The Best Adventure and Exploration Stories Ever Told

by Stephen Brennan

  As the curtain of flames lowered, one could see in place of the illimitable host of ants an extensive vista of water. The thwarted river had swept over the plantation, carrying with it the entire army. The water had collected and mounted in the great “saucer,” while the ants had in vain attempted to reach the hill on which stood the ranch house. The girdle of flames held them back.

  And so imprisoned between water and fire, they had been delivered into the annihilations that was their god. And near the farther mouth of the water ditch, where the stone mole had its second gap, the ocean swept the lost battalions into the river, to vanish forever.

  The ring of fire dwindled as the water mounted to the petrol trench, and quenched the dimming flames. The inundation rose higher and higher because its outflow was impeded by the timber and underbrush it had carried along with it, its surface required some time to reach the top of the high stone breakwater and discharge over it the rest of the shattered army.

  It swelled over ant-stippled shrubs and bushes, until it washed against the foot of the knoll whereon the besieged had taken refuge. For a while an alluvial of ants tried again and again to attain this dry land, only to be repulsed by streams of petrol back into the merciless flood.

  Leiningen lay on his bed, his body swathed from head to foot in bandages. With fomentations and salves, they had managed to stop the bleeding, and had dressed his many wounds. Now they thronged around him, one question in every face. Would he recover? “He won’t die,” said the old man who had bandaged him, “if he doesn’t want to.”

  The planter opened his eyes. “Everything in order?” he asked.

  “They’re gone,” said his nurse. “To hell.” He held out to his master a gourd full of a powerful sleeping draught. Leiningen gulped it down.

  “I told you I’d come back,” he murmured, “even if I am a bit streamlined.” He grinned and shut his eyes. He slept.