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The mysterious object at the bottom of the funnel suddenly springs up and shows itself it is the ant-lion in all its hideous proportions; and before the little ant can draw itself away, the other has flung around it a shower of sand that brings it rolling down the side of the pit.
My first attempt to "rush" Pornic up the steep sand-banks showed me that I had fallen into a trap exactly on the same model as that which the ant-lion sets for its prey. At each step the shifting sand poured down from above in tons, and rattled on the drip-boards of the holes like small shot.
For the same cause for which a molehill is like a cone, though a very rough one; and that the little heaps which the burrowing beetles make on the moor, or which the ant-lions in France make in the sand, are all something in the shape of a cone, with a hole like a crater in the middle. What the beetle and the ant-lion do on a very little scale, the steam inside the earth does on a great scale.
Doña Isidora and Leona had watched all the manoeuvres of the ant-lion with great interest, and Leona, after the bite she had had, was not in any mood to sympathise with the ants. Indeed, she felt rather grateful to the ant-lion, ugly as he was, for killing them.
"Sooner or later it must involve him in its airy meshes, eh, Squills? entrap him into its fatal cerebral cell. There his fate waits him, like the ant-lion in its pit." "Too true," quoth Squills. "What a phrenological lecturer you would have made!" "Go then, my love," said my father, "and lay no blame but on this melancholy cavity of mine, where cautiousness is not!
Those who, from 1802 till 1827, had merely laughed at the little man as they saw him trotting to Saint-Thibault and attending to his business, like a merchant living on his vineyards, found the answer to the riddle when the ant-lion seized his prey, after waiting for the day when the extravagance of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse culminated in the sale of that splendid property.
As the insect in the hollow snare of the ant-lion, she felt that there was no footing up the sides of the cave into which she had fallen; the sand gave way to the step. But despondency in her brought no meekness; the cloud did not descend in rain; resting over the horizon, its darkness was tinged with the fires which it fed.
I have already stated that many ants were crawling about. There were dozens of them "quatering" the ground in every direction in search of their own prey; and they left not an inch of it unsearched. At last one was seen to approach the trap of the ant-lion. Curiosity brings it to the very edge of that terrible pit-fall.
Another , which dances above the mountain streams in Oovah, and amongst the hills descending towards Kandy, gleams in the sun as if each of its green enamelled wings had been sliced from an emerald. The Ant-Lion. Of the ant-lion, whose larvæ have earned a bad renown from their predaceous ingenuity, Ceylon has, at least, four species, which seem peculiar to the island.
It flies but little during the day, and is usually found quietly sitting amongst the leaves of plants, and seems to be one of the most pacific and harmless of insects. How very different with the larva the very reverse See!" Doña Isidora pointed to the ant-lion that was just then beginning to bestir itself, and both sat silent regarding it attentively.
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