THE TROPICAL REGIONS, 133 
terrible legions. Give them a ship of the line—what do I say? a 
town—to devour, and they charge at it with eager joy. In course 
of time they have excavated under Valentia, near Caraccas, vast 
* abysses and catacombs; the city is now literally suspended. <A few 
individuals of this voracious tribe, unfortunately transported to 
Rochelle, have set to work to eat up the place, and already more 
than one edifice trembles upon timbers which are only externally 
sound, and at the core are rotten. 
What would be the fate of a man given up to the insects? One 
dares not think of it. An unfortunate wretch, while intoxicated, 
fell down near a carcass. The insects which were devouring the 
dead could not distinguish from it the living; they took possession 
of his body, entered at every avenue, filled all the natural cavities. 
It was impossible to save him. He expired in the midst of frightful 
convulsions. 
In those lands of fire, where the rapidity of decomposition renders 
every corpse dangerous, where all death threatens life, these terrible 
accelerators of the disappearance of animal bodies multiply ad in- 
jinitum. A corpse scarcely touches the earth before it is seized, 
attacked, disorganized, dissected. Only the bones are left. Nature, 
endangered by her own fecundity, invites, stimulates, encourages 
them by the heat, by the irritation of a world of spices and acrid 
substances. She makes them furious hunters, insatiable gluttons. 
The tiger and the lion, compared with the vulture, are mild, sober, 
moderate creatures; but what is the vulture in the presence of an 
insect which, in four-and-twenty hours, consumes thrice its own 
weight ? 
Greece personified nature under the calm and noble image of 
Cybele chariot-drawn by lions. India dreams of her god Siva, the 
divinity of life and death, who incessantly winks his eye, never 
gazing fixedly, because his single glance would reduce all the worlds 
to dust. How weak these fancies of men in the presence of the 
reality! What avail their fictions before the burning centre where, 
by atoms or by seconds, life dies, is born, blazes, scintillates 
