In some ways the grasshoppers were worse, for they were their own wind, and a living dust, a dust winged, each grain with a chewing mouth. God had breathed life into clay again, and was distributing it differently this time—by means of sky—over the whole earth. The dust howled and hissed, or otherwise moved with a harsh shush, but the grasshoppers had a dry whirr and rustle, a toy chirp, a click almost mechanical, a stridulation which became a scream. This was new speech; this was greed made manifest and multiplied like man, greed given a body appropriate to it, with long hind-leaping legs and feet, motive wings, tireless jaws, and no nervous tics about food. They would eat the fur from cats, some said. And so they came in wide flat covering clouds, in enormous flooding sheets—millions and millions of swallowing mouths. I never saw a cyclone clean the ground as they could clean it. Fields went up in minutes—as though in flames, in smokeless hunger. Where they settled down the land seethed. Streets rained their color (a yellow brown green), sidewalks crawled, your feet could not avoid them, so wherever you went (and you went nowhere if possible) you heard and dimly felt the crunch of soft shells. They were often packed so closely, clambering over one another (you would also find them stacked sometimes like plates), they seemed one monstrous animal with exposed cells, a model made to please, instruct, amaze, and thoroughly mislead the third grade; a scientific demonstration of the wee workers of the body, all those hidden inner bees, each with that small but vital task he carried out so faithfully. This was an illusion, for within the mass, movement was a matter of chance. They did not carry water for one another. There was no surrender of powers, and they composed no true Leviathan. Vast and protean, unimaginably hungry, obeying simple principles of want and motion, one supposed, somewhat as Hobbes had dreamed, the swarm was nevertheless a monster of chaos, Führerless. The understanding had to resort to Planmantee’s stats and calculations concerning chance. There were simply too many for life to have any individual importance; each one was utterly careless of it, and supremely unintelligent. They had only two aims: to feed and breed; and they relied on numbers to make up for their stupidity. Don’t tell me mere addition can’t accomplish qualitative change, it can—with frightening ease. They came out of Canada, some said, from the slopes of the Rockies; others muttered darkly: Asia. But this was the pure, the primeval horde. The Great Khan certainly could not have loosed it. Still, I was constantly compelled to see them as versions of us, just as the dust was a version: Nature representing on its several planes the same serene and universal forms by means of massive, blind and automatic spasms. I’d recently returned from my first visit to Germany then, in a thoroughly Nazi mood, bewildering my friends with my talk, and I clearly remember reflecting, as watched the hoppers browse: there are more of these grass-chewing jaws in Iowa than there are Jews in Germany.