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Updated: May 7, 2025
The busily trampling cohorts in sack-coats and derby hats were, from here, subdued by distance to an aesthetic inoffensiveness of mere ant-like comings and goings.
A red and unclouded sun setting into a purple ocean looked with a fiery stare upon the enormous wall of the Cordilleras, worthy witnesses of his glorious extinction. But it is inconceivable that it should have seen the ant-like men busy with their absurd and insignificant trials of killing and dying for reasons that, apart from being generally childish, were also imperfectly understood.
When a youngling he had been impressed with the words of Solomon, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard, observe her ways and be wise," in conformity to which he had ever been of a restless, ant-like turn; hurrying hither and thither, nobody knew why or wherefore, busying himself about small matters with an air of great importance and anxiety, and toiling at a grain of mustard-seed in the full conviction that he was moving a mountain.
In our ant-like efforts to attain to some idea of the nature of this transcendent reality, let us next avail ourselves of the help afforded by the artist and the man of genius, too troubled by the flesh for perfect clarity of vision, too troubled by the spirit not to attempt to render or record the Pisgah-glimpses of the world-order now and then vouchsafed.
Ahead, the forest, starting again, showed as a black band a quarter of an inch high. Behind, the forest he had already left lay dwarfed in a ruled, serried line. But that was not all. Something was moving out upon the spotless plain of snow, something which appeared to be no more than crawling, ant-like, but was really traveling very fast.
We could see swarms of black things, seething with ant-like activity amid a phantasmagoria of colours, draperies, curtains, flashes of white linen, streaks of red and yellow meat gallant with rosettes and garlands, instantaneous, glistening vistas of gold, silver and crystal, warm reflections of mahogany and walnut; on the pavements an agglutinated yet moving mass by the shop fronts, the inner stream a garish pink ribbon of faces, the outer a herd of subfuse brown.
Brown ant-like creatures, white maggot-like creatures, of several shapes and sizes, were hurrying up and down, as busy as human beings in Cheapside. They were Termites, 'white ants' of which of the many species I know not and the lump above was their nest.
Twice he saw them cross over ridges. Then a tiny, swift-moving speck came into his field of view, traveling up the slope of a distant divide. The ant-like rider dipped over the crest of it and was gone. "He's more than five miles in the lead of them," he said. "Across rough country too.
If only, like the Maltese, they would talk less and do more in certain respects, the "comite du peuplement" might close its doors. But such recklessness would ill comport with the ant-like hiving quality which paid back, within I forget how few years, the German war indemnity.
It took quite half a bottle of champagne to pull us up to our usual spirits, as we sat at supper at a window where we could see London spread out beneath us like a huge black velvet flower, dotted with fiery embroideries, sudden flaring stamens, and rows of ant-like fireflies moving in slow zig-zag processions along and across its petals.
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