such showers the ground was hollowed
out, the plains were changed to lakes, the streams to torrents, the
rivers, overflowing, inundated vast territories. In temperate zones
the violence of the storms decreases according to their duration; but
in Africa, however heavy they are, they continue for several entire
days. How can so much electricity be collected in the clouds? How
can such quantities of vapor be accumulated? It is very difficult to
comprehend this. However, such are the facts, and one might suppose
himself transported to the extraordinary epochs of the diluvian
period.

Fortunately, the ant-cone, with its thick walls, was perfectly
impervious. A beaver's hut, of well-beaten earth, could not have been
more water-tight. A torrent could have passed over it without a single
drop of water filtering through its pores.

As soon as Dick Sand and his companions had taken possession of the
cone they occupied themselves in examining its interior arrangement.
The lantern was lighted, and the ant-hill was sufficiently
illuminated. This cone, which measured twelve feet in height inside,
was eleven feet wide, except in its upper part, which rounded in the
form of a sugar loaf. Everywhere the walls were about one foot in
thickness, and there was a distance between the stories of cells which
adorned them.

We may be astonished at the construction of such monuments, due to
these industrious swarms of insects, but it is true that they are
frequently found in the interior of Africa. Smeathman, a Dutch
traveler of the last century, with four of his companions, occupied
the top of one of these cones. In the Lounde, Livingstone observed
several of these ant-hills, built of reddish clay, and attaining a
height of fifteen and twenty feet. Lieutenant Cameron has many a time
mistaken for a camp these collections of cones which dotted the plain
in N'yangwe. He has even stopped at the foot of great edifices, not
more than twenty feet high, but composed of forty or fifty enormous
rounded cones, flanked with bell-towers like the dome of a cathedral,
such as Southern Africa possesses.

To what species of ant was due, then, the prodigious style of
architecture of these cones?

"To the warlike termite," Cousin Benedict had replied, without
hesitating, as soon as he had recognized the nature of the materials
employed in their construction.

And, in fact, the walls, as has been said, were made of reddish clay.
Had they been formed of a