I left them struggling there, and half an hour later, when I returned, the episode was just coming to a climax. My Atta hero was exerting his last strength, flinging off the pile that assaulted him, fighting all the easier because of the loss of his heavy body. He lurched forward, dragging the second giant, now dead, not toward the deserted trail or the world of jungle around him, but headlong into the lines of stupid leaf-carriers, scattering green leaves and flower-petals in all directions. Only when dozens of ants threw themselves upon him, many of them biting each other in their wild confusion, did he rear up for the last time, and, with the whole mob, rolled down into the yawning mouth of the Atta nesting-hole, disappearing from view, and carrying with him all those hurrying up the steep sides. It was a great battle. I was breathing fast with sympathy, and whatever his cause, I was on his side.
The next day both giants were lying on the old, disused trail; the revolt against absolute democracy was over; ten thousand ants passed to and fro without a dissenting thought, or any thought, and the Spirit of the Attas was content.
Clambering through white, pasty mud which stuck to our boots by the pound, peering through bitter cold mist which seemed but a thinner skim of mud, drenched by flurries of icy drops shaken from the atmosphere by a passing moan and a crash, breathing air heavy with a sweet, horrible, penetrating odor--such was the world as it existed for an hour one night, while I and the Commandant of _Douaumont_ wandered about completely lost, on the top of his own fort. We finally stumbled on the little 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.