Again Locusts, Again Manna

Miles away Boer farmers heard it and trembled: a noise like a giant crumpling enormous sheets of paper. The noise came from a black cloud 500 miles wide sweeping down from West Africa last week at the rate of 100 miles per day. It was the rustling of billions upon billions of locusts' wings. Whirring swarms dropped down on fields ripe for the autumn harvest, and when they moved on there were no leaves, no grass, no growing things.

As the Bible remarks and as Shakespeare emphasized, fat locusts are good to eat, especially with wild honey. But the taste must be acquired. Last week battalions of embattled Africanders thought only of fighting their "locust plague" with blazing torches and smudges released expensively from roaring airplanes. When these efforts failed the Africanders waited gloomily for the locust swarms to settle and lay eggs, prepared to exterminate the eggs, dug trenches in which to trap crawling locusts and burn them up.

In another part of South Africa another kind of food fell from the heavens last week, was greedily gobbled. This food, genuine Biblical manna, descended in a white cloud on a 30-acre field at the farm of Farmer Theunis Botha, cousin of the late great Boer General Louis Botha (1862-1919). Manna, as reported by the careful author of Exodus 16:31 tastes "like wafers made with honey." It is an excretion of the plant louse coccid (TIME, Aug. 29, 1927). Its effect upon the eater is mildly cathartic.

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