Activity Where Cursing Is Expected Crosswords

"Get me a drink, lass, " Stephen then said, and she set a bottle of whiskey by him. Margaret had been on the farm for three years now. The earth seemed to be moving, with locusts crawling everywhere; she could not see the lands at all, so thick was the swarm. Her heart ached for him; he looked so tired, the worry lines deep from nose to mouth. It sounded like a heavy storm.

• Activity where cursing is expected crossword answer
• Activity where cursing is expected crossword answers
• What does cursing mean
• What is cursing mean

Activity Where Cursing Is Expected Crossword Answer

It might go on for three or four years. What does cursing mean. The locusts were flopping against her, and she brushed them off—heavy red-brown creatures, looking at her with their beady, old men's eyes while they clung to her with their hard, serrated legs. Insects, swarms of them—horrible! Out came the servants from the kitchen. Stephen impatiently waited while Margaret filled one petrol tin with tea—hot, sweet, and orange-colored—and another with water.

Activity Where Cursing Is Expected Crossword Answers

Toward the mountains, it was like looking into driving rain; even as she watched, the sun was blotted out with a fresh onrush of the insects. Up came old Stephen again—crunching locusts underfoot with every step, locusts clinging all over him—cursing and swearing, banging with his old hat at the air. She kept the fires stoked and filled tins with liquid, and then it was four in the afternoon and the locusts had been pouring across overhead for a couple of hours. You ever seen a hopper swarm on the march? The men were her husband, Richard, and old Stephen, Richard's father, who was a farmer from way back, and these two might argue for hours over whether the rains were ruinous or just ordinarily exasperating. What is cursing mean. Beautiful it was, with the sky on fair days like blue and brilliant halls of air, and the bright-green folds and hollows of country beneath, and the mountains lying sharp and bare twenty miles off, beyond the rivers. There it was even more like being in a heavy storm.

Quick, get your fires started! Then, although for the last three hours he had been fighting locusts, squashing locusts, yelling at locusts, and sweeping them in great mounds into the fires to burn, he nevertheless took this one to the door and carefully threw it out to join its fellows, as if he would rather not harm a hair of its head. "We're finished, Margaret, finished! " "The main swarm isn't settling. The men were throwing wet leaves onto the fires to make the smoke acrid and black. And she noticed that for all Richard's and Stephen's complaints, they did not go bankrupt.

What Does Cursing Mean

And then there are the hoppers. At the doorway, he stopped briefly, hastily pulling at the clinging insects and throwing them off, and then he plunged into the locust-free living room. She held her breath with disgust and ran through the door into the house again. Their farm was three thousand acres on the ridges that rise up toward the Zambezi escarpment—high, dry, wind-swept country, cold and dusty in winter, but now, in the wet months, steamy with the heat that rose in wet, soft waves off miles of green foliage. In the meantime, thought Margaret, her husband was out in the pelting storm of insects, banging the gong, feeding the fires with leaves, while the insects clung all over him. But the gongs were still beating, the men still shouting, and Margaret asked, "Why do you go on with it, then? A tree down the slope leaned over slowly and settled heavily to the ground. "All the crops finished. We'll all three have to go back to town. Nor did they get very rich; they jogged along, doing comfortably. When she looked out, all the trees were queer and still, clotted with insects, their boughs weighted to the ground. But it's only early afternoon. He lifted up a locust that had got itself somehow into his pocket, and held it in the air by one leg. She might even get to letting locusts settle on her, in time.

Their crop was maize. It was like the darkness of a veldt fire, when the air gets thick with smoke and the sunlight comes down distorted—a thick, hot orange. Asked Margaret fearfully, and the old man said emphatically, "We're finished. And then: "Get the kettle going. Now she was a proper farmer's wife, in sensible shoes and a solid skirt. Overhead, the air was thick—locusts everywhere.

What Is Cursing Mean

He looked at her disapprovingly. From down on the lands came the beating and banging and clanging of a hundred petrol tins and bits of metal. The locusts were coming fast. But at this she took a quick look at Stephen, the old man who had farmed forty years in this country and been bankrupt twice before, and she knew nothing would make him go and become a clerk in the city. The telephone was ringing—neighbors to say, Quick, quick, here come the locusts! She felt suitably humble, just as she had when Richard brought her to the farm after their marriage and Stephen first took a good look at her city self—hair waved and golden, nails red and pointed.

This comforted Margaret; all at once, she felt irrationally cheered. Behind the reddish veils in front, which were the advance guard of the swarm, the main swarm showed in dense black clouds, reaching almost to the sun itself. "Imagine that multiplied by millions. Now there was a long, low cloud advancing, rust-colored still, swelling forward and out as she looked. Margaret sat down helplessly and thought, Well, if it's the end, it's the end. Margaret looked out and saw the air dark with a crisscross of the insects, and she set her teeth and ran out into it; what the men could do, she could. But Richard and the old man had raised their eyes and were looking up over the nearest mountaintop. If we can make enough smoke, make enough noise till the sun goes down, they'll settle somewhere else, perhaps. " So that evening, when Richard said, "The government is sending out warnings that locusts are expected, coming down from the breeding grounds up north, " her instinct was to look about her at the trees. The sky made her eyes ache; she was not used to it. He picked a stray locust off his shirt and split it down with his thumbnail; it was clotted inside with eggs. In the meantime, he told her about how, twenty years back, he had been eaten out, made bankrupt by the locust armies. When the government warnings came, piles of wood and grass had been prepared in every cultivated field.

So Margaret went to the kitchen and stoked up the fire and boiled the water. Soon they had all come up to the house, and Richard and old Stephen were giving them orders: Hurry, hurry, hurry. One does not look so much at the sky in the city. Here were the first of them. If we can stop the main body settling on our farm, that's everything. Old Stephen yelled at the houseboy. Now half the sky was darkened. The cookboy ran to beat the rusty plowshare, banging from a tree branch, that was used to summon the laborers at moments of crisis. They are looking for a place to settle and lay. Everywhere, fifty miles over the countryside, the smoke was rising from a myriad of fires. The air was darkening—a strange darkness, for the sun was blazing. The houseboy ran off to the store to collect tin cans—any old bits of metal.

But they went on with the work of the farm just as usual, until one day, when they were coming up the road to the homestead for the midday break, old Stephen stopped, raised his finger, and pointed. Margaret supplied them. There were seven patches of bared, cultivated soil, where the new mealies were just showing, making a film of bright green over the rich dark red, and around each patch now drifted up thick clouds of smoke. The iron roof was reverberating, and the clamor of beaten iron from the lands was like thunder. Over the rocky levels of the mountain was a streak of rust-colored air. Outside, the light on the earth was now a pale, thin yellow darkened with moving shadow; the clouds of moving insects alternately thickened and lightened, like driving rain. Now on the tin roof of the kitchen she could hear the thuds and bangs of falling locusts, or a scratching slither as one skidded down the tin slope.