Tiny armies march across the sands beside the Hargeisa-Berbera highway. The road is being freshly tarmacked, and over the summer it grew almost by the day. When traffic stalled around the construction roadblocks, a stationary glance at the bordering wilderness revealed the stuff of hallucination: a horizon of ravening specks, an invasion force of grasshoppers, off to feed on what remained of the desert’s vegetation.
