IN FEATHERS AND FUR 109 
HOUSES A MILE HIGH. 
If a man should build a house of clay, a mile high, with no 
tool but his own hands, it would be thought a wonderful thing ; 
and yet it is no higher in proportion to his size, than the houses 
built by the White Ants. 
These Ants are curious creatures. They always work in the 
dark, and under cover ; and the first you know of their house, it 
rises out of the ground roof first, as you may say. They go on 
growing in size till they are seventeen or eighteen feet high, 
shaped like a sugar loaf, and covered all over with smaller mounds. 
The inside is full of rooms and passages, and yet so strongly 
is it built, that men and even cattle can stand on them with perfect 
safety. Even then these indomitable workers are not satisfied ; 
but they tunnel out long passages thirteen or fourteen inches high, 
to connect with other Ant-hills, or to look for food. 
Suppose our roads had all to be tunnels, and three hundred 
feet high. That is no bigger for us than the thirteen inches for 
the Ant. 
All this without one Ant getting into sight. You might have 
a dozen of these ant-hills in your yard, with millions of Ants, and 
never see one. 
The most curious thing about them, I think, is their taste for 
destroying wood and paper— and, in fact, anything they can 
destroy. They will tunnel under a house, eat out the inside of 
every beam and board of the floor, leaving walls no thicker than 
paper. They will bore through the floor into the legs of chairs 
and tables, eat out the inside of them, and the first one knows of 
it, the chair falls to pieces under him, or a flight of stairs crumbles 
into dust when stepped upon. 
I think one must feel very insecure in those countries. In 
one case that I read of, they got into some packages of valuable 
papers, and destroyed every particle except the top leaf of every 
bundle, and a thin wall of the margins, leaving just a paper box. 
Nof all these little creatures are workers. They keep a stand- 
ing arrry of fighters, who do nothing but fight; and very fierce 
