Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 144.djvu/94

88 From ants to flies is a natural transition as the eyes are lifted from the ground, and of flies it may be said that in all their varieties they are at least as omnipresent in India as elsewhere in the world. The house-fly and the blue-bottle are here beforehand, to renew with greater vigour and in larger reinforcements the easier campaigns you have fought with them in Europe. The house-fly in his thousands is at some seasons, and in some provinces, so serious a plague that he richly merits here a few words of anathema. The irritation which he causes is due less to any acts of aggression, or even to his unknown wanderings, than to his stupidity. With less conscience even than a cat, and armed only with a facility of movement by which he can double more quickly than a hare, it is not from pluck, or patience, or intelligence, but from sheer blundering stupidity, that he returns to your face or hand or food, as often as he is driven away. "Curious" and "thirsty" he may be, but he is never really "busy." With no strange ways to wonder at, he is not even an object of curiosity; with no sting to provoke anger, it seems almost murder to kill so harmless a thing; yet are there few heavier burdens added to the exhaustion of an Indian climate than the presence of this everlasting "bore." Other flies, however, there are, which are far more deadly enemies of man and brute. The sand-fly, whom closest curtains cannot shut out; the eye-fly, which dances ever a tiny speck before your eyes; the gad-fly, which drives your horse to distraction, and yourself into a fever, as you ride in the sultry heat, – these are the scourge of certain regions in India, but are happily not universal.

But there is harmless beauty, too, among Indian flies. None of all the insects can rival the inexplicable beauty of the firefly – the innocent brown thing with shelly wings covering a body which glows and throbs with bright flashes of soft phosphoric light.

It is only by accident that the firefly ever wanders into the house, but he is a familiar friend in every garden, where on still nights he will transform every shrub into a living Christmas-tree.

There is a common little fly of graceful shape, whose green and gold attract the eye in the sunshine like a diamond. There are brown wasp-like flies which build curious nests of mud in the corners of your room; brilliant talc-winged dragon-flies, and slim flies of steely blue which bore in wood. One of these lately bored his nest in my writing-table, just above my knees. When the punkah was not moving he could go in and out as he pleased; but when the punkah was pulled, the wind made it difficult for him to approach his nest, and it was a pretty sight to watch the beautiful blue thing tacking and struggling, like a cutter sailing up into the wind, till he made good his footing at a distance, and crept round to the nest.

The terrors of the Indian hornet are well enough known, and it is not long since the newspapers told of men stung to death by hornets in the jungles of the Central Provinces.

Wasps, too, are common throughout India; but the Indian wasp is a disappointing creature, without any of the beauté du diable of the wasp of our childhood, of which he seems to be but a dreamy image. Instead of the compact active creature we know so well, of brilliant yellow and black, the Indian wasp is long and thin of body, of a uniform pale-brownish