ttle grated opening through which the lookout peered
unceasingly over the landscape of mud. The mist lifted and we
rediscovered the cave-like entrance, watched for a moment the ominous
golden dumb-bells rising from the premier ligne, scraped our boots on
a German helmet and went down again into the strangest sanctuary in
the world.

This was the vision which flashed through my mind as I began vigil at
an enormous nest of Attas--the leaf-cutting ants of the British
Guiana jungle. In front of me was a glade, about thirty feet across,
devoid of green growth, and filled with a great irregular expanse of
earth and mud. Relative to the height of the Attas, my six feet must
seem a good half mile, and from this height I looked down and saw
again the same inconceivably sticky clay of France. There were the
rain-washed gullies, the half-roofed entrances to the vast underground
fortresses, clean-swept, perfect roads, as efficient as the arteries
of Verdun, flapping dead leaves like the omnipresent, worn-out
scare-crows of camouflage, and over in one corner, to complete the
simile, were a dozen shell-holes, the homes of voracious ant-lions,
which, for passing insects, were unexploded mines, set at hair
trigger.

My Atta city was only two hundred feet away from the laboratory, in
fairly high jungle, within sound of the dinner triangle, and of the
lapping waves on the Mazaruni shore. To sit near by and concentrate
solely upon the doings of these ant people, was as easy as watching a
single circus ring of performing elephants, while two more rings, a
maze of trapezes, a race track and side-shows were in full swing. The
jungle around me teemed with interesting happenings and distracting
sights and sounds. The very last time I visited the nest and became
absorbed in a line of incoming ants, I heard the shrill squeaking of
an angry hummingbird overhead. I looked up, and there, ten feet above,
was a furry tamandua anteater slowly climbing a straight purpleheart
trunk, while around and around his head buzzed and swore the little
fury--a pinch of cinnamon feathers, ablaze with rage. The curved claws
of the unheeding anteater fitted around the trunk and the strong
prehensile tail flattened against the bark, so that the creature
seemed to put forth no more exertion than if walking along a fallen
log. Now and then it stopped and daintily picked at a bit of termite
nest.

With such side-shows it was sometimes difficult to concentrate on the