Country Diary: Peloponnese, Greece

Bug-eyed, its squat, half-egg abdomen like a rattlesnake's tail, and its long wings with tea-coloured veins like a diaphanous tent over the body, the cicada looks straight out of a Gothic horror. Yet its physical movements are so clumsy that you can't help but smile. It whizzes through the air like tiny spacecraft on a mission, but if disturbed from its arboreal perch, it crashes noisily through the surrounding foliage before charging drunkenly away. Several times the escaping bugs struck me by accident, one catching me smack on the forehead.

Who could believe such a shambling brute could produce such a divine song; a song to die for, or, perhaps, to die to. The male's organ of sound, lying at the base of the abdomen, is an area of cuticle known as a tymbal that can vibrate at 4,500 cycles a second. The noise it yields - a deep, insistent, throbbing buzz - is before everything a song of the sun. It lasts 13 hours, from 8am to nightfall.

Just after dawn as the hard, white Greek sunlight fires down, each cicada tunes up, linking its song to its neighbour's like synapses in a waking brain, until the whole Earth is alive. By mid-morning everywhere is submerged beneath the drone. It's hard to imagine that it could be produced by insects. It's as if the baked Greek soil or its eternal cloak of kiln-fired olive trees were humming to the sun. By midday it has acquired a menacing claustrophobic power. Could one possibly drown in sound?

When Ulysses finally made Ithaca he could only sit and endure the cicadas. Not even Zeus and his family could defeat them. As they went about their meddling in the affairs of man, I imagine them merely leaving god-sized cavities in the song of the cicada.