It really was a cricket, with its elongated head bearing four very large and thick antennules and two thinner antennae. Three little eyes, arranged on the same horizontal line, were set between two eyes that were considerably more voluminous. The front feet were enormous, very powerful and flattened, terminating in six claws, four turned outwards and two inwards. As for the body, it was clad in a sort of corset, an elongated breastplate, cylindrical in form and covered in hairs that gave it the appearance of velvet. Two huge wings, folded back and pointed, were partly hidden by short sheaths crossed over one another on the animal’s back.
While Paradou and Soleihas were examining the cricket and studying the mechanism that enabled it to produce its shrill call, by rubbing its feet against its wing-cases, Camaret had taken a few steps back along the path. They suddenly heard him uttering desperate cries.
“Save yourselves! Save yourselves!” he shouted, prey to a sharp terror, running toward his companions.
“What’s the matter?” asked Paradou.
“Save yourselves!” Camaret repeated. “Save yourselves!”
“Answer, for God’s sake!” cried Soleihas in his turn, seizing the dentist’s arm.
“There! There!” the latter said, his teeth chattering, pointing toward the path.
Horror! A frightful reptile, 100 meters long, was snaking along the path and coming toward the three voyagers. Its body was undulating in gigantic ripples and its head, terminating in a tapering spindle, was swaying in mid-air at a prodigious height.
“Don’t move!” shouted Paradou. “Let the earthworm pass by in peace.”
The enormous beast had arrived at the rock. It turned abruptly to its left, and, in a few minutes, had disappeared into the thicket, making the earth tremble beneath its weight.
It is easy to imagine the joyous cry of deliverance uttered simultaneously by the three friends. This time, the danger had been terrible; they could have been crushed by the blind and unconscious beast.
“We’ve had a lucky escape!” Camaret exclaimed. “Personally, I’ve just about had enough—I value my skin, after all. If this goes on, we’ll be devoured before reaching the end of our voyage through this accursed lawn.”
“Next time,” Soleihas added, “we’ll definitely have to equip ourselves with weapons.”
“Bring cannons, at least,” added the dentist.
As they went back along the path, the optician drew his companions’ attention to the singular trees forming the thicket they were traversing. Their appearance was truly strange. Their stems bore many leaves, but they did not resemble ordinary leaves. Long thin filaments extended from the tops of the stems, each one terminating in a sort of urn. No woody tree bore the slightest resemblance to these extraordinary plants, which seemed to belong to a planet far from the Earth.
“Do you know what this undergrowth is?” Soleihas asked Camaret.
“I have no idea,” the dentist replied. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“There’s nothing more commonplace, though,” said the optician. “It’s moss.”
The path they were following extended into the distance; it must have been traced by the cricket. They were now moving forward rapidly, still beneath the thick dome of greenery, when they found the way blocked by a large dead tree lying on its side. The trunk, about ten meters high in cross-section, extended as far as the eye could see to the right and left, like a new version of the Great Wall of China.
“It must be a tree-branch fallen in the middle of the lawn,” said Paradou. “What an annoying obstacle! In any case, it’s too long to go around. The simplest thing is to climb over.”
“Yes,” said Soleihas, “all the more so as it seems quite easy to do. The bark, dried out and cracked, forms corridors of a sort that will allow us to scale it.”
No sooner said than done: here goes our optician, sliding into a fissure and beginning the ascent. Paradou follows him by the same route.
All went well to begin with, but they had not climbed five meters before it was necessary to abandon that route. The corridor became so narrow that a man could no longer pass along it.
“Keep climbing!” Paradou shouted to Soleihas, who was blocking his path. “There must be a path higher up.”
“Impossible,” the optician replied. “I can’t even move any more. My foot is stuck in the crack and I’m held as in a vice.”
“Try to free it.”
“I can’t.” Poor Soleihas was making every effort, but in vain.
The situation was becoming critical.
Camaret had remained at the bottom of the tree all this time. More heavily burdened than his companions with his photographic apparatus, he was waiting for them to find a good route. He climbed up in his turn, to come to the aid of Soleihas.
At that moment, something very extraordinary happened.
In order to take a short cut, the dentist had launched himself directly on to the smooth bark. To the amazement of everyone, especially science, he arrived at the top of the trunk in a few strides.
“It’s no more difficult than that!” he shouted. “You’re making it awkward with your corridors. It’s nothing at all to me. Do as I did, and come to meet me.”
Paradou and Soleihas were mute with amazement. It must be admitted that they had reason. Like the most agile of clowns, Camaret was climbing the steepest planes without difficulty. At one moment, his companions even saw him leaning over empty space in a horizontal position and continuing his ascent as if in defiance of the laws of gravity and equilibrium.
“Since you can move so well over the trees,” said Soleihas, exhausted by his futile efforts to free himself, “come and help us instead of parading around up there like a windmill.”
“Wait a minute while I take your photograph—the two of you don’t look bad there,” the dentist riposted.
“Scoundrel!” cried the optician, who could not help laughing. “If I catch you, I’ll throw you and your diabolical instrument from the top of the tree.”
