However, when
the advancing column had recovered from its confusion it formed up,
and, wheeling round in most regular order, fell behind the rear-guard
of the working column, and before dark not an ant remained outside
except a dead body.
Soon after the last of its living comrades had disappeared, six ants,
with a red one (dare I say?) "in command," came out and seemed to hold
a somewhat fussy consultation round the corpse which had fallen on the
line of march to the stump. After a minute or two, three of them got
hold of it, and with the other four as spectators or mourners, they
dragged it for about six feet and concealed it under a leaf, after
which they returned home; all this was most fascinating. A little later
Captain Murray destroyed both entrances to the town, but before
daylight, by dint of extraordinary labor, they were reconstructed lower
down the slope, and the work at the stump was going on as if nothing so
unprecedented had happened.
I should have liked also to study the ways of the white ant, the great
timber-destroying pest of this country, which abounds on this hill. He
is a large ant of a pale buff color. Up the trunk of a tree he builds
a tunnel of sand, held together by a viscid secretion, and under this
he works, cutting a deep groove in the wood, and always extending the
tunnel upward.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 225 of 437
Words from 61795 to 62044
of 120530
