"It seemed that some one was calling to me in a whisper--'Sahib!
Sahib! Sahib!' exactly as my bearer used to call me in the mornings. I
fancied that I was delirious until a handful of sand fell at my
feet. Then I looked up and saw a head peering down into the
amphitheater--the head of Dunnoo, my dog-boy, who attended to my
collies. As soon as he had attracted my attention, he held up his hand
and showed a rope. I motioned, staggering to and fro the while, that
he should throw it down. It was a couple of leather punkah-ropes
knotted together, with a loop at one end. I slipped the loop over my
head and under my arms; heard Dunnoo urge something forward; was
conscious that I was being dragged, face downward, up the steep
sand-slope, and the next instant found myself choked and half-fainting
on the sand-hills overlooking the crater."
And then Mary broke in. We were lying in a sunny warm spot on an open
hillside a little way off the road, and I was reading aloud from a
favorite author.
"That is a fairy story," said Mary, "and I thought we were not going
to read any more fairy stories now that I am grown up."
Mary's idea of being grown up is to be more than three feet eleven
inches high and to have her hair no longer in two braids.
"Not exactly a fairy story," I replied. "For Kipling rather prefers
soldiers to fairies and machines to caps of invisibility. Of course,
though, he wrote the Mowgli stories."
"But those are not fairy stories," interrupted Mary. "Those were about
a real boy and real animals only a long way off and different from
ours."
"Ah-um, real? Well, perhaps; anyway, the Mowgli animals seem more real
than most real animals. But this story of the sand-pit and the man
sliding down into it and not being able to get out isn't impossible at
all. Only the other people down in the bottom seem a little unusual."
"No, there can't be any such place," said Mary positively, "and as
there can't be any such place, nobody could have slid into it or been
in the bottom, and so it is a fairy story. Any story that isn't so is
a fairy story."
"Well, that makes it easy to tell a fairy story from the other kinds,
and I never knew exactly how before. But I once saw a place much like
the sand-pit that Morrowbie Jukes slid into, or that Kipling says he
slid into. It is on the side of a great mountain in Oregon; Mt. Hood
its name is. I had climbed far above timber line, that is, above where
all the trees and bushes stop because it is too cold for them to live,
and there is only bare rocks and snow and ice, and had sat down to
rest near a great snowbank a mile long. As I looked back down the
mountain I saw a curious yellowish smoke rising in little puffs and
curls. I decided to find out about this smoke on my way down; perhaps
it was the beginning of a forest fire, and ought to be put out.
"Well, when I got to it there was no fire; the puffs and curls were
not smoke. It was a real Morrowbie Jukes pit; a great crater-like hole
in the mountain, with its side so steep that the loose volcanic sand
and rocks (for the whole mountain is an old volcano) kept slipping
down in little avalanches from which puffs and curls of fine yellow
dust kept rising and drifting lazily away. If I had made the mistake
of going too close to the edge, I should certainly have started one
of these avalanches and gone slipping and sliding, faster and faster,
to the very bottom, a thousand feet below."
"My!" said Mary; "and were there horrible people in the bottom, and
crows?"
"Well, really, Mary, I couldn't see on account of the dust-smoke."
"Of course there weren't, probably," said Mary thoughtfully and a
little wistfully.
"Probably not," I had to reply regretfully.
But a bright thought came to me. I remembered something. Several days
before I had tramped along this hillside road near which Mary and I
were lying and I had seen--well, just wait. So I said to Mary: "But I
know where there is a Morrowbie Jukes pit, several of them, indeed,
near here. Sha'n't we go and see them?"
"Why, of course," said Mary rather severely.
"Let us go galloping as Morrowbie Jukes did," said I. So we took hold
of hands and as soon as we got out of the chaparral, we went
galloping, hop, hop, hoppity, hop, down the road. I must confess that
I got out of breath pretty soon and my knees seemed to creak a little.
And when a swift motor-car came exploding by, going up the hill, all
the people stared and smiled to see an elderly gentleman with
spectacles and a long coat hop-hopping along with a yellow-haired
red-cheeked little girl in knee skirts. But we don't mind people much!
They simply don't know all the things that go with being happy.
Pretty soon--and it was high time, for I had only three breaths
left--we came to a place where the road bent sharply around the
hillside and was especially broad.
"Now, Mary," I said, "be careful and don't fall in. I'm afraid I
could not get you out."
"Fall in where? Get me out of what?" asked Mary, quite puzzled. She
was staring about excitedly, looking most of the time down into the
canon with its spiry redwood trees pushing far up from the bottom. And
then suddenly she saw. She flopped down on her hands and knees in the
warm sand by the roadside and cried out, "What funny little holes!"
"Why, Mary," I said with pained surprise. "You don't really mean to
call these awful Morrowbie Jukes pits 'funny little holes'! That isn't
fair after all we've done to find them. Especially after my galloping
all the way right to the very edge of this largest one."
As I spoke I pointed it out with the toe of my shoe, but inadvertently
filled it all up by poking a couple of tablespoonfuls of sand and dust
into it. But size is quite a relative matter, and for the tiny
creatures with whom Mary and I have to deal, the little crater-like
holes in the sand of the roadside are large and dangerous pits. We
sprawled down on our stomachs among the pits to see what we could see.
