Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 144.djvu/92

86 without the protection of a can of water to isolate the cage.

It would be tedious to enumerate the varieties of ant with which in India one becomes quickly familiar, and all of which are alike too active and too inquisitive to be anything but a constant annoyance; but some separate notice is due to that strangest of his species, the white ant. An ant of ants, he is in many ways wholly unlike the common herd. Of all his kind the most destructive, there seems to attach to him something of the dignity of a superior caste. He does not belong to the restless, novelty-seeking races, which skirmish far and wide in small companies. He never runs across your hand or your writing-paper, or climbs aimlessly up your legs. Moving only in masses, he does not lightly invade any place, nor does he lightly leave the place he has invaded. Soberly and of set purpose he sits down before some rich treasure-house, whether of soft wood or paper, of cloth or leather, perceived from afar by that marvellously keen sense which seems common to every tribe of the species.

Unable to bear the light of day, he carries his approaches under covered trenches of mud, thrown up as he advances. These he is at no pains to conceal, so that his presence is at once betrayed and his dearest plans may be easily frustrated. But woe to the bookshelf, the wardrobe, or even the house-timbers to which he once gains access unobserved! His followers are legion; their weapons are sharp; and their energy is inexhaustible. In a single night the contents of shelf or box will be reduced to powder, and when the lid is lifted and the unwonted light betrays the scared and swarming thousands of the enemy, the work of destruction is done. "Destroyed by white ants," is an accepted explanation of the loss of official papers in India; and a defaulting cashier has been known to offer the same account even of missing bags of rupees.

There is one familiar scene for which the white ant is responsible, which is so characteristic of India that it cannot be passed over, and which carries us back for a moment to the source and origin of the white-ant horde. Deep down in the earth secure, like a toad in a flint, in a stony nest surrounded by a labyrinth of tunnelled passages, lies a huge misshapen insect, swollen to portentous size.

Hardly to be recognised for an ant, this monstrous creature is the queen-mother of a million children.

From this buried city go forth the legions of the white ant, and hence it is that, at one stage of his Buddha-like transmigrations, he takes flight to the upper air on new-found wings.

On some still evening the signal is given, and, specially equipped for the flight, the swarm issues from the earth in a living stream, dense almost as the smoke of a furnace, leaving for ever the dark galleries of their native home to soar for a few brief moments in infinite space. The soft unwieldy bodies are furnished with fairy wings, which bear them in happy innocence to their new inheritance. What fate awaits them, if the flight is near the homes of men, will be seen forthwith.

When the evening lamps are lighted, and the insects begin to stray in to the light, it is not without dismay that the first heralds of the swarm are seen. By twos and threes they flock in and flutter round lamp and candle. More helpless than other insects, they fall an easy sacrifice, as their wings,