I stayed there for a while looking at this fabulous plantation, where seemingly all types of the world's trees could be found, each one giving exotic flowers and fruit, in its proper season. Between the wheat fields and the massive cork-oaks, a stream shone, and refreshed--the eye at least--on an airless morning. As I approved the fineness and order of it all: the beautiful farm with its Moorish arcades and terraces, brilliantly white in the dawn, and its surrounding stables and barns, I recalled that it was twenty years since these brave settlers set up home in the valley of the Sahel. At first, they found only a workman's shack, and ground haphazardly planted with dwarf palms and mastic trees. Everything was yet to be done; everything to be built. At any time, there could be an attack from Arabs. They had to leave the plough out for cover in case of a shoot-out. Then there was the sickness, the ophthalmia, the fevers; and the failed harvest, the groping inexperience, and the fight against a narrow-minded administration--always putting off its prevarications. What a world of work, and fatigue, and having to watch their backs all the time! Even now, despite the end of the bad times, and the hard-won good fortune, both the settler and his wife were up before anyone else on the farm. At an ungodly hour they could be heard coming and going, overlooking the workers' coffee, in the huge kitchens on the ground floor. Shortly afterwards, a bell was rung and the workmen set out for the day's work. There were some Burgundy wine-growers, Kabyle workers in rags and red tarbooshes, bare-legged Mahonian terrace workers, Maltese, and people from Lucca; men from many places and therefore more difficult to manage. Outside the door, the farmer curtly gave out the day's work to everyone. When he was finished, this fine man looked up and scrutinised the sky anxiously. Then, he noticed me at the window: --Awful growing weather, he told me, here comes the sirocco. In fact, as the sun rose waves of hot, suffocating air came in from the south as though an oven door had briefly opened. We didn't know where to put ourselves or what to do. The whole morning was like this. We took coffee sitting on mats in the gallery, without finding the will power to move or speak. The dogs, stretched out, hoping the flagstones would keep them cool, looked utterly washed out. Lunch picked us up a bit; it was a generous if singular meal, and included carp, trout, wild boar, hedgehog, Staouëli butter, Crescian wines, guavas, and bananas. All in all, an improbability of delicacies which nevertheless reflected the complex variety of nature which surrounded us.... We were just about to get up from the table, when shouts rang out from behind the closed French window, shouts that guaranteed that we would soon experience first-hand the furnace-like heat in the garden: --Locusts! Locusts!