of this little fraternity, by realization of its temporal brevity. Three
weeks after I first discovered the glade, I returned in late afternoon
and waited silently. For a time I feared that the mariposal friendship
was a thing of the past. But a few minutes before five the first
Red-spot fluttered by, in and out among the twigs and leaves, as one
slips an aeroplane through openings in drifting clouds. One by one, from
all directions, the rest followed, until I counted twelve, twenty,
thirty-four. Many of the twigs were now vacant, and most of the
heliconias were tattered and forlorn, just able to keep at their
fluttering level. There was something infinitely pathetic in this little
company, which in less than a month had become so out at elbow, so aged,
with death close ahead, yet with all their remaining strength making
their way from north and from south, from dense and from open jungle,
to keep tryst for this silent, somnolent communion. I rose quietly and
passed carefully from the glade, disturbing none of the paper-thin
silhouettes, so like the foliage in outward seeming, yet so individual,
each perhaps with dim dreams of flowers and little meetings and wind
tossings; certainly with small adventures awaiting their awakening on
the morrow, and a very certain kismet such a short way ahead.
Two weeks after this, only three butterflies came to the glade, one
newly painted, freshly emerged, the other two old and tattered and very
weary.
I loitered on my homeward way and before I reached Kalacoon found myself
in the Convict Trail in full moonlight. At one turn of the path a
peculiar tinkling reached my ear. It was a veritable silver wire of
sound--so high, so tenuous that one had to think as well as listen to
keep it in audible focus. I pushed through a growth of cecropias and at
once lost the sound never to hear it again, but in its place there
appeared a very wonderful thing--a good-sized tree standing alone and
exposed, bathed in full moonlight, and yet gleaming, as brightly as if
silhouetted against complete darkness, by the greenish light of
numberless fireflies. After the first marvel of the sudden sight, I
approached and pulled down a branch and counted twenty-six glowing
insects, as close together as the blossoms on a Japanese cherry branch.
There were hundreds upon hundreds, all clustered together in candelabred
glory, hidden from the view of all, at the farther side of this dense
thicket. As I left I remembered with gratitude the silver wire of sound
which had guided me, and in a far corner of my mind I stored a new
memory--one which I could draw upon at need in distant times of pain, or
of intolerance or perhaps in some lull of battle--the thought of a tree
all aglow with living flames, in the moonlight of the Convict Trail.
IX
WITH ARMY ANTS "SOMEWHERE" IN THE JUNGLE
Pit number five had become a shambles. Number five was one of the series
of holes dug along the Convict Trail to entrap unwary walkers of the
night--walkers or hoppers, for frogs and toads of strange tropical sorts
were the most frequent victims. It was dug wide and deep on the slope of
an ancient dune of pure white sand, a dune deep hidden in the Guiana
jungle, which had not heard the rush and slither of breaking waves for
centuries untold. All around this quiet glade was an almost pure culture
of young cecropia trees. Day after day the pit had entrapped big
beetles, rarely a mouse of some unknown species, more frequently a frog.
Now I stood on the brim, shocked at an unexpected sight. A horde of
those Huns of the jungle, army ants, had made their drive directly
across the glade, and scores of fleeing insects and other creatures had
fallen headlong into this deep pit. From my man's height it was a
dreadful encounter, but squatting near the edge it became even more
terrible; and when I flattened myself on the sand and began to
distinguish individuals and perceive the details from an ant's point of
view, I realized the full horror and irresistibility of an assault by
these ants.
One is not strongly affected by the dying struggles of a single
grasshopper captured by a cuckoo or flycatcher. An individual roach
being torn to pieces moves one but slightly. A batrachian, however, has
more claim on our emotions, and my sympathy went out to a small,
sandy-white frog who was making a brave fight for his life. The pit was
alive with a host of the army ants, and wherever the little frog hopped,
some soldier or heavy-jawed worker soon found him and sank jaws into his
soft skin. With frantic scratching the frog would brush it off and leap
again, only to be again attacked. The most horrible thing about these
ants is their leaping ability. The hop of a bird or the jump of a toad
when going about their usual business of life, if we think of it at all,
is only amusing. But the sudden leap of a bulldog or tarantula, and the
corresponding vicious attack of these ants, is particularly appalling. I
saw a soldier leap a full inch and a half toward the landing thud of the
frog and bite and sting at the instant of contact. I did not dare go
into the pit. No warm-blooded creature could have stood the torture for
more than a few seconds. So I opened my umbrella and reaching down,
scooped up the sand-colored frog. A half-dozen ants came up in the same
instrument, but I evaded them and tied up the tormented batrachian in my
handkerchief.
