THE ATTAS AT HOME 173 
Attas—the leaf-cutting ants of the British Gui- 
ana jungle. In front of me was a glade, about 
thirty feet across, devoid of green growth, and 
filled with a great irregular expanse of earth 
and mud. Relative to the height of the Attas, 
my six feet must seem a good half mile, and 
from this height I looked down and saw again 
the same inconceivably sticky clay of France. 
There were the rain-washed gullies, the half- 
roofed entrances to the vast underground for- 
tresses, clean-swept, perfect roads, as efficient as 
the arteries of Verdun, flapping dead leaves like 
the omnipresent, worn-out scare-crows of cam- 
ouflage, and over in one corner, to complete the 
simile, were a dozen shell-holes, the homes of 
voracious ant-lions, which, for passing insects, 
were unexploded mines, set at hair trigger. 
My Atta city was only two hundred feet away 
from the laboratory, in fairly high jungle, with- 
in sound of the dinner triangle, and of the lap- 
ping waves on the Mazaruni shore. To sit near 
by and concentrate solely upon the doings of 
these ant people, was as easy as watching a sin- 
gle circus ring of performing elephants, while 
two more rings, a maze of trapezes, a race track 
and side-shows were in full swing. The jungle 
