& 



140 Idle Days in Patagonia. 



wonderful ant story. Well, I have smiled too, and 

 cried a little, perhaps, when, witnessing one of these 

 " decisive battles of the world," I have thought that 

 the stable civilization of the CEcodoma ants will 

 probably continue to flourish on the earth when our 

 feverish dream of progress has ceased to vex it. 

 Does that notion seem very fantastical ? Might 

 not such a thought have crossed the mind of some 

 priestly Peruvian, idly watching the labours of a 

 colony of leaf-cutters — a thousand years ago, let us 

 say, before the canker had entered into his system 

 to make it, long ere the Spaniard came, ripe for 

 death ? History preserves one brief fi'agment which 

 goes to show that the Incas themselves were not 

 altogether enslaved by the sublime traditions they 

 taught the vulgar ; that they also possessed, like 

 philosophic moderns, some conception of that im- 

 placable power of nature which orders all things, 

 and is above Viracocha and Pachacamac and the 

 majestic gods that rode the Avhirlwind and tempest, 

 and had their thrones on the everlasting peaks of 

 the Andes. Five or six centuries have probably 

 made little change in the economy of the QEcodoma, 

 but the splendid civilization of the children of the 

 sun, all^eit it bore on the face of it the impress of 

 unchangeableness and endless duration, has vanished 

 utterly from the earth. 



To return from this digression. The nest I have 

 discovered is more populous than London, and there 

 are several roads diverging from it, each one four 

 or five inches wide, and winding away hundreds of 



