rent and scraped fragments of a great beetle's shiny casing lay upon the
ground. A greater beetle had come upon the first and slain him. Burl was
looking upon the remains of the meal.
Three or four minims, little ants barely six inches long, foraged
industriously among the bits. A new ant city was to be formed and the
queen-ant lay hidden a half-mile away. These were the first hatchlings,
who would feed the larger ants on whom would fall the great work of the
ant-city. Burl ignored them, searching with his eyes for a spear or
weapon.
Behind him the clicking roar, the high-pitched stridulations of the
horde of army ants, rose in volume. Burl turned disgustedly away. The
best he could find in the way of a weapon was a fiercely toothed hind
leg. He picked it up, and an angry whine rose from the ground.
One of the black minims was working busily to detach a fragment of flesh
from the joint of the leg, and Burl had snatched the morsel from him.
The little creature was hardly half a foot in length, but it advanced
upon Burl, shrilling angrily. He struck it with the leg and crushed it.
Two of the other minims appeared, attracted by the noise the first had
made. Discovering the crushed body of their fellow, they unceremoniously
dismembered it and bore it away in triumph.
Burl went on, swinging the toothed limb in his hand. It made a fair
club, and Burl was accustomed to use stones to crush the juicy legs of
such giant crickets as his tribe sometimes came upon. He formed a
half-defined idea of a club. The sharp teeth of the thing in his hand
made him realize that a sidewise blow was better than a spearlike
thrust.
The sound behind him had become a distant whispering, high-pitched, and
growing nearer. The army ants swept over a mushroom forest, and the
yellow, umbrella-like growths swarmed with black creatures devouring the
substance on which they found a foothold.
A great bluebottle fly, shining with a metallic luster, reposed in an
ecstasy of feasting, sipping through its long proboscis the dark-colored
liquid that dripped slowly from a mushroom. Maggots filled the mushroom,
and exuded a solvent pepsin that liquefied the white firm "meat."
They fed upon this soup, this gruel, and a surplus dripped to the ground
below, where the bluebottle drank eagerly. Burl drew near, and struck.
The fly collapsed into a writhing heap. Burl stood over it for an
instant, pondering.
The army ants came nearer, down into a tiny valley, swarming into and
through a little brook over which Burl had leaped. Ants can remain under
water for a long time without drowning, so the small stream was but a
minor obstacle, though the current of water swept many of them off their
feet until they choked the brook-bed, and their comrades passed over
their struggling bodies dry-shod. They were no more than temporarily
annoyed, however, and presently crawled out to resume their march.
About a quarter of a mile to the left of Burl's line of march, and
perhaps a mile behind the spot where he stood over the dead bluebottle
fly, there was a stretch of an acre or more where the giant, rank
cabbages had so far resisted the encroachments of the ever present
mushrooms. The pale, cross-shaped flowers of the cabbages formed food
for many bees, and the leaves fed numberless grubs and worms, and
loud-voiced crickets which crouched about on the ground, munching busily
at the succulent green stuff. The army ants swept into the green area,
ceaselessly devouring all they came upon.
A terrific din arose. The crickets hurtled away in a rocketlike flight,
in a dark cloud of wildly beating wings. They shot aimlessly in any
direction, with the result that half, or more than half, fell in the
midst of the black tide of devouring insects and were seized as they
fell. They uttered terrible cries as they were being torn to bits.
Horrible inhuman screams reached Burl's ears.
A single such cry of agony would not have attracted Burl's attention--he
lived in the very atmosphere of tragedy--but the chorus of creatures in
torment made him look up. This was no minor horror. Wholesale slaughter
was going on. He peered anxiously in the direction of the sound.
A wild stretch of sickly yellow fungus, here and there interspersed with
a squat toadstool or a splash of vivid color where one of the many
"rusts" had found a foothold. To the left a group of awkward, misshapen
fungoids clustered in silent mockery of a forest of trees. There a mass
of faded green, where the giant cabbages stood.
With the true sun never shining upon them save through a blanket of
thick haze or heavy clouds, they were pallid things, but they were the
only green things Burl had seen. Their nodding white flowers with four
petals in the form of a cross glowed against the yellowish green leaves.
