Читать книгу Consider Her Ways - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 9

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The first notice I received of the presence of man in these parts came from reports given by Assa-ree; it consisted in no more than a casual mention of the fact that a small colony, comprising some 500 individuals, was located on a bold cliff overjutting the sea.

I commissioned Assa-ree to reconnoitre; and her second report was more detailed. The colony consisted of a number of dusky individuals whose integuments were scanty and bright in colour. They were given to rapid and incomprehensible chatterings resembling those of monkeys in our native woods. I had a curious suspicion that these chatterings might conceivably represent their method of communication; for the widely attested fact of a social life, with its division of labour, presupposed some such power. Among these darker men lived one individual differing markedly from the others, both in colour of facial skin and in integuments. The latter Assa-ree described as pure white in colour and fine in texture, apart from his hind-feet which were encased in an ectoskeleton of bright brown and of considerable hardness. He--it was a male--must have occupied a leading position among the rest; for a number of the dusky individuals seemed to wait on him much as certain adult workers of ours wait on Her Majesty. His abode consisted of a number of lofty and spacious chambers one of which contained large cases of a transparent, rock-like substance filled with glittering, uncanny-looking things of unknown purpose.

These reports inspired me with a desire to see for myself. We knew from former investigations that man's communities are often vastly more numerous; I reasoned, therefore, that this was an opportunity to study him individually, unconfused by numbers.

I had Assa-ree conduct me to the abode of this curious individual. All her observations were confirmed, and at least one was added: among the darker individuals waiting upon him was one who, with regard to the rest (most of them females), occupied a position of intermediate authority. His integuments closely resembled those of the master, consisting of white, fine-textured tissues which covered all but his head, his hands, and his feet; and in one point he was unique: he had two pairs of eyes, one of them being external and consisting of the same transparent, rock-like substance as the mysterious cases of the chamber.

As luck would have it, Assa-ree and I entered this man's abode at a moment when a dusky female came to call on the master. To our amazement, the master, ordering the assistant about in a most peremptory manner, placed the female in a peculiar position in an ingeniously constructed seat and looked into her mouth. From his behaviour I was inclined to think that he was going to osculate or to regurgitate; but suddenly he inserted a claw of his fore-foot into the open mouth of the female and shouted something to his assistant. The latter opened one of the transparent cases and took from it a sinister-looking piece of apparatus² closely resembling such tongs as certain aquatic members of the Articulata exhibit in our own country. This piece of apparatus he handed to the master who brutally thrust it into the mouth of the female, seized with it one of the bony plates used for mastication, and, with a powerful wrench, pulled it out, the female giving a pitiful groan. Profoundly stirred by the suffering of the victim of this brutality, I gave Assa-ree the signal of retreat; and we made our exit.

² Whenever dealing with man, Wawa-quee's consciousness became purely visual and was transferred to me in that form. I recognised this "piece of apparatus", of course, as the sort of tongs or forceps used by dentists to extract teeth. Whenever such a case arises in which I understand what the ant does not, I shall, in what follows, use italics. E.

Returned to our temporary dwelling, I shut myself up in the queen's chamber. I will not dwell on my feelings but merely give the results of my analysis of the facts. He whom I have called the master had clearly enslaved the one whom I have called the assistant, as well as the other members of his clan. It was not a case of co-operation such as exists among ants. What the nature and method of this enslavement might be remained unexplained; in physical power the slave was manifestly superior to his master. But he was of a different variety of the species man; his racial relation to the master was approximately that of ourselves to the Œcodomas, or the reverse. It was hard to say which; for now the one, now the other of these two seemed the less civilized.

It will perhaps be best simply to relate what happened next and to let the curious draw their own conclusions. I will frankly own that I was little inclined to pursue my studies in this particular abode of man; and I should have left well enough alone had I not been forcibly carried back there.

I made up my mind to take Bissa-tee, the zoologist, into my confidence. As far as Assa-ree was concerned, I had no intention of letting her look too deeply into my thoughts and secrets. I knew her to be at heart impatient of my control; and I knew it to be impossible for her to appreciate my motives. Care for my personal safety was dictated, of course, not by fear for myself, but by my solicitude for the fate of the whole expedition the success of which depended on the preservation of that unity of direction which centred in myself. I have too often shown that death holds no terror for me to have to give a cheap exhibition of courage when discretion is clearly indicated by the circumstances.

Bissa-tee was one of those big, magnificent, and boisterous ants who will rap their thorax with one antenna while they touch yours with the other, and who will breeze in and out of a chamber with a hearty nod; so that everyone mistakes them for commonplace ants and thinks she knows all about them because they seem to carry their heart upon the anterior joint. I knew that all this was mere pretence and that she knew excellently well, as her name, too, signifies, how to keep her own counsel. That was the reason why we were friends.

