Activity Where Cursing Is Expected Crosswords Eclipsecrossword

July 2, 2024, 5:48 pm

From down on the lands came the beating and banging and clanging of a hundred petrol tins and bits of metal. The houseboy ran off to the store to collect tin cans—any old bits of metal. The men were throwing wet leaves onto the fires to make the smoke acrid and black. Now on the tin roof of the kitchen she could hear the thuds and bangs of falling locusts, or a scratching slither as one skidded down the tin slope. Activity where cursing is expected crossword answer. By now, the locusts were falling like hail on the roof of the kitchen. They are heavy with eggs. You ever seen a hopper swarm on the march?

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In the meantime, he told her about how, twenty years back, he had been eaten out, made bankrupt by the locust armies. Their crop was maize. Soon they had all come up to the house, and Richard and old Stephen were giving them orders: Hurry, hurry, hurry. "We haven't had locusts in seven years, " one said, and the other, "They go in cycles, locusts do. " She held her breath with disgust and ran through the door into the house again. Old Stephen said, "They've got the wind behind them. When she looked out, all the trees were queer and still, clotted with insects, their boughs weighted to the ground. It was oppressive, too, with the heaviness of a storm. If we can stop the main body settling on our farm, that's everything. What is cursing mean. And then: "Get the kettle going. Then up came old Stephen from the lands. She might even get to letting locusts settle on her, in time. "Get me a drink, lass, " Stephen then said, and she set a bottle of whiskey by him. 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.

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Beautiful it was, with the sky on fair days like blue and brilliant halls of air, and the bright-green folds and hollows of country beneath, and the mountains lying sharp and bare twenty miles off, beyond the rivers. But at this she took a quick look at Stephen, the old man who had farmed forty years in this country and been bankrupt twice before, and she knew nothing would make him go and become a clerk in the city. More tea, more water were needed. It's thirsty work, this. Margaret heard him and she ran out to join them, looking at the hills. There it was even more like being in a heavy storm. The locusts were flopping against her, and she brushed them off—heavy red-brown creatures, looking at her with their beady, old men's eyes while they clung to her with their hard, serrated legs. So that evening, when Richard said, "The government is sending out warnings that locusts are expected, coming down from the breeding grounds up north, " her instinct was to look about her at the trees. Up came old Stephen again—crunching locusts underfoot with every step, locusts clinging all over him—cursing and swearing, banging with his old hat at the air. Activity where cursing is expected crosswords. Behind the reddish veils in front, which were the advance guard of the swarm, the main swarm showed in dense black clouds, reaching almost to the sun itself. Out came the servants from the kitchen. The earth seemed to be moving, with locusts crawling everywhere; she could not see the lands at all, so thick was the swarm. Overhead, the air was thick—locusts everywhere. The rains that year were good; they were coming nicely just as the crops needed them—or so Margaret gathered when the men said they were not too bad.

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The locusts were coming fast. The farm was ringing with the clamor of the gong, and the laborers came pouring out of the compound, pointing at the hills and shouting excitedly. Through the hail of insects, a man came running. But Richard and the old man had raised their eyes and were looking up over the nearest mountaintop. For, of course, while every farmer hoped the locusts would overlook his farm and go on to the next, it was only fair to warn the others; one must play fair. Quick, get your fires started! "All the crops finished. This swarm may pass over, but once they've started, they'll be coming down from the north one after another. The iron roof was reverberating, and the clamor of beaten iron from the lands was like thunder. At the doorway, he stopped briefly, hastily pulling at the clinging insects and throwing them off, and then he plunged into the locust-free living room. So Margaret went to the kitchen and stoked up the fire and boiled the water. We'll all three have to go back to town. They all stood and gazed. Then, although for the last three hours he had been fighting locusts, squashing locusts, yelling at locusts, and sweeping them in great mounds into the fires to burn, he nevertheless took this one to the door and carefully threw it out to join its fellows, as if he would rather not harm a hair of its head.

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Insects, swarms of them—horrible! If we can make enough smoke, make enough noise till the sun goes down, they'll settle somewhere else, perhaps. " But it's only early afternoon. But they went on with the work of the farm just as usual, until one day, when they were coming up the road to the homestead for the midday break, old Stephen stopped, raised his finger, and pointed. But she was getting to learn the language. Now half the sky was darkened. "You've got the strength of a steel spring in those legs of yours, " he told the locust good-humoredly. One does not look so much at the sky in the city. Margaret had been on the farm for three years now. She still did not understand why they did not go bankrupt altogether, when the men never had a good word for the weather, or the soil, or the government. The sky made her eyes ache; she was not used to it. Margaret sat down helplessly and thought, Well, if it's the end, it's the end.

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And she noticed that for all Richard's and Stephen's complaints, they did not go bankrupt. She remembered it was not the first time in the past three years the men had announced their final and irremediable ruin. This comforted Margaret; all at once, she felt irrationally cheered. If they get a chance to lay their eggs, we are going to have everything eaten flat with hoppers later on. " When the government warnings came, piles of wood and grass had been prepared in every cultivated field. 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. It was like the darkness of a veldt fire, when the air gets thick with smoke and the sunlight comes down distorted—a thick, hot orange. There were seven patches of bared, cultivated soil, where the new mealies were just showing, making a film of bright green over the rich dark red, and around each patch now drifted up thick clouds of smoke. The cookboy ran to beat the rusty plowshare, banging from a tree branch, that was used to summon the laborers at moments of crisis. Asked Margaret fearfully, and the old man said emphatically, "We're finished.

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It might go on for three or four years. Everywhere, fifty miles over the countryside, the smoke was rising from a myriad of fires. Old Stephen yelled at the houseboy. Toward the mountains, it was like looking into driving rain; even as she watched, the sun was blotted out with a fresh onrush of the insects. They are looking for a place to settle and lay. It sounded like a heavy storm. She felt suitably humble, just as she had when Richard brought her to the farm after their marriage and Stephen first took a good look at her city self—hair waved and golden, nails red and pointed. It was a half night, a perverted blackness. Nor did they get very rich; they jogged along, doing comfortably. Over the rocky levels of the mountain was a streak of rust-colored air. Nothing left, " he said. And then there are the hoppers. He picked a stray locust off his shirt and split it down with his thumbnail; it was clotted inside with eggs.

"Those beggars can eat every leaf and blade off the farm in half an hour! Now there was a long, low cloud advancing, rust-colored still, swelling forward and out as she looked. At once, Richard shouted at the cookboy. Outside, the light on the earth was now a pale, thin yellow darkened with moving shadow; the clouds of moving insects alternately thickened and lightened, like driving rain.

"We're finished, Margaret, finished! " "Imagine that multiplied by millions. Stephen impatiently waited while Margaret filled one petrol tin with tea—hot, sweet, and orange-colored—and another with water. 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. In the meantime, thought Margaret, her husband was out in the pelting storm of insects, banging the gong, feeding the fires with leaves, while the insects clung all over him. Their farm was three thousand acres on the ridges that rise up toward the Zambezi escarpment—high, dry, wind-swept country, cold and dusty in winter, but now, in the wet months, steamy with the heat that rose in wet, soft waves off miles of green foliage. Margaret was wondering what she could do to help. And then, still talking, he lifted the heavy petrol cans, one in each hand, holding them by the wooden pieces set cornerwise across the tops, and jogged off down to the road to the thirsty laborers. Here were the first of them.