But as Burl gazed toward them, the green became slowly black.
From where he stood, Burl could see two or three great grubs in lazy
contentment, eating ceaselessly on the cabbages on which they rested.
Suddenly first one and then the other began to jerk spasmodically. Burl
saw that about each of them a tiny rim of black had clustered. Tiny
black motes milled over the green surfaces of the cabbages. The grubs
became black, the cabbages became black. Horrible contortions of the
writhing grubs told of the agonies they were enduring. Then a black wave
appeared at the further edge of the stretch of the sickly yellow fungus,
a glistening, living wave, that moved forward rapidly with the roar of
clickings and a persistent overtone of shrill stridulations.
The hair rose upon Burl's head. He knew what this was! He knew all too
well the meaning of that tide of shining bodies. With a gasp of terror,
all his intellectual preoccupations forgotten, he turned and fled in
ultimate panic. And the tide came slowly on after him.
* * * * *
He flung away the great mass of edible mushroom, but clung to his
sharp-toothed club desperately, and darted through the tangled aisles of
the little mushroom forest with a heedless disregard of the dangers that
might await him there. Flies buzzed about him loudly, huge creatures,
glittering with a metallic luster. Once he was struck upon the shoulder
by the body of one of them, and his skin was torn by the swiftly
vibrating wings of the insect, as long as Burl's hand.
Burl thrust it away and sped on. The oil with which he was partly
covered had turned rancid, now, and the odor attracted them,
connoisseurs of the fetid. They buzzed over his head, keeping pace even
with his headlong flight.
A heavy weight settled upon his head, and in a moment was doubled. Two
of the creatures had dropped upon his oily hair, to sip the rancid oil
through their disgusting proboscises. Burl shook them off with his hand
and ran madly on. His ears were keenly attuned to the sound of the army
ants behind him, and it grew but little farther away.
The clicking roar continued, but began to be overshadowed by the buzzing
of the flies. In Burl's time the flies had no great heaps of putrid
matter in which to lay their eggs. The ants--busy scavengers--carted
away the debris of the multitudinous tragedies of the insect world long
before it could acquire the gamey flavor beloved by the fly maggots.
Only in isolated spots were the flies really numerous, but there they
clustered in clouds that darkened the sky.
Such a buzzing, whirling cloud surrounded the madly running figure of
Burl. It seemed as though a miniature whirlwind kept pace with the
little pink-skinned man, a whirlwind composed of winged bodies and
multi-faceted eyes. He twirled his club before him, and almost every
stroke was interrupted by an impact against a thinly armoured body which
collapsed with a spurting of reddish liquid.
An agonizing pain as of a red-hot iron struck upon Burl's back. One of
the stinging flies had thrust its sharp-tipped proboscis into Burl's
flesh to suck the blood.
Burl uttered a cry and--ran full tilt into the thick stalk of a
blackened and draggled toadstool. There was a curious crackling as of
wet punk or brittle rotten wood. The toadstool collapsed upon itself
with a strange splashing sound. Many flies had laid their eggs in the
fungoid, and it was a teeming mass of corruption and ill-smelling
liquid.
With the crash of the toadstool's "head" upon the ground, it fell into a
dozen pieces, and the earth for yards around was spattered with a
stinking liquid in which tiny, headless maggots twitched convulsively.
The buzzing of the flies took on a note of satisfaction, and they
settled by hundreds about the edges of the ill-smelling pools, becoming
lost in the ecstacy of feasting while Burl staggered to his feet and
darted off again. This time he was but a minor attraction to the flies,
and but one or two came near him. From every direction they were
hurrying to the toadstool feast, to the banquet of horrible, liquefied
fungus that lay spread upon the ground.
Burl ran on. He passed beneath the wide-spreading leaves of a giant
cabbage. A great grasshopper crouched upon the ground, its tremendous
jaws crunching the rank vegetation voraciously. Half a dozen great worms
ate steadily from their resting-places among the leaves. One of them had
slung itself beneath an overhanging leaf--which would have thatched a
dozen homes for as many men--and was placidly anchoring itself in
preparation for the spinning of a cocoon in which to sleep the sleep of
metamorphosis.
