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Updated: June 22, 2025
The entomologist has laboured hard to show us that the insect has no voice, and that the "drowsy hum" is made by the wings; a fact which, being beyond all cavil, puts to the blush the old-world story of Plutarch, who tells us that when Terpander was playing upon the lyre, at the Olympic games, and had enraptured his audience to the highest pitch of enthusiasm a string of his instrument broke, and a cicada or grasshopper perched on the bridge supplied by its voice the loss of the string and saved the fame of the musician.
It was as if a hawk should carry a hen, or an eagle a turkey. I at once proceeded to dig for one of the hornets, and, after following his hole about three feet under the footpath and to the edge of the roadbed, succeeded in capturing him and recovering the cicada. The hornet weighed fifteen grains, and the cicada nineteen; but in bulk the cicada exceeded the hornet by more than half.
At break of day I was pacing up and down outside my door, when something fell from the nearest plane-tree with a shrill grating sound. I ran up and saw a Grasshopper gutting the belly of a struggling Cicada. In vain the victim buzzed and waved his limbs: the other did not let go, dipping her head right into the entrails and rooting them out by small mouthfuls.
It was a large morsel, and the mother seemed to have doubts of her chick's ability to dispose of it, for she stood near and watched its efforts with great solicitude. The young bird struggled valiantly with the cicada, but made no headway in swallowing it, when the mother took it from him and flew to the sidewalk, and proceeded to break and bruise it more thoroughly.
A little garden in the outskirts became familiar to me by daily use, and I see it still with its almond and pear trees, its trellised vines, the blue stars of its borage, and the pure whiteness of its lilies. A bird seizes a noisy cicada from a sunny leaf, and as it flies away the captive draws out one long scream of despair.
Despotism has its moments of secure tranquillity. Her reign seems like the hour which precedes the tempest, and whose silence enables the traveler, stretched upon the faded grass, to hear at a mile's distance, the song of the cicada.
How express the calm audacity of this pigmy, following closely after the colossus, step by step; several at once almost under the talons of the giant, which could crush them merely by treading on them? But the cicada respects them, or they would long ago have disappeared."
Meadows had driven home again long ago. Van Koppen intended to sail in the early hours of next morning. The bishop and Denis were likewise on the verge of departure. A break-up was at hand. Mr. Keith alone refused to budge. He was waiting for the first cicada whose strident call was due, he declared, in a week's time. Till then he proposed to remain on Nepenthe.
But suddenly there is a sound as of a cry of anguish, short and strident; it is the despairing lamentation of the cicada, surprised in repose by the green grasshopper, that ardent hunter of the night, which leaps upon the cicada, seizes it by the flank, and devours the contents of the stomach. After the orgy of music comes night and assassination.
The slope is fatal: who crosses the brink can no longer escape the murderer. Head first, the Cicada dives into the abyss, down which the spoiler drags her by successive jerks. She is drawn into the low-ceilinged tunnel. Here the wings cease to flutter, for lack of space. She reaches the knacker's cellar, at the end of the corridor.
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