Argentina circa 1915
Albert B. Martinez and Maurice Lewandowski, The Argentine in the Twentieth Century, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1915, pp.76-77.
The only serious scourge which can menace the creative power of the earth … is the invasion of locusts.
These invasions take the form of flying armies of locusts passing between earth and sky, and revealing their passage by the semi-darkness they produce in the regions over which they travel. Leaving the hot deserts of the tropical regions, the locusts advance in their phalanxes, sometimes 50 or 60 miles across; swarm succeeds swarm uninterruptedly for several days, leaving behind them no trace of vegetation. They till the wells, stop the trains, by opposing veritable barriers of their bodies, obstruct the rivers in which they drown, and sometimes even, by the accumulation of their bodies, form a bridge over which the rear-guard can pass.
