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At the foot of the kopje stood a clump of large trees under which we arranged ourselves. Another clump stood about twenty yards away. A pigeon cooed somewhere from the leaves in this second clump. It stopped at the disturbance we made, decided we were harmless and cooed on. It was a soft, somnolent, drugging sound, hypnotic, like the sound of cicadas, which - now that we were listening - we realized were shrilling everywhere about us. The noise of cicadas is like having malaria and being full of quinine, an insane incessant shrilling noise that seems to come out of the ear-drums. Soon one doesn't hear it, as one ceases to hear the fevered shrilling of quinine in the blood.
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, Panther Books Ltd., Great Britain, 1973, p.411-12.
TIME: October or November (the summertime) in the 1950's.
PLACE: the countryside of South Africa
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