Mary saw first. Ah, those bright eyes! My spectacles are rather in the
way out-of-doors, I find. But if I keep on getting younger--and I
certainly am younger since I got acquainted with Mary--I shall be able
soon to leave them at home in my study when I go out to see things.
Mary, then, saw first. What she saw were two very small shining,
brown, gently curved, sharp-pointed, sickle-like jaws sticking up out
of the loose sand in the very bottom of one of the pits. They moved
once, these curved and pointed jaws, and that movement caught Mary's
eye.
"It's the dragon of the pit," I cried. "Dig him out!"
So Mary dug him out. He was very spry and had a strong tendency to
shuffle backwards down into the hiding sand. But it takes a keen
dragon to get away from Mary, and this one wasn't and didn't.
He was an ugly little brute, squat and hump-backed, with sand sticking
to his thinly haired body. But he was fierce-looking for all his
diminutiveness. Remember again that whether a thing is big or little
to you depends on whether you are big or little. This dragon of the
sand-pit was little to us. He is terribly big to the ants.
When Mary got him out and had put him down on the sand near the pit,
he trotted about very actively but always backwards. He seems to have
got so used to pulling backwards against the frantic struggles of his
prey to get up and out of the pit, that he can now only move that way.
After we watched him a while, we "collected" him; that is, put him
into a bottle, with some sand, to take home and see if we could keep
him in our room of live things. Then we turned our attention to
another crater. It was about three inches across at the top and about
two inches deep; a symmetrical little broad-mouthed funnel with the
loose sand-slopes just as steep as they could be. The slightest
disturbance, a touch with a pencil-point for example, would start
little sand avalanches down the slopes anywhere. It is, of course,
easy to see how this horrible pit-trap works. And, in fact, in the
very next moment we saw actually how it did work.
A foraging brown ant that was running swiftly over the ground plunged
squarely over the verge of the crater before she could stop. She
certainly tried hard to stop when once over, but it was too late.
Slipping and sliding with the rolling sand-grains, down she went right
toward those waiting scimitar-like jaws.
Now, these jaws deserve a word of description. Because, horrible as
they may seem to the unfortunate ants, they are so well arranged for
their particular purpose that they must attract our admiration. The
dragon of the pit, ant-lion he is usually called, has no open, yawning
mouth behind those projecting jaws, as might be expected. Indeed there
is no mouth at all, just a throat, thirsty for ant blood! The slender
scimitar jaws have each a groove on the concave inner side, and down
this groove runs the blood of the struggling victim, held impaled on
the sharp points of the curving mandibles. The two fine grooves lead
directly into the throat, and thus there is no need of open mouth with
lips and tongue, such as other insects have.
"But see," cried Mary, "the ant has stopped sliding. It is going to
get out!"
Ah, Mary, you are not making allowance for all the resources of this
dreadful dragon of the pit. Not only is the pit a nearly perfect trap,
and the eager jaws at the bottom more deadly than any array of spikes
or spears at the bottom of an elephant pit, but there is another most
effective thing about this fatal dragon's trap, and that is this: it
is not merely a passive trap, but an active one. Already it is in
action. And Mary sees now how hopeless it is with the ant. For a
shower of sand is being thrown up from the bottom of the pit against
the ant and it is again sliding down. The dragon has a flat, broad
head and powerful neck muscles, and has wit enough to shovel up and
hurl masses of dry sand-grains against the victim on the loose slopes.
And this starts the avalanche again, and so down slides the frantic
ant.
What follows is too painful for Mary and me to watch and certainly too
cruel to describe. But one must live, and why not ant-lions as well as
ants? If truth must be told, many ants have as cruel habits and as
bloodthirsty tastes as the ant-dragon. Indeed, more cruel and
revolting habits. For ants have a gastronomic fondness for the babies
of other ants, which is a fondness quite different from that which
they ought to have. It means that they like these babies--to eat. Some
communities of ants, indeed, spend most of their time fighting other
communities just to rob them of their babies, which they carry off to
their own nests and use in horrible cannibalistic feasts.
Mary and I had seen enough of the Morrowbie Jukes pits. So we went
back to our little open sunny spot in the chaparral on the hillside
and lay quiet and silent for a long time. Then Mary murmured, "I
wonder how the ant-lion digs its pit."
"I can tell you, Mary," I replied. "For a man who once saw one digging
told me. It is this way: First he makes a circular groove the full
circumference of the top of the pit. Then he burrows into the sand
inside of the groove and piles sand-grains on top of his flat, horny,
shovel-like head with his fore feet. This sand he tosses over the
groove so that it will fall outside. He works his way all around the
groove, doing this over and over, and then makes another groove inside
the first, and digs up and tosses the sand out as before. And so on,
groove after groove, each inside the one made before, thus gradually
making a conical pit with the sides as steep as the loose sand will
lie. The pit must always be made in a dry sandy spot, and is usually
located in a warm sunny place at the foot of a large rock. This man
said that it is easy to get the ant-lions to dig pits in boxes of sand
in the house, and so we can try with our 'collected' fellow."
Mary was silent some moments. Then she said softly, "But how will he
get anything to eat?"
"Why," said I, "of course we can give him--" Mary looked up at me in a
special way she has. I go on, more slowly, but still without very
much hesitation: "But, of course, we sha'n't do that, shall we?"