My next glance into the pit showed a large toad, squatted on a small
shelf of sand, close to the edge of a crowded column of ants. He was a
rough old-chap, covered with warts and corrugations, and pigmented in
dark gray, with mottlings of chocolate and dull red and occasional
glints of gold. He was crouched flat, with all his fingers and toes
tucked in beneath him. His head was drawn in, his eyes closed, and all
his exposed surface was sticky with his acid perspiration--the sweat of
fear. He knew his danger--of that there was no doubt--and he was
apparently aware of the fact that he could not escape. Resignedly he
had settled on the very line of traffic of the deadly foe, after
intrenching himself and summoning to his aid all the defenses with which
nature had endowed him. And he was winning out--the first vertebrate I
have ever known to withstand the army ants. For a few minutes he would
be ignored and his sides would vibrate as he breathed with feverish
rapidity. Then two or three ants would run toward him, play upon him
with their antennae, and examine him suspiciously. During this time he
was immovable. Even when a soldier sank his mandibles deep into the
roughened skin and wrenched viciously, the toad never moved. He might
have been a parti-colored pebble embedded in its matrix of sand. Once,
when three bit him simultaneously, he winced, and the whitish, acrid
juice oozed from his pores. Usually the ants were content with merely
examining him. I left him when I saw that he was in no immediate danger.
One other creature was quiescent in the pit and yet lived: a big, brown,
hardbacked millipede. Like the frog, he fully realized his danger and
had sunk his bulk partly into the sand, bending down head and tail and
presenting only mailed segments. A mob of ants were trying vainly to
bite their way into this organic citadel.
For the dozens of grasshoppers, crickets, roaches, beetles, spiders,
ants, and harvest men, there was no escape. One daddy-long-legs did a
pitiful dance of death. Supported on his eight long legs, he stood high
out of reach of his assailants. He was balanced so exactly that the
instant a feeling antenna touched a leg, he would lift it out of reach.
Even when two or three were simultaneously threatened, he raised them,
and at one time stood perfectly balanced on four legs, the other four
waving in air. But his _kismet_ came with a concerted rush of half a
dozen ants, which overbore him, and in a fraction of time his body, with
two long legs trailing behind, was straddled by a small worker and borne
rapidly away.
I now flattened myself on an antless area at the edge of the pit and
studied the field of battle. In another half-hour the massacre was
almost over. Five double, and often quadruple, columns were formed up
the sandy cliffs, and the terrific labor of carrying out the dead
victims began. The pit was five feet deep, with perfectly straight
sides, which at the rim had been gutted by the rain, so that they
actually overhung. Yet the ants which had half-climbed, half-tumbled and
rolled their way to the bottom in the wake of their victims, now set
themselves to solving the problem of surmounting these cliffs of loose,
crumbling grains, dragging loads which, in most cases, were much heavier
than themselves. Imagine a gang of men set to carrying bundles of one to
two hundred pounds up perpendicular cliffs twelve hundred feet in
height, and the task of the army ants is made more vivid. So swiftly did
they work and so constantly shifted their formations and methods of
meeting and surmounting difficulties, that I felt as I used when looking
at a three-ring circus. I could perceive and record only a small part of
the ingenious devices and the mutual assistance and sharing of the
complicated conditions which arose at every step.
Among the frightened victims, even for those endowed with excellent
eyesight and powerful flight, there was only hopeless confusion and
blind terror. Instead of directing their flight upward, they drove from
side to side. Those whose leaps should have carried them out, simply
kicked out blindly and brought up against the sandy walls.
