o
attention to them. I wondered if they were not quite odorless,
intangible to the ants, invisible guests which lived close to them,
going where, doing what they willed, yet never perceived by the
thousands of inhabitants. They seemed to live in a kind of fourth
dimensional state, a realm comparable to that which we people with
ghosts and spirits. It was a most uncanny, altogether absorbing,
intensely interesting relationship; and sometimes, when I ponder on
some general aspect of the great jungle,--a forest of greenheart, a
mighty rushing river, a crashing, blasting thunderstorm,--my mind
suddenly reverts by way of contrast to the tiny ghosts of springtails
flitting silently among the terrible living chambers of the army ants.

On the following morning I expected to achieve still greater intimacy
in the lives of the mummy soldier embryos; but at dawn every trace of
nesting swarm, larvae, pupae and soldiers was gone. A few dead workers
were being already carried off by small ants which never would have
dared approach them in life. A big blue morpho butterfly flapped
slowly past out of the jungle, and in its wake came the distant
notes--high and sharp--of the white-fronted antbirds; and I knew that
the legionaries were again abroad, radiating on their silent, dynamic
paths of life from some new temporary nest deep in the jungle.

IV

A JUNGLE BEACH

A jungle moon first showed me my beach. For a week I had looked at it
in blazing sunlight, walked across it, even sat on it in the intervals
of getting wonted to the new laboratory; yet I had not perceived it.
Colonel Roosevelt once said to me that he would rather perceive things
from the point of view of a field-mouse, than be a human being and
merely see them. And in my case it was when I could no longer see the
beach that I began to discern its significance.

This British Guiana beach, just in front of my Kartabo bungalow, was
remarkably diversified, and in a few steps, or strokes of a paddle, I
could pass from clean sand to mangroves and muckamucka swamp, thence
to out-jutting rocks, and on to the Edge of the World, all within a
distance of a hundred yards. For a time my beach walks resulted in
inarticulate reaction. After months in the blindfolded canyons of New
York's streets, a hemicircle of horizon, a hemisphere of sky, and a
vast expanse of open water lent itself neither to calm appraisal nor
to impromptu cuff-notes.

It was recalled to my mind that t