“Come on, then,” Camaret replied, folding his arms across his chest in a challenging manner.
The dentist did not try to take the joke any further. He came back down over the bark as easily as he had climbed up, and extended his hand successively to his two companions They soon found themselves beside him, liberated from the fissure.
“Have no fear of climbing,” he told them. “Walk exactly as you would on an ordinary road.”
Indeed, they all went up to the summit and came down on the other side with surprising ease.
“That’s marvelous!” Paradou exclaimed, as soon as they had resumed their forward march. “Do you understand what happened, my dear Soleihas?”
“In sum,” the optician relied, after a moment’s reflection, “we comported ourselves like any other small animals. An ant, a fly—any small insect whatsoever—can do as much everywhere without our being astonished.”
“You’re right,” said the doctor, who was not satisfied by that explanation but did not want to take the discussion any further, for the moment. “There’s one tem of useful information to be drawn from our discovery. Instead of going round obstacles, as we’ve been doing until now, the simplest thing to do henceforth is to pass over them.”
“What astonishes me,” observed Soleihas, “is that we took so long to make that discovery.”
“I’ve already thought about that,” Paradou replied. “It’s because we’ve never tried to walk in any other way than the ordinary one. Great discoveries are made in exactly the same fashion; it’s by leaving the beaten track, and acting differently from other people, that men of genius invent marvels. Electricity has existed eternally; it impregnates the entire universe. Many centuries went by, however, before the movement of a frog’s leg revealed its existence to Galvani and Volta…”
The doctor was abruptly interrupted in his dissertation, which was threatening to become transcendental, by a cry uttered by Soleihas.
“Halt!” he said.
“What is it now?” asked Camaret.
“Look!” the optician replied. “There’s an ant over there. What an enormous beast!”
V. The Anthill
The voyagers were beginning to get accustomed to the strange form of insects, but the sight of that ant certainly had what it took to astonish them.
It was as big as an ox, but bore very little resemblance to that mammal. It was more like an antediluvian monster, an inhabitant of an unknown planet or a beast of the Apocalypse.
The ant was coming directly toward the three companions, apparently oblivious to their presence.
“It must be blind!” Camaret exclaimed.
“No,” Soleihas replied. “Like all its peers, it has very short sight. When an ant advances along a path that is unfamiliar to it, it hesitates, moving to the right and the left, slowly and prudently.”
The beast was now so close that they could examine it in every detail. The head was especially curious, with its complicated mouth, like that of all insects, its antennae and its eyes, five in number, arranged along the same line, the two extremes being composed of a large number of facets, like those of the fly.
Camaret, who was examining that head curiously, suddenly asked: “Monsieur Soleihas, can you tell me where the ant’s ears and nose are? I can’t see them anywhere.”
“The ant doesn’t possess ears or a nose,” the optician replied. “The sense of hearing seems to be situated in the antennae, perhaps even in the limbs.”
“That’s very good!” cried the dentist, twirling around and writhing with laughter. “Oh yes, that’s very good. Ants can hear with their legs!” Then, taking on an inspired expression, he immediately added: “I have an idea, Monsieur Soleihas, that I shall make an extraordinary discovery. I demonstrated just now that we’re capable of climbing trees like ants; I’ll prove to you now that we can also hear like them.”
And here is the enraged dentist, leaning forward to place his hands on the ground and lifting his feet to the height of the optician’s face.
“Talk to my foot,” he said. “I’m listening.”
“Put our feet down, you clown,” Soleihas replied, pushing the leg away.
“I didn’t hear anything,” said Camaret, resuming a vertical position. Immediately, he added: “Can you tell me now how ants smell, since they have no noses?”
“No one knows,” the optician replied.
“I’ll find out,” said the dentist. “On our next excursion, I’ll bring a packet of snuff and sprinkle it all over the ant’s body—I’ll see where it sneezes.”
At this stupid repartee, Paradou and Soleihas were seized by fits of hysterical laughter. Decidedly, they would never make a serious man out of the dentist.
The ant was still moving forward slowly. Paradou proposed that they follow it wherever it went. That was what they did. Less than ten minutes had gone by when they suddenly emerged from the forest and came into a vast plain, limited in all directions by trees. In the middle, a high conical hill rose up, like an extinct volcano. At this sight, our three companions stopped and consulted one another. Should they go back into the wood or set off cross the plain with the ant? The latter seemed to be heading for the hill.
They decide to continue following the ant.
The soil of the plain had a singular appearance, as if thousands of torrents had churned it up in every direction. The doctor, who had a keen interest in geology, was struck by that, and wondered what could have caused such a disposition of the soil—but he could not think of a satisfactory hypothesis.
The ant was marching straight ahead. Suddenly, they perceived a second ant, then a third, and then an entire caravan advancing in Indian file. They were coming from all points of the horizon—and, remarkably enough, they were all heading for the hill.
“I have it,” said the doctor, speaking to himself. “That hill is the entrance to an ant-hill. The soil has been furrowed by dint of having been trodden down by the passage of ants.”