A mile away, the great black tide of army ants was advancing
relentlessly. The great cabbage, the huge grasshopper, and all the
stupid caterpillars upon the wide leaves would soon be covered with the
tiny biting insects. The cabbage would be reduced to a chewed and
destroyed stump, the colossal, furry grubs would be torn into a myriad
mouthfuls and devoured by the black army ants, and the grasshopper would
strike out with terrific, unguided strength, crushing its assailants by
blows of its powerful hind legs and bites of its great jaws. But it
would die, making terrible sounds of torment as the vicious mandibles of
the army ants found crevices in its armour.
The clicking roar of the ants' advance overshadowed all other sounds,
now. Burl was running madly, breath coming in great gasps, his eyes wide
with panic. Alone of all the world about him, he knew the danger behind.
The insects he passed were going about their business with that
terrifying efficiency found only in the insect world.
* * * * *
There is something strangely daunting in the actions of an insect. It
moves so directly, with such uncanny precision, with such utter
indifference to anything but the end in view. Cannibalism is a rule,
almost without exception. The paralysis of prey, so it may remain alive
and fresh--though in agony--for weeks on end, is a common practice. The
eating piecemeal of still living victims is a matter of course.
Absolute mercilessness, utter callousness, incredible inhumanity beyond
anything known in the animal world is the natural and commonplace
practice of the insects. And these vast cruelties are performed by
armoured, machine-like creatures with an abstraction and a routine air
that suggests a horrible Nature behind them all.
Burl nearly stumbled upon a tragedy. He passed within a dozen yards of a
space where a female dung-beetle was devouring the mate whose honeymoon
had begun that same day and ended in that gruesome fashion. Hidden
behind a clump of mushrooms, a great yellow-banded spider was coyly
threatening a smaller male of her own species. He was discreetly ardent,
but if he won the favor of the gruesome creature he was wooing, he would
furnish an appetizing meal for her some time within twenty-four hours.
Burl's heart was pounding madly. The breath whistled in his
nostrils--and behind him, the wave of army ants was drawing nearer. They
came upon the feasting flies. Some took to the air and escaped, but
others were too engrossed in their delicious meal. The twitching little
maggots, stranded upon the earth by the scattering of their soupy broth,
were torn in pieces. The flies who were seized vanished into tiny maws.
The serried ranks of black insects went on.
The tiny clickings of their limbs, the perpetual challenges and
cross-challenges of crossed antennae, the stridulations of the
creatures, all combined to make a high-pitched but deafening din. Now
and then another sound pierced the noises made by the ants themselves. A
cricket, seized by a thousand tiny jaws, uttered cries of agony. The
shrill note of the crickets had grown deeply bass with the increase in
size of the organs that uttered it.
There was a strange contrast between the ground before the advancing
horde and that immediately behind it. Before, a busy world, teeming with
life. Butterflies floating overhead on lazy wings, grubs waxing fat and
huge upon the giant cabbages, crickets eating, great spiders sitting
quietly in their lairs waiting with invincible patience for prey to draw
near their trap doors or fall into their webs, colossal beetles
lumbering heavily through the mushroom forests, seeking food, making
love in monstrous, tragic fashion.
And behind the wide belt of army ants--chaos. The edible mushrooms gone.
The giant cabbages left as mere stumps of unappetizing pulp, the busy
life of the insect world completely wiped out save for the flying
creatures that fluttered helplessly over an utterly changed landscape.
Here and there little bands of stragglers moved busily over the denuded
earth, searching for some fragment of food that might conceivably have
been overlooked by the main body.
Burl was putting forth his last ounce of strength. His limbs trembled,
his breathing was agony, sweat stood out upon his forehead. He ran a
little, naked man with the disjointed fragment of a huge insect's limb
in his hand, running for his insignificant life, running as if his
continued existence among the million tragedies of that single day were
the purpose for which the whole of the universe had been created.
He sped across an open space a hundred yards across. A thicket of
beautifully golden mushrooms (_Agaricus caesareus_) barred his way.
Beyond the mushrooms a range of strangely colored hills began, purple
and green and black and gold, melting into each other, branching off
from each other, inextricably tangled.
They rose to a height of perhaps sixty or seventy feet, and above them a
little grayish haze had gathered. There seemed to be a layer of tenuous
vapor upon their surfaces, which slowly rose and coiled, and gathered
into a tiny cloudlet above their tips.
