Held to the ear and shaken, the object rattles slightly, as would the shell of a dry fruit with a stone lying free inside it. Does it contain the grub, shrivelled by desiccation? Does it contain the dead insect? I thought so, but I was wrong. It contains something much more instructive than that.
I carefully rip up the gourd with the point of a knife. Within a homogenous wall, whose thickness is over three-quarters of an inch in the largest of my three specimens, is encased a spherical kernel, which fills the cavity exactly, but without sticking to the wall at any part. The small amount of free play allowed to this kernel accounts for the rattling which I heard when I shook the thing.
In the colour and general appearance of the whole, the kernel does not differ from the wrapper. But break it open and minutely examine the pieces. We now recognize tiny fragments of bone, flocks of down, threads of wool, scraps of flesh, the whole mixed in an earthy paste resembling chocolate.
This paste, when placed on hot charcoal, sifted under the lens and deprived of its particles of dead bodies, becomes much darker, is covered with shiny bubbles and sends forth puffs of that acrid smoke by which we so readily recognize burnt animal matter. The whole mass of the kernel, therefore, is strongly impregnated with sanies.
Treated in the same manner, the wrapper also turns black, but not to the same extent; it hardly smokes; it does not become covered with jet-black bubbles; lastly, it would not anywhere contain bits of carcase similar to those in the central kernel. In both cases, the residue after calcination is a fine, reddish clay.
This brief analysis tells us all about the table of Phanæus Milon. The fare served to the grub is a sort of meat-pie. The sausage-meat consists of a mince of all that the two scalpels of the forehead and the toothed knives of the fore-legs have been able to remove from the corpse: hair and down, small crushed bones, strips of flesh and skin. Now hard as brick, the thickening of this mincemeat was originally a paste of fine clay steeped in the liquor of corruption. Lastly, the light crust of our meat-pies is here represented by a covering of the same clay, less rich in extract of meat than the other.
The pastry-cook gives his work an elegant shape; he decorates it with rosettes, with twists, with scrolls. Phanæus Milon is no stranger to these culinary æsthetics. She turns the crust of her meat-pie into a splendid gourd, with a finger-print ornamentation.
The outer covering, an unprofitable crust, insufficiently steeped in savoury juices, is not, we can easily guess, intended for consumption. It is possible that, somewhat later, when the stomach becomes robust and is not repelled by coarse fare, the grub scrapes a little from the sides of its pasty walls; but, until the adult insect emerges, the calabash as a whole remains intact, having acted at first as a safeguard of the freshness of the force-meat and all the while as a protecting casket for the recluse.
Above the cold pastry, right at the base of the neck of the gourd, is contrived a round cell with a clay wall continuing the general wall. A fairly thick floor, made of the same material, separates it from the store-room. This is the hatching-chamber. Here is laid the egg, which I find in its place but dried up; here is hatched the grub, which, to reach the ball of food, must first open a trap-door through the partition that separates the two stories.