“An ant-hill?” queried Soleihas.
“Yes,” Paradou replied. “We’re going into an ant-hill.”
“Oh, my friends, let’s run away, quickly!” Camaret exclaimed. “We’ll be devoured.”
“On the contrary, my friend,” said the doctor. “We must go forward. I have a presentiment that we’re about to see something extraordinary.”
A quarter of an hour later, they had reached the foot of the hill. It really was an immense cone of earth, similar to a volcano, whose crater as nothing but the entrance to the ant-hill. Thousands of ants were incessantly scaling the slopes of the cone and disappearing into the central gulf, while others, coming from inside, were going down in the opposite direction.
“What if we were to go into the ant-hill?” the doctor asked his companions.
“It would be very audacious,” Soleihas replied.
“I’d like to,” said the dentist, in his turn, “for these ants seem gentle and tame to me. Not one of them has so far attempted to do us the slightest harm.”
“It’s because they recognize us as intelligent and civilized beings, like them,” the doctor remarked. “The ant is, as you know, the king of insects, man being that of the vertebrates. We can deal with them as one sovereign power to another.”
“Except,” the optician remarked, “that we must seem to them to be very feeble creatures. Remember that they’re as big as oxen.”
“It must be admitted,” Paradou replied, “that the advantage does not lie with man at the moment.”
They climbed up the hill and found the entrance to the ants’ subterranean dwelling. One of the insects seemed to be posted there as a sentinel.
“Is that one mounting guard?” asked the dentist. “It only lacks a rifle in its arms.”
“Exactly,” said Soleihas. “Like human warriors, ants have sentinels to watch over the entrances to their habitations, and scouts to signal dangers in the vicinity. They even barricade their doors at night.”
“They raise the drawbridge?” Camaret queried.
“No,” the optician continued, “they content themselves with rolling stones over the entrance.”
“It’s running away,” said the dentist. “It’s afraid of us.”
“I don’t think so,” the doctor replied. “I believe that it’s gone to warn its comrades of our arrival. We’ll soon find out.”
Indeed, the ant re-emerged a few seconds later, accompanied by three others. Their conversation must have been very animated, for the four insects delivered themselves to a veritable orgy of blows of the head against one another’s thoraxes, and never ceased to touch antennae—which is, as everyone knows, the means employed by ants to chat among themselves. Finally, an agreement was struck. The sentinel returned to its observation-post and the other three beasts advanced toward the human visitors. They came to a halt a few meters away and, to judge by their gracious attitude, seemed to be inviting the three voyagers to come into the ant-hill.
Thinking that it was, indeed, an invitation to follow them, the three friends immediately went into the opening that was gaping in front of them. The three ants accompanied them.
Ants having not yet invented artificial lighting by gas or electricity, or even oil or kerosene, the tunnel that opened there was plunged in the most profound darkness. Fortunately, Soleihas had anticipated that circumstances might arise in which they would need light. He took a packet of candles and three tiny candlesticks from their pockets. A moment later, he and his companions were equipped with the luminous means necessary to make a long excursion in the ant-hill. The ants did not seem troubled by the unprecedented illumination of their subterranean abode.
They advanced into the tunnel in the following order: one ant at the head, serving as guide, then the three humans, then the other two ants, forming a rear-guard. Very tortuous at first and steeply inclined, the tunnel soon became straight and horizontal.
“It’s marvelous,” said Soleihas, who was the first to break the silence, “to see the preca
utions taken by the ants to guard their entrance. These turnings and narrow corridors are evidently designed to protect them against enemy invasion.”
“See also,” the doctor added, “how the walls of these tunnels are constructed.”
It was necessary to raise their voices considerably to talk, for the noise produced by the feet of the little troop echoed like the sound of distant thunder in the subterranean tunnels.
As for Camaret, the novelty and strangeness of the spectacle impressed him to the highest degree.
Brave little ants, he said to himself, I shall have the greatest admiration for you henceforth when I encounter you in my path. I shall remember your fine welcome for as long as I live, and will never crush you when you come to eat my jam.
A little further on, they encountered a crew of workers in the process of repairing the surface of a collapsed tunnel. How skillfully they were making use of their mandibles to lift the materials and their feet to fix them in place and consolidate the walls. The three explorers could not tear themselves away from the spectacle, so novel and instructive for them.
“Monsieur Soleihas,” Camaret said to the optician, “can you tell me how the ants can work in the dark? That seems extraordinary to me.”
“I can only satisfy you,” the latter replied, “in a very incomplete fashion, for scientists are still very ignorant with regard to that interesting question. Like all other insects, ants can move and work very easily in darkness. Do they see with their eyes or steer with the aid of touch? For myself, the particular constitution of their visual organs, so complicated and so different from ours, causes me to believe that they really can see. Perhaps they perceive luminous rays of an infinitely tiny intensity, which completely escape the human eye. Heat is a vibration analogous to that of light, and yet our eyes cannot perceive it. It might be the case, therefore, that the eyes of insects are impressed by calorific vibrations.”
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