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 Cicodoma 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 fragment 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 whirlwind 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 CEcodoma, 
but the splendid civilization of the children of the 
sun, albeit 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 hundréds of 
