THE NEW YORKER FI by Doris Lessing February 26, 1955
The rains that year were good; they were ing nicely just as the crops hem—or saret gathered when the men said they were not too bad. She never had an opinion of her own on matters like the weather, because even to know about a simple thing like the weather needs experience, which Margaret, born and brought up in Johannesburg, had not got. The men were her husband, Richard, and old Stephen, Richard』s father, who was a farmer from way back, and these two might argue for hours over whether the rains were ruinous or just ordinarily exasperating. Margaret had been on the farm for three years now. She still did not uand why they did not go bankrupt altogether, when the men never had a good word for the weather, or the soil, or the gover. But she was getting to learn the language. Farmers』 language. And she noticed that for all Richard』s and Stephen』s plaints, they did not go bankrupt. Nor did they get very rich; they jogged along, doing fortably.
Their crop was maize. Their farm was three thousand acres on the ridges that rise up toward the Zambezi escarpment—high, dry, wind-swept try, cold and dusty in winter, but now, i months, steamy with the heat that rose i, soft waves off miles of green foliage. Beautiful it was, with the sky on fair days like blue and brilliant halls of air, and the bright-green folds and hollows of try beh, and the mountains lying sharp and bare twenty miles off, beyond the rivers. The sky made her eyes ache; she was not used to it. One does not look so much at the sky iy. So that evening, when Richard said, 「The gover is sending out warnings that locusts are expected, ing down from the breeding grounds up north,」 her instinct was to look about her at the trees. Is, swarms of them—horrible! But Richard and the old man had raised their eyes and were looking up over the mountaintop. 「We haven』t had locusts in seven years,」 one said, and the other, 「They go in cycles, locusts do.」 And then: 「There goes our crop for this season!」
But they went on with the work of the farm just as usual, until one day, when they were ing up the road to the homestead for the midday break, old Stephen stopped, raised his finger, and pointed. 「Look, look!」 he shouted. 「There they are!」
Margaret heard him and she ran out to join them, looking at the hills. Out came the servants from the kit. They all stood and gazed. Over the rocky levels of the mountain was a streak of rust-colored air. Locusts. There they came.
At once, Richard shouted at the cookboy. Old Stephen yelled at the houseboy. The cookboy ran to beat the rusty plowshare, banging from a tree branch, that was used to summon the laborers at moments of crisis. The houseboy ran off to the store to collect tin s—any old bits of metal. The farm was ringing with the clamor of the gong, and the laborers came p out of the pound, pointing at the hills and shoutiedly. Soon they had all e up to the house, and Richard and old Stephen were giving them orders: Hurry, hurry, hurry.
And off they ran again, the two white men with them, and in a few minutes Margaret could see the smoke of fires rising from all around the farmlands. When the gover warnings came, piles of wood and grass had been prepared in every cultivated field. There were seven patches of bared, cultivated soil, where the new mealies were just showing, making a film ht greehe rich dark red, and around each patow drifted up thick clouds of sm