In order to make sure that we could not be spied upon, I led her far from our temporary abode. I took a north-east path which led close to the wide and open clearing that surrounded the human village.

But I had hardly begun to explain my perplexities when I was interrupted. We found we were not alone in this margin of the forest. The ground shook with the rapid and ponderous tread of some large animal, presumably a mammal. Both Bissa-tee and myself instantly ceased from all motion and stood rigid, every muscle taut. And then, what was my horror when I espied the very assistant of the master man jumping about close by under the trees, bending over and reaching for things on the ground! My first impulse was to hide; but the second impulse was of curiosity. And this second impulse, which I followed, seemed, for the moment, to prove our undoing; for suddenly the man was right upon us.

To our amazement, he reached for us, not with the long, slender toes of his fore-feet, but with a pair of tongs. Before I knew what was happening, he had grasped me by my pedicel (of all places to catch an ant: the pedicel!), lifted me and dropped me into a hollow cylinder of the rock-like, transparent substance repeatedly mentioned. Bissa-tee promptly followed me; and, to our horror, we found ourselves confined with a score or two of huge Eciton Hamatum, our worst enemies. The fear of the Eciton is so inbred in us Attas, I presume, that, faced with them, we are capable of exertions which under ordinary circumstances would be beyond our powers. Both Bissa-tee and myself were, a moment later, clinging to the rough paper cover of the cylinder. Ordinarily such a leap of at least fourteen antlengths would have been impossible to any Atta. Yet the imprisoned Ecitons were themselves too bewildered to pay the slightest attention to us.

Meanwhile our bearer was wildly shaking us up and down: apparently he was running in his clumsy human way, using only his hind-feet.

Before we had had time to reflect, he had removed the cover from the cylinder and was shaking us out on a flat white surface of extraordinary smoothness. There, Bissa-tee and myself, together with fifty Ecitons, were instantly rushing about in the wildest confusion. The surface was circular and surrounded by a moat twelve antlengths wide and filled with water. At last I stopped to recover my breath; and as I did so, I looked about. Incredibly, we were in that precise chamber where Assa-ree and I had witnessed the maltreatment of the human female.

Still more incredibly, that same female was lying like one dead stretched out on a raised platform close to the glistening plateau on which we were. Her forefoot was bared to the upper joint and exhibited a wide, bleeding gash twenty antlengths long and gaping, with its ragged edges separated by at least four antlengths. How such a gash can be produced I have of course no means of telling. But, as I said, red blood was trickling from it.

Perhaps I should explain here what I came to investigate at a much later stage. Man's blood, like that of all mammals, is confined in large, tubular vessels and cannot flow outside of them. If he is wounded and one of these vessels or veins is severed, the blood escapes instead of simply changing its course and flowing around the wound as it does with us; and with its escape life itself ebbs away.

A moment later I saw the master hurrying about; he shouted something to his assistant, and the assistant answered. Again I should, perhaps, anticipate and explain that man produces sounds, not by means of a stridula, but by sending a current of air forcibly over two chord-like membranes concealed in his throat.

The master approached the female, knelt by her side, and laved the wound; the assistant stood by, armed with a forceps. By this time curiosity had completely conquered my panic. The Ecitons were still rushing wildly about. No greater proof, I believe, can be found of the superiority of the Atta than the fact that Bissa-tee had coolly selected a point of vantage from which she watched the proceedings; and her I now joined on the bank of the moat.

Having finished the task of laving the wound, the master, by a gesture of his forelimb, gave the assistant a signal; and the latter, bending over the platform, picked up a giant soldier Eciton, applying the forceps to her pedicel. I distinctly remember how this individual opened her formidable and menacing sickle-jaws as though to attack her captor. There is one thing to be said for the Eciton: she knows no fear; she is the personification of blind and bold fury; but she is nothing else; she is a mere fighting machine.

As it turned out, this gesture of menace was exactly what the human wanted to produce. With a touch much more gentle than I should have expected him to be capable of, the master took the forceps from his assistant; and while, with the extended toes of his free forelimb, he pressed the ragged edges of the gaping wound in the human female's arm together, he approached, with the other, the head of the Eciton. At once the ant buried her jaws, on both sides of the red line, in the human flesh and drew them close together; whereupon the master slipped his soft toes back by two ant-lengths and returned the forceps to his assistant. A second Eciton was picked up; and the proceeding repeated; then a third and a fourth.

Up to this point I had been so fascinated by what was going on that I had no eyes for anything else. Now I cast a fleeting glance at Bissa-tee. To my inexpressible astonishment I saw, behind her, in an attitude of bold and close scrutiny, my ever-present rival Assa-ree. Where did she come from? I feel convinced that, like ourselves, she had been caught by mere chance; but, when questioned, later on, she had the effrontery to assert, though her boldness was disguised under an air of almost apologetic modesty, that she had intentionally allowed herself to be captured in order to find out what these Ecitons were wanted for. How she came to be in the very locality which I had sought in order to escape her espionage, she has never seen fit to explain.