If leaf-cutting ants had been at work here, there would have been a
certain amount of cooperation. Certain ones would have cut leaves, other
individuals would have picked them up and transported them. But with the
army ants this mutual assistance was sublimated, developed to a
quintessence of excellence. If I, seated on the rim, overlooking the
whole, had been an all-powerful spirit, gifted with the ability to guide
by thought simultaneously all the ants within sight, such guidance could
not have bettered the cunning cooperation, the unexpectedly clever
anticipation of trouble, the marvelous singleness of purpose and
manifold effectiveness exhibited by these astounding creatures.
First, as to the personnel of the army ants. Roughly I divided them into
two categories, white-heads and black-heads. The latter were by far the
more numerous and, as a rule, were smaller, with less powerful jaws. But
this did not mean that the white-heads were all soldiers. Most of them
indeed were the hardest workers. Between the great extremes of size in
each of these two types, there seemed to exist only a difference of
degree. The smallest black-head laborers, only a little more than
one-fifth of an inch long, did their bit, flew like bull pups at any
prey which showed signs of life, and staggered bravely along with any
piece of loot which their short legs could straddle.
The white-heads, twice as large, were the strong men of the community,
putting all their activity into the labor, shouldering, pushing,
dragging, lifting, singly or in unison. These persons had powerful jaws,
but jaws which were stout and scissor-edged. The largest of the
white-heads were armed with reaping-hooks, long inwardly-pronged jaws,
curved like the tushes of ancient mammoths, too specialized for carrying
loads, but well adapted for defense of the most powerful character. Yet,
as we shall see, even these were not too proud to work, when occasion
demanded it. But their jaws were so enormous that they had to carry
themselves very erect, and they could not make quite as good time as the
other castes.
All had reddish brown abdomens, with darker thoraxes and white or black
heads. These heads bulged on each side like the domes of observatories.
Exactly in the center of each dome, looking like the jet-black head of
a tiny pin, was the single remaining facet of the eye, the degenerate
residue of the hundreds which were present in their ancestors, and which
the perfect males and females still possess and look through. Even this
single eye is a sham, for its optic nerve dies out before the brain
ganglion is reached; so we come to the astounding realization that these
ants are totally blind, and carry on all their activities through the
sense or senses residing in those marvelous quivering antennae. Here are
beings spending all their lives in ceaseless changing activities,
meeting and coping with constantly new conditions, yet wholly blind.
Their sense of smell dominates their judgment of substance, and the
moment an army ant reached my moccasin he sank jaws and sting deep into
the fabric as instinctively and instantly as when he executed the same
manoeuvers more effectively on my hand.
Keeping this handicap in mind, the achievements of these little
creatures assumed a still greater significance, and with renewed
interest and appreciation I again surveyed the scene in the amphitheater
before me. When the majority of the pit victims had been slain, the
process of carrying them up to the surface began. The hordes of
ravening ants resolved themselves, as I have said, into five distinct
columns of traffic which, inch by inch, fought for a footing up three of
the four sides.
Half of the bottom of the pit was a sort of flat table-land several
inches higher than the rest, and the first thing the ants did was to
carry all their booty to this steppe, in pieces or bodily, some of the
unfortunate creatures still protesting weakly as they were dragged
along. In fifteen minutes the lowest part of the pit bottom was
deserted, and after much hesitation I vaulted down and found a footing
reasonably safe from attack.
Two traffic columns had already reached the summit, and the others were
forging rapidly ahead. All used a similar method of advance. A group of
mixed castes led the way, acting as scouts, sappers, and miners. They
searched out every slope, every helpful step or shelf of sand. They took
advantage of every hurdle of white grass-roots as a welcome grip which
would bind the shifting sand grains. Now and then they had to cross a
bare, barren slope with no natural advantages. Behind them pressed a
motley throng, some still obsessed with the sapper instinct, widening
the trail, tumbling down loose, dangerous grains. Some bore the
first-fruits of victory, small ants and roaches which had been the first
to succumb. These were carried by one, or at most by two ants, usually
with the prey held in the jaws close beneath the body, the legs or
hinderpart trailing behind. In this straddling fashion the burden was
borne rapidly along, an opposite method from the overhead waving banners
of the leaf-cutters.
