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Updated: May 7, 2025
Jim saw the sun blotted out swiftly, saw a huge, pinkish-gray wall swoop down between him and Denny, and the deadly horde of termites pursuing them. Then he saw another pinkish-gray wall, in which was set something a shallow, regular, hollowed plateau that looked familiar. The patty-dish in which he and Denny had been carried to this place of death and horror.
The termites did not customarily follow these practises. Yet yet the odor coming from the place before them certainly suggested ... But he tried to thrust such apprehensions from his thoughts. They entered the chamber. The two gigantic soldiers stopped on the threshold behind them and took up their standard guard attitudes. The men stared about them....
This is what hundreds of leaf-cutting ants accomplish daily, when cutting leaves from a tall bush, at the foot of the bank near the laboratory. The Army Ants are carnivorous, predatory, militant nomads; the Termites are vegetarian scavengers, sedentary, negative and provincial; the Attas, or leaf-cutting ants, are vegetarians, active and dominant, and in many ways the most interesting of all.
Like Man, they possess a language which enables them to combine their efforts, and there is no human industry in which these insects have not arrived at a high degree of perfection. If in certain parts of the earth human societies are superior to those of Ants, in many others the civilisation of Ants is notably superior. No village of Kaffirs can be compared to a palace of the Termites.
It is highly probable that the termites are endowed with some such faculty: nor is it more remarkable that an insect should combine the gases of its food to produce water, than that a fish should decompose water in order to provide itself with gas. FOURCROIX found the contents of the air-bladder in a carp to be pure nitrogen. Yarrell, vol. i. p. 42.
Whether Jim's guess that it was only a temporary bond was correct, or whether it had been developed to harden relentlessly only over unyielding surfaces of horn such as the termites' deadliest enemy, the ants, wear for armor, will never be known. But in a matter of moments it became apparent that it was going to prove too brittle to continue clamping flesh as elastic as that of the two humans!
These vehicles, which have no counterparts nowadays, had something distorted and hunchbacked about them; and when one saw them passing in the distance, and climbing up some road to the horizon, they resembled the insects which are called, I think, termites, and which, though with but little corselet, drag a great train behind them. But they travelled at a very rapid rate.
David said that the manides are very inoffensive animals; that they live solely on ants and termites. They burrow to a great depth in the ground. For this, as also for extracting their food from ant-hills and decayed wood, we found that the creature's feet were armed with powerful claws, which it could double up when walking.
The anaconda is equally dangerous to those sleeping near the river's edge; while the cunning and savage alligator lies in wait for the unwary bather or drawer of water who ventures into the stream; and termites and ants devour the stores of the inhabitants, and, in certain localities, well-nigh sting them to madness.
I have traced their arcades, occasionally, for a distance of one or two hundred yards; the grains of earth are taken from the soil over which the column is passing, and are fitted together without cement. It is this last-mentioned feature that distinguishes them from the similar covered roads made by Termites, who use their glutinous saliva to cement the grains together.
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