I had not yet completely recovered from what amounted almost to indignation at her presence when Bissa-tee touched me with her antenna. The process of closing the wound had been finished. Twenty-five Ecitons had buried their jaws in the human flesh and were holding the edges of the wound together.

And now comes the most amazing thing of all: a thing so horrible that I can barely bring myself to relate it. The master had risen and was bending over the wounded arm. In one fore-foot he held a new instrument, a pair of scissors, of the same metal as the forceps. With this he severed the heads of the Ecitons from their bodies, allowing the latter to fall to the ground. I nearly swooned. The only thing which preserved me from so ignominious a breakdown was the consciousness that, over Bissa-tee's tense body, Assa-ree's median eye was fastened upon me, with an expression of diabolic curiosity.

A few moments went by during which I was aware of nothing but my own efforts not to give way. But suddenly I saw the master bending over our platform, forceps in one, and the hollow cylinder in the other fore-limb. He was picking up and re-imprisoning the remaining Ecitons. Before I knew what to do in order to escape, he had picked up Bissa-tee, but to my surprise he flung her to the ground; apparently he did not think her suitable for his purpose. I was just on the point of running blindly when I also felt myself grasped. As he lifted me close to his eye, I saw Assa-ree clearing the moat in a single, magnificent leap. Clearly, fear gave her, too, strength beyond the measure ordinarily bestowed on ants. The next moment I was, like Bissa-tee, flung to the ground.

I hastened to escape through the door; but instantly Bissa-tee was by my side and detained me. I hardly know how I managed to attend to what she was endeavouring to convey to me. Never before had such an opportunity offered to measure the tenacity of life in Ecitons: since we had forbidden vivisection by law, the only specimens on which she and her colleagues had been able to work had been such as were mutilated in war; and neither she nor anyone else had ever succeeded in getting hold of beheaded specimens the exact hour of whose execution had been known; nor had these specimens ever been free from other mutilations and wounds. These Ecitons, on the other hand, were in magnificent health, apart from the fact that they had lost their heads; and so zoology must claim them, not only in order to determine the protoplasmic vitality of the Eciton body as such, deprived of the intelligent direction of the brain and even of the very possibility of adding to the vital force by feeding it; but also in order to study the distribution of instincts between body and head. Surely, she argued, when the head is removed, activities can be directed only by the dorsal and ventral ganglia. Help me, she added, to drive these decapitated specimens, or at least some of them, to our station where I shall provide an orderly as a guard for each individual; and zoology will owe you an everlasting debt.

I could not help admiring this devotion to science which caused Bissa-tee entirely to forget the danger she was in, for she had stopped me in the very door through which numbers of humans were now passing, lifting and bringing down their huge flat feet; to be caught between them and the rock-like floor would have been equivalent to a cataclysm in nature. Nevertheless, I was impatient with her; clearly, this was the moment to think of our own safety first of all.

But at that juncture Assa-ree appeared, her attitude marking a peculiar mixture of jaunty nonchalance and solicitude in our service. As though to set an example of reckless disregard of danger, she came through the very centre of the wide exit; and when the assistant appeared behind her, she even stopped till the latter's hard and smooth hind-foot was directly above her before, with a dexterous and elegant twist, she evaded the descending destruction.

The remainder of this adventure is chiefly of interest to specialists; and a detailed report has been given on scent-tree number 319 to which I must refer the curious. Here I confine myself to the bald statement that we succeeded in securing twelve of the decapitated Ecitons whom Bissa-tee kept confined during the remainder of our stay at the Narrows; when we left, she took them along under escort. Those whom we did not thus capture returned to their army, proving thereby that the homing instinct is independent of the contact-odour sense; though with this restriction that the individuals captured apparently never discovered that they were not with an army of their own kind. In fact, when we set out again, they seemed quite content to travel with us and even anxious never to stray: travelling was, of course, the natural mode of their lives. It was sometimes ludicrous to see how they begged for food, palpating us with imaginary antennæ and lifting the stumps of their necks as though they were opening shadowy mouths. Never have I seen a more striking symbol of such systems of philosophy as try to explain the universe by means of intuition. Anna-zee, our botanist, indulged in inexhaustible mirth at the expense of these living corpses. They lived for 39 days and kept up sufficient energy to continue marching to within the last but one day of their lives. At no time did they betray signs of conscious suffering--proof conclusive that the seat of suffering is the brain, and likely the imagination.³

³ See also Tenacity of Life in Ants, by A. M. Fielde, Scient. Amer., 1893. E.