With these came a crowd of workers, both white and black-headed, and
soldiers, all empty-jawed, active, but taking no part in the actual
preparation of the trail. This second cohort or brigade had, it seemed
to me, the most remarkable functions of any of the ants which I saw
during my whole period of observation. They were the living implements
of trail-making, and their ultimate functions and distribution were so
astounding, so correlated, so synchronized with the activities of all
the others that it was difficult not to postulate an all-pervading
intelligence, to think of these hundreds and thousands of organisms as
other than corpuscles in a dynamic stream of life controlled by some
single, outside mind.
Here, then, were scores of ants scrambling up the steep uneven sides,
over ground which they had never explored, with unknown obstacles
confronting them at every step. To the eye they were ants of assorted
sizes, but as they advanced, numbers fell out here and there and
remained behind. This mob consisted of potential corduroy, rope-bridges,
props, hand-rails, lattices, screens, fillers, stiles, ladders, and
other unnamable adjuncts to the successful scaling of these apparently
impregnable cliffs. If a stratum of hard sand appeared, on which no
impression could be made, a line of ants strung themselves out, each
elaborately fixing himself fast by means of jaws and feet. From that
moment his feverish activity left him: he became a fixture, a single
unit of a swaying bridge over a chasm; a beam, an organic plank, over
which his fellows tramped by hundreds, some empty, some heavily laden.
If a sudden ascent had to be made, one ant joined himself to others to
form a hanging ladder, up which the columns climbed, partly braced
against the sandy wall.
At uncertain, unguarded turns a huge soldier would take up his station,
with as many functions and duties as a member of the Broadway traffic
squad. Stray, wandering ants would be set right by a single twiddle of
antennae; an over-burdened brother would be given a helping jaw and
assisted for some distance to the end of his beat. I was especially
interested in seeing, again and again, this willingness to help bear the
burdens. It showed the remains of an instinct, inhibited by
over-development, by ultra-specialization of fighting paraphernalia,
still active when opportunity gave it play. At the first hint, by sound
or smell, of danger, the big soldier whirled outward and, rearing high
on his legs, brandished his mighty blades in mid-air. Here was an ideal
pacifist, who could turn his sword into a plowshare at will, and yet
keep the former unsheathed for instant use.
When I watched more closely, I detected more delicate gradations of
mutual aid. At the same level in two columns of ascent, the same stratum
of hard sand was encountered. To one column the sand presented a rough
surface which gave good foothold. Here the single line of ants which was
ranged along the lower edge of the trail, in lieu of hand-rail, all
faced downward, so that the ants passing above them walked partly on
the abdomens and partly on the hind legs of their fellows. In the second
column, the surface of the sand was smooth, and here the burdened ants
found great difficulty in obtaining a foothold. In this instance the
supporting gang of ants faced upward, keeping their place solely by
their six sturdy legs. This left head and jaws free, and in almost every
case they helped the passage of the booty by a system of passing from
jaw to jaw, like a line of people handing buckets at a fire. The
rightful carriers gave up their loads temporarily and devoted their
attention to their own precarious footing.
I learned as much from the failures of this particular formation as from
its successes. Once a great segment of a wood-roach was too much for the
gallant line clinging to the sides of the pit, and the whole load broke
loose and rolled to the bottom. Of the hand-rail squad only two ants
remained. Yet in four minutes another line was formed of fresh
ants,--ants who had never been to the spot before,--and again the
traffic was uninterrupted. I saw one ant deliberately drop his burden,
letting it bounce and roll far down to the bottom of the pit, and
instantly take his place in the line of living guardrails. The former
constituents of the line had clung to the roach segment through all its
wild descent, and until it came to rest at the bottom. Without a
moment's pause, they all attacked it as if they thought it had come to
life, then seized it and began tugging it upward. In a fraction of time,
without signal or suggestion or order, the hand-rails had become
porters. The huge piece of provender had rolled close to an ascending
column on the opposite side of the pit, and up this new trail the
bearers started, pulling and pushing in unison, as if they had been
droghers and nothing else throughout the whole of their ant-existence.
