John Peters on a Locust Plague in Mesopotamia
In this excerpt from Chapter XIII Conclusion, John Peters describes a Mesopotamian locust plague.
[p. 345] There was a locust plague that summer, and every green thing except the palms had been eaten up by the all-devouring insects, and in some places even the palm leaves had been nibbled and gnawed. Millions of locusts had fallen into the Euphrates and perished there, and at many points the great river stank like a cess-pool. As I ate my dinner, the locusts would often descend upon it in such quantities that I could scarcely see the food. To secure a mouthful of the bread I held in my hands I was compelled to brush a free place, and before I was ready for another mouthful the bread was once more buried under the bodies of locusts.
This excerpt is taken from John Punnett Peters, Nippur or Explorations and Adventures on the Euphrates: The Narrative of the University of Pennsylvania Expedition to Babylonia in the Years 1888-1890, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1897, Volume II, p. 345.
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