THE ARMY ANTS’ HOME TOWN 77 
thing of mine, or any part of my anatomy which 
might come close enough, but otherwise stim- 
ulated to activity only when they came across a 
bit of rubbish from the nest high overhead. This 
was at once seized and carried off to one of two 
neat piles in far corners. Before night these 
kitchen middens were an inch or two deep and 
nearly a foot in length, composed, literally, of 
thousands of skins, wings, and insect armor. 
There was not a scrap of dirt of any kind which 
had not been gathered into one of the two piles. 
The nest was nine feet above the floor, a distance 
(magnifying ant height to our own) of nearly 
a mile, and yet the care lavished on the cleanli- 
ness of the earth so far below was as thorough 
and well done as the actual provisioning of the 
colony. 
As I watched the columns and the swarm-nest 
hour after hour, several things impressed me;— 
the absolute silence in which the ants worked ;— 
such ceaseless activity without sound one asso- 
ciates only with a cinema film; all around me 
was tremendous energy, marvelous feats of 
achievement, super-human instincts, the ceaseless 
movement of tens of thousands of legionaries; 
yet no tramp of feet, no shouts, no curses, no 