One climax of mutual assistance occurred near the rim of the pit on a
level with my eyes, where one column passed over a surface which had
been undermined by heavy rain, and which actually overhung. I watched
the overcoming of this obstacle. All the ants which attempted to make
their way up at this point lost their footing and rolled headlong to the
bottom. By superformicine exertions a single small worker at last won a
path to the rim at the top. Around the edge of the pit innumerable ants
were constantly running, trying, on their part, to find a way down. The
single ant communicated at once with all which came past, and without
hesitation a mass of the insects formed at this spot and began to work
downward. This could be done only by clinging one to the other; but more
and more clambered down this living ladder, until it swayed far out over
the vastness of the pit, three inches in length. I had never lost sight
of the small worker, who had turned on his tracks and was now near the
bottom of the ladder, reaching wildly out for some support--ant, grass,
or sand. I was astonished to see that, as the length and consequent
weight of the dangling chain increased, the base support was
correspondingly strengthened. Ant after ant settled itself firmly on the
sand at the top, until a mat of insects had been formed, spread out like
animate guy-ropes.
At last the ultimate ant in the rope touched the upraised jaws of the
soldier far below. The contact acted like an electric shock. The
farthest ant in the guy-rope gang quivered with emotion, a crowd of ants
climbed down and another up, and bits of insect and spider prey began
to appear from the depths of the pit, over the living carpet suspended
from the brim. For an inch the droghers climbed over the bodies braced
against the cliff. Then, where the surface became smooth, the dangling
chain came into use. Before the rim of the pit was reached, the chain
had become a veritable hollow tube of ants, all with heads inward, and
through this organic shaft passed the host from the ascending column.
But it was far more than any mechanically built tube. When an extra
large piece of loot came up, the tube voluntarily enlarged, the swelling
passing along until the booty and its bearers emerged at the top.
Within five minutes after this last column was completed, there passed
over it, out of the pit, a daddy-long-legs with legs trailing, perhaps
the same one which I had seen in the tragic little dance of death. There
followed two silvery-gray ants, a wood-roach in two installments, part
of a small frog, three roaches, and two beetles. These latter gave a
great deal of trouble and tumbled down the cliff again and again.
When all the columns were established and the provision trains in full
movement, I leaped out and scouted round for the rest of the army. I
found that the pit was only an incident. In all directions lines of ants
poured past, carrying booty of all sizes and descriptions. Here and
there the huge soldiers walked slowly along the outskirts, directing
stragglers, looking for danger, snapping at any roach or strange ant
which rushed frantically by, and holding it until it was carried off by
nearby workers.
I followed a column over logs and leaves to where it ascended a cecropia
tree. A harvest of small arboreal insects was being gleaned high
overhead. As I watched, there came a heavy downpour of rain, a typical
shower of the tropics, with a scattering of heavy drops out of the full
sunshine and then a sudden clouding and a straight deluge for a few
minutes. The reaction of the ants was interesting. They did not like the
water, and it was comical to see them tumble over one another to get
under shelter. Like the doorways of city shops in a shower, every
curled-up leaf was packed, and from every crevice of bark projected
sundry abdomens and hind legs for which there was no room inside. When
the bearer of a large bag of booty found a convenient corner, he backed
into it and left his meat sticking out in the rain.
After the shower all came forth at full speed, but for some minutes
there was considerable confusion. The sluice of water had evidently
washed away much of the scent which stood for guide-posts, directing
signs, and pointing hands along the trail. Only after many false starts
were the old pathways discovered and again traversed. In one place the
ants climbed a huge log and marched along the top for six or seven
yards. I timed them carefully and found that on this straightaway track
their average speed was two and a half feet in ten seconds. So they
covered a mile in three hours and a half, and in all the army ants I
have ever watched this rate of speed never slackens; in fact, it
frequently greatly increases. When hot on the scent of prey they double
their usual gait.