The hills, themselves, were but masses of fungus, mushrooms and fungoids
of every description, yeasts, "musts," and every form of fungus growth
which had grown within itself and about itself until this great mass of
strangely colored, spongy stuff had gathered in a mass that undulated
unevenly across the level earth for miles.
Burl burst through the golden thicket and attacked the ascent. His feet
sank into the spongy sides of the hillock. Panting, gasping, staggering
from exhaustion, he made his way up the top. He plunged into a little
valley on the farther side, up another slope. For perhaps ten minutes he
forced himself on, then collapsed. He lay, unable to move further, in a
little hollow, his sharp-toothed club still clasped in his hands. Above
him, a bright yellow butterfly with a thirty-foot spread of wing,
fluttered lightly.
He lay motionless, breathing in great gasps, his limbs stubbornly
refusing to lift him.
* * * * *
The sound of the army ants continued to grow near. At last, above the
crest of the last hillock he had surmounted, two tiny antennae appeared,
then the black glistening head of an army ant, the forerunner of its
horde. It moved deliberately forward, waving its antennae ceaselessly.
It made its way toward Burl, tiny clickings coming from the movements of
its limbs.
A little wisp of tenuous vapor swirled toward the ant, a wisp of the
same vapor that had gathered above the whole range of hills as a thin,
low cloud. It enveloped the insect--and the ant seemed to be attacked by
a strange convulsion. Its legs moved aimlessly. It threw itself
desperately about. If it had been an animal, Burl would have watched
with wondering eyes while it coughed and gasped, but it was an insect
breathing through air-holes in its abdomen. It writhed upon the spongy
fungus growth across which it had been moving.
Burl, lying in an exhausted, panting heap upon the purple mass of
fungus, was conscious of a strange sensation. His body felt strangely
warm. He knew nothing of fire or the heat of the sun, and the only
sensation of warmth he had ever known was that caused when the members
of his tribe had huddled together in their hiding place when the damp
chill of the night had touched their soft-skinned bodies. Then the heat
of their breaths and their bodies had kept out the chill.
This heat that Burl now felt was a hotter, fiercer heat. He moved his
body with a tremendous effort, and for a moment the fungus was cool and
soft beneath him. Then, slowly, the sensation of heat began again, and
increased until Burl's skin was red and inflamed from the irritation.
The thin and tenuous vapor, too, made Burl's lungs smart and his eyes
water. He was breathing in great, choking gasps, but the period of
rest--short as it was--had enabled him to rise and stagger on. He
crawled painfully to the top of the slope, and looked back.
The hill-crest on which he stood was higher than any of those he had
passed in his painful run, and he could see clearly the whole of the
purple range. Where he was, he was near the farther edge of the range,
which was here perhaps half a mile wide.
It was a ceaseless, undulating mass of hills and hollows, ridges and
spurs, all of them colored, purple and brown and golden-yellow, deepest
black and dingy white. And from the tips of most of the pointed hills
little wisps of vapor rose up.
A thin, dark cloud had gathered overhead. Burl could look to the right
and left, and see the hills fading into the distance, growing fainter as
the haze above them seemed to grow thicker. He saw, too, the advancing
cohorts of the army ants, creeping over the tangled mass of fungus
growth. They seemed to be feeding as they went, upon the fungus that had
gathered into these incredible monstrosities.
The hills were living. They were not upheavals of the ground, they were
festering heaps of insanely growing, festering mushrooms and fungus.
Upon most of them a purple mould had spread itself so that they seemed a
range of purple hills, but here and there patches of other vivid colors
showed, and there was a large hill whose whole side was a brilliant
golden hue. Another had tiny bright red spots of a strange and malignant
mushroom whose properties Burl did not know, scattered all over the
purple with which it was covered.
Burl leaned heavily upon his club and watched dully. He could run no
more. The army ants were spreading everywhere over the mass of fungus.
They would reach him soon.
Far to the right the vapor thickened. A column of smoke arose. What Burl
did not know and would never know was that far down in the interior of
that compressed mass of fungus, slow oxidization had been going on. The
temperature of the interior had been raised. In the darkness and the
dampness deep down in the hills, spontaneous combustion had begun.
