SAVED BY ANTS 
of a sudden. I could no longer remember in what coun¬ 
try I was travelling, nor could I remember anything dis¬ 
tinctly. Only some lucid intervals came every now and 
then, in which I realized our tragic position; but those 
did not last long, all I could remember being that I must 
go to the west. I could not remember why nor where 
I intended to come out. 
Everything seemed to be against us. We were there 
during the height of the rainy season. Towards sunset 
rain came down once more in bucketsful and lasted the 
entire night, the water dripping from our hammocks as 
it would from a small cascade. We were soaked and 
shivering, although the temperature was not low. I had 
my maximum and minimum thermometers with me, but 
my exhaustion was such that I had not the strength to 
unpack them every night and morning and set them. 
We crossed two streamlets flowing west. Benedicto 
and Filippe were in such a bad way that it was breaking 
my heart to look at them. Every time they fell down in 
a faint I never knew whether it was for the last time 
that they had closed their eyes. When I felt their hearts 
with my hand they beat so faintly that once or twice I 
really thought they were dead. That day I myself 
fainted and fell with the left side of my face resting on 
the ground. When I recovered consciousness some time 
later, I touched my face, which was hurting me, and 
found that nearly the whole skin of my cheek had been 
eaten up by small ants, the lower lid of the eye having 
suffered particularly. A nasty sore remained on my face 
for some two months after that experience, the bites of 
those ants being very poisonous. 
Bad as they were, there is no doubt that to a great 
extent we owed our salvation to those terrible ants. Had 
it not been for them and the incessant torture they in¬ 
flicted on us when we fell down, we should have lain there 
and perhaps never gotten up again. 
281 
