THE WHITE ANTS. 



presently find it covered with an earthy crust. If you 

 scratch that off, you find underneath it a swarm of little 

 yellow animals, blind, bigheaded, armed with strong jaws, 

 and affording a most v/holesome and nourishing food for 

 young guinea-fowls. When uncovered, they manifest the 

 keenest distress, and rush into any shelter they can find. 



In the meantime everything that finds them, from the 

 black ant upwards, kills and eats them pro bono publico. It 

 is also known that these same creatures raise hills several 

 feet high, and in form like miniature 

 volcanoes, with the principal crater in 

 the middle, and a network of passages 

 all through, and that if you dig under 

 one of these hills you find an animal 

 as big as a sausage, and so fat that her 

 legs have long since been lifted off the 

 ground, and she cannot walk. Never- 

 theless, she seems quite contented, and 

 kills time by producing eggs, as some 

 one claims to have ascertained, at the 

 rate of 80,000 a day. Another point 

 on which we have attained certainty is that sometimes, 

 especially on a monsoon evening, the volcanoes are in 



13 