Just as the vast piles of coal the railroad companies of thirty thousand
years before had gathered together sometimes began to burn fiercely in
their interiors, and just as the farmers' piles of damp straw suddenly
burst into fierce flames from no cause, so these huge piles of
tinder-like mushrooms had been burning slowly within themselves.
There had been no flames, because the surface remained intact and nearly
air-tight. But when the army ants began to tear at the edible surfaces
despite the heat they encountered, fresh air found its way to the
smouldering masses of fungus. The slow combustion became rapid
combustion. The dull heat became fierce flames. The slow trickle of thin
smoke became a huge column of thick, choking, acrid stuff that set the
army ants that breathed it into spasms of convulsive writhing.
From a dozen points the flames burst out. A dozen or more columns of
blinding smoke rose to the heavens. A pall of fume-laden smoke gathered
above the range of purple hills, while Burl watched apathetically. And
the serried ranks of army ants marched on to the widening furnaces that
awaited them.
They had recoiled from the river, because their instinct had warned
them. Thirty thousand years without danger from fire, however, had let
their racial fear of fire die out. They marched into the blazing
orifices they had opened in the hills, snapping with their mandibles at
the leaping flames, springing at the glowing tinder.
* * * * *
The blazing area widened, as the purple surface was undermined and fell
in. Burl watched the phenomenon without comprehension and even without
thankfulness. He stood, panting more and more slowly, breathing more and
more easily, until the glow from the approaching flames reddened his
skin and the acrid smoke made tears flow from his eyes.
Then he retreated slowly, leaning on his club and looking back. The
black wave of the army ants was sweeping into the fire, sweeping into
the incredible heat of that carbonized material burning with an open
flame. At last there were only the little bodies of stragglers from the
great ant-army, scurrying here and there over the ground their comrades
had denuded of all living things. The bodies of the main army had
vanished--burnt to crisp ashes in the furnace of the hills.
There had been agony in that flame, dreadful agony such as no man would
like to dwell upon. The insane courage of the ants, attacking with their
horny jaws the burning masses of fungus, rolling over and over with a
flaming missile clutched in their mandibles, sounding their shrill war
cry while cries of agony came from them--blinded, their antennae burnt
off, their lidless eyes scorched by the licking flames, yet going madly
forward on flaming feet to attack, ever attack this unknown and
unknowable enemy.
Burl made his way slowly over the hills. Twice he saw small bodies of
the army ants. They had passed between the widening surfaces their
comrades had opened, and they were feeding voraciously upon the hills
they trod on. Once Burl was spied, and a shrill war cry was sounded, but
he moved on, and the ants were busily eating. A single ant rushed toward
him. Burl brought down his club, and a writhing body remained to be
eaten later by its comrades when they came upon it.
Again night fell. The skies grew red in the west, though the sun did not
shine through the ever present cloud bank. Darkness spread across the
sky. Utter blackness fell over the whole mad world, save where the
luminous mushrooms shed their pale light upon the ground and fireflies
the length of Burl's arm shed their fitful gleams upon an earth of
fungus growths and monstrous insects.
Burl made his way across the range of mushroom hills, picking his path
with his large blue eyes whose pupils expanded to great size. Slowly,
from the sky, now a drop and then a drop, now a drop and then a drop,
the nightly rain that would continue until daybreak began.
Burl found the ground hard beneath his feet. He listened keenly for
sounds of danger. Something rustled heavily in a thicket of mushrooms a
hundred yards away. There were sounds of preening, and of delicate feet
placed lightly here and there upon the ground. Then the throbbing beat
of huge wings began suddenly, and a body took to the air.
A fierce, down-coming current of air smote Burl, and he looked upward in
time to catch the outline of a huge body--a moth--as it passed above
him. He turned to watch the line of its flight, and saw a strange glow
in the sky behind him. The mushroom hills were still burning.
He crouched beneath a squat toadstool and waited for the dawn, his club
held tightly in his hands, and his ears alert for any sound of danger.
The slow-dropping, sodden rain kept on. It fell with irregular, drumlike
beats upon the tough top of the toadstool under which he had taken
refuge.