But what has this to do with earth or with agriculture? The most important point in the work of the white ant remains to be noted. I have already said that the white ant is never seen. Why he should have such a repugnance to being looked at is at first sight a mystery, seeing that he himself is stone-blind. But his coyness is really due to the desire for self-protection, for the moment his juicy body shows itself above-ground there are a dozen enemies waiting to devour it. And yet the white ant can never procure any food until it comes above-ground. Nor will it meet the case for the insect to come to the surface under the shadow of night. Night in the tropics, so far as animal life is concerned, is as the day. It is the great feeding-time, the great fighting-time, the carnival of the carnivores, and of all beasts, birds, and insects of prey from the least to the greatest. It is clear, then, that darkness is no protection to the white ant; and yet without coming out of the ground it can not live. How does it solve the difficulty? It takes the ground out along with it. I have seen white ants working on the top of a high tree, and yet they were underground. They took up some of the ground with them to the tree-top; just as the Esquimaux heap up snow, building it into the low tunnel huts in which they live, so the white ants collect earth, only in this case not
"all sorts of fantastic shapes"
from the surface but from some depth underneath the ground, and plaster it into tunneled ways. Occasionally these run along the ground, but more often mount in endless ramifications to the top of trees, meandering along every branch and twig, and here and there debouching into large covered chambers which occupy half the girth of the trunk. Millions of trees in some districts are thus fantastically plastered over with tubes, galleries, and chambers of earth, and many
