When Locusts abound, the natives become quite fat, and would even reward any old lady who would say that she had coaxed them to alight within reach of the inhabitants.
Mr. Moffat thinks the Locust not bad food, and, when well fed, almost as good as shrimps.[412]
The plan of gathering Locusts by night is occasionally attended with danger. "It has happened that in gathering them people have been bitten by venomous reptiles. On one occasion a woman had been traveling for several miles with a large bundle of Locusts on her head, when a serpent, which had been put into the sack with them, found its way out. The woman, supposing it to be a thong dangling about her shoulders, laid hold of it with her hand, and, feeling that it was alive, instantly precipitated the bundle to the ground and fled."[413]
Pringle, in his song of the wild Bushman, has the following lines:
Yea, even the wasting Locust-swarm, Which mighty nations dread, To me nor terror brings nor harm; I make of them my bread.[414]
Flights of Locusts are considered so much of a blessing in South Africa, that, as Dr. Livingstone states, the _rain_-doctors sometimes promised to bring them by their incantations.[415]
Carsten Niebuhr says that all Arabians, whether living in their own country or in Persia, Syria, and Africa, are accustomed to eat Locusts. They distinguish several species of insect, to which they give particular names. The red Locust, which is esteemed fatter and more succulent than any other, and accordingly the greatest delicacy, they call _Muken_; another is called _Dubbe_, but they abstain from it because it has a tendency to produce diarrhoea. A light-colored Locust, as well as the Muken, is eaten.
In Arabia, Locusts, when caught, are put in bags, or on strings, to be dried; in Barbary, they are boiled, and then dried upon the roofs of the houses. The Bedouins of Egypt roast them alive, and devour them with the utmost voracity. Niebuhr says he saw no instance of unwholesomeness in this article of food; but Mr. Forskal was told it had a tendency to thicken the blood and bring on melancholy habits. The former gentleman also says the Jews in Arabia are convinced that the fowls, of which the Israelites ate so largely of in the desert, were only clouds of Locusts, and laugh at our translators, who have supposed that they found quails where quails never were.[416]