Page:Amazing Stories Volume 10 Number 13.djvu/108

106 "It's to be expected," chirped Corker, "that a structure which has made nothing of the erosians of the ages; which has stood unchanged while seas have become mountains and mountains seas, disregarding inconceivable pressure, ignoring fiery heat and bitter cold, shrugging aside the elements as they altered the face of earth; it's to be expected that such a structure won’t be bothered by a bit of a blow-up under its bottom."

His pedantic and stilted language irritated me, who am a simple-spoken man despite my intellectual achievements ; and I answered sharply, "Leave such piddling nonsense to the verse writers, Corker. This termite nest is no more of Tertiary origin than I am."

"And well you may be, from the looks of you," rejoined Corker. "As to the ant-hill, I've called in a chemist from Zurich to analyze it; for if one thing's more sure than another in this world, it’s that no cellulose has gone into the cement of those walls."

With this statement I was forced to agree, though unavowedly, for I myself had found the material unexampled in my previous observations. It gave every appearance of mineral, though of a nature unfamiliar to me. My diamond ring, which I took as security the one time in my life I was foolish enough to sign a fellow professor's note, scratched its surface with the greatest difficulty.

Nor was Schmidt of Zurich, for all his big words and wisely nodding head, much better informed.

"You half here," he said, folding his pudgy hands over his paunch as he stared up at the ant-hill, "gombound gombosed of garbon, alzo oggzygen, alzo other elemends undetermined. Vier Tagen ve must for dedermination of the gemmigal formula have."

We did not want the chemical formula, as I told him in no uncertain terms; the sum and substance of our desire was for an acid that would dissolve the walls, permitting access to the interior. This he promised to procure for us; and, somewhat to my surprise, he was as good as his word.

HE termitarium and the bodies of its last inmates varied little from what I had expected. For a reason imperceptible to me, they had sealed off their exits and entrances; but this aberration may have been caused by attacks from any one of a thousand insect tribes that failed to survive the Miocene period. Since the nest was composed entirely of excretion, my principal wonder was at their ability to digest a metal as hard as this must have been in its original state. My incredulity regarding the age of the find was wearing thin.

The termites themselves were slightly larger than those now extant, and in the antennae of mature males and females I counted as many as twenty-seven beaded joints. Their bodies partook in lesser degree of the walls' lightness and impermeability. The soldiers and workers had compound rounded eyes, indicating that, unlike modern termites, they were adults rather than modified larvae. Apart from these eccentricities, the type was one I knew by heart, from its tri-segmented thorax and nine-segmented abdomen to the four joints of its tarsi.

(An elaborate description of Termitidae and of the maze of runways composing their home has been omitted. Professor Whitehead takes