in the shape of companies of
peasants and slaves, (the panic having broken the bonds of discipline,)
with their employers and overseers, nay the farmers themselves and
proprietors, rushing thither from famine and infection as to a place of
safety. The inhabitants of the city are as frightened as they, and more
energetic. They determine to keep them at a distance; the gates are
closed; a strict _cordon_ is drawn; however, by the continued pressure,
numbers contrive to make an entrance, as water into a vessel, or light
through the closed shutters, and anyhow the air cannot be put into
quarantine; so the pestilence has the better of it, and at last appears in
the alleys, and in the cellars of Sicca.