“Of course I’m thankful,” said Gilbert. “And I dare say I am too apt to turn things into jest. Well, we’ll drop the matter now, at all events. And by the same token, here comes the doctor. Now, I suppose, we shall hear whether this place will do for our halt for the night or not. Well, doctor, is the rascal really gone?”
“Yes, I am satisfied he is. I doubted, at first, whether Omatoko really believed in the beetle. He has lived so long among the Dutch, that I thought he might have learned better. But he hasn’t, I am persuaded. Yes, he has really gone back. He daren’t follow us.”
“That is well, at all events. Well, what do you think of this as a halting-place? It’s an abandoned kraal, I suppose, only it must have belonged to some tribe of savages, who took more pains with their house-building than those Namaquas.”
“Kraal, Nick? Do you suppose these houses, for such they may certainly be called; do you suppose these houses to be the handiwork of men?”
“To be sure I do,” returned Nick; “who but men could have built them?”
“They are nests of white ants,” said Lavie, “and if we were to stay here all night, our clothes, our knapsacks, our belts, and everything that could be devoured by them, would be gnawed to pieces!”
“Ants, doctor! You are joking, surely. What—that hut there, or whatever it is, is a good twenty feet high, and thirty, I’ll go bail for it, in diameter? Ants make that! It isn’t possible.”
“It’s true, anyhow,” said Lavie. “I know they have been found more than a hundred feet in circumference. It is the enormous number of the ants that enables them to construct such huge dwellings. And, after all, their work is nothing compared with that of the coral insect of the Pacific.”
“Don’t they sometimes build in the trunks of trees?” asked Warley.
“Very frequently,” answered the surgeon. “Their mode of going to work, when they do, is very much like their house-building. In the latter case, they heap together an immense mass of earth, which they form into innumerable galleries, all leading, inwards, to the central chamber of the structure. When they choose a tree, and they generally pitch upon one of the largest trees they can find—a baobab, perhaps, or a giant fig—they simply eat these galleries out of the wood, taking care never to disturb the outer bark. In this manner they will sometimes destroy the whole inside of a vast fruit tree so completely, that it crumbles to dust as soon as touched.”