Elephants in the Sky

For this first report I was reading a book written by Dennis L Siluk that is titled "The Tale of the Jumping Serpents of Bosnia". In this book there is a history that called my attention, its title is "Elephants in the Sky".

This tale relates a fantastic event that took place in the legendary city of Timbuktu, Mali; an event that unfortunately for the writer is not fiction. He starts his tale describing swarms of locust everywhere around his stopped car, a dark shadow covering the sky. His car had been slipping a wile before it couldn't work anymore so he had to pull it to one side of the road; some meters down the street, he saw three adolescents trying to beat these terrible hoppers, they were using their belts, forearms, hats and hands. Then one resorted to a stick that made him asked himself, would you use a stick? Under normal circumstances unimaginable, but in reality, in that moment, anything in ones hand that can reach out and swat the little beasts becomes possible. He say these beasts were dropping down like hail onto them from all sides, like the plagues in the days of Moses, they were in their hair, noses, ears, climbing up their pants legs, flying straight for their mouths.

He was just crouched forward to peer through the blinding storm of locust, with his heart beating two-hundred bangs a minute; it was a form of dying slowly; melting of the heart, you might say until you couldn't breathe, he say. He was breathing in the hot air in his rental jeep, it seemed to him he was recycling his own air, something that got worse at mid-afternoon; with all these hoppers, like little elephants on the hood, such as they knew he was trapped in the car; trying to eat his tires, trying to get into the jeep and eat him. Then, sitting behind the wheel, he'd calculate (in his head) the weight volume of these pests, it was like 5000 elephants dropping from the sky.

Because a friend had told him, he knew the best time to run away was early in the morning, when everything cools down, so at 2:00 AM an automatic clock in his head woke him up, it was dark out there. He took a flashlight and go out of the car to fix it, without making any sound he walked around and oppened the hood of the car, then he removed all the hoppers and their carcasses, cleaning the engine to make it works. Whereupon he took five gallon can of gasoline that then poured on the side of the road, finaly he lit the gasoline by throwing a match out of the window and hit the accelerator, going as fast as his jeep could go.