“Food became so scarce that the Zionists actually were foced to cook and eat them. I sometimes find people in my audiences who have never tasted fried locust. If you haven't — well, you haven't missed much. I was told that they tasted lake stale herring. Personally, I think I should prefer stale herring.
The Turkish Government even issued a proclaimation making it obligatory for every person between the ages of sixteen and sixty to bring in eleven pounds of locust eggs so that they might be destroyed before they hatched. The people attempted to fight the plague by gathering in circles, waving flags and driving the insects, in the creeper stage, to the centre of the circle. Then they would bury millions of them in these zinc boxes in the sand. But there were so many that this had very little effect. The way the plague ended was the most amazing part. These first locusts were dying off, and the second just coming from the shells. If they had lived they would have devoured every blade of grass in the Holy Land. But just as they were coming from their shells great flocks of storks came up from Egypt and devoured all of them. It was the first time thet these storks had been seen in Palestine in any considerable numbers for hundreds of years, so the people regarded it as actually providential.”
-Lowell Thomas
“With Allenby in Palestine” (1919)
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