Let us now examine the work of Phanæus Milo [[104]]more thoroughly. The calabashes came into my hands in a state of complete desiccation. They are very nearly as hard as stone; their colour favours a pale chocolate. Neither inside nor out does the lens discover the small fibrous particle pointing to a residuum of grasses. The strange Dung-beetle does not, therefore, employ the bovine cakes, nor anything similar; he handles products of another class, which are pretty difficult to specify at first.
Held to the ear and shaken, the object sounds a little 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, [[105]]but I was wrong. It contains something much better than that for our instruction.
I carefully rip up the gourd with the point of the knife. Under a homogeneous outer wall, the thickness of which reaches as much as two centimetres[3] 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 trifle of free scope allowed to this kernel accounts for the rattling which I heard when shaking the piece.
The kernel does not differ from the wrapper in the colour and general appearance of its bulk. But let us break it and examine the shreds. I recognize tiny fragments of gold, flocks of down, threads of wool, scraps of meat, the whole drowned in an earthy paste resembling chocolate.
Placed on a glowing coal, this paste, shredded 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 in which we easily 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 dark, but not to the same extent; it hardly smokes; it is not covered with jet-black bubbles; lastly, it does not anywhere contain shreds of carcasses similar to those in the central nut. In both cases, the residuum of the calcination is a fine, reddish clay.
This brief analysis tells us all about Phanæus Milo’s table. The fare served to the grub is a sort of vol-au-vent. The sausage-meat consists of a mince of all that the two scalpels of the shield and the toothed knives of the fore-legs have been able to cut away from the carcass: [[106]]hair and down, crushed ossicles, strips of flesh and skin. Now hard as brick, the thickening of that mince was originally a jelly of fine clay soaked in the juice of corruption. Lastly, the puff-paste crust of our vol-au-vent is here represented by a covering of the same clay, less rich in extract of meat than the other.
The pastry-cook gives his pie an elegant shape; he decorates it with rosettes, with twists, with scrolls. Phanæus Milo is no stranger to these culinary æsthetics. He turns the crust of his vol-au-vent into a handsome gourd, ornamented with a finger-print guilloche.
The outer covering, a disagreeable 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 wall of its pie; but, taken as a whole, until the adult insect emerges, the calabash remains intact, having acted as a safeguard of the freshness of the mince-meat at first and as a protecting box for the recluse from start to finish.
Above the cold pasty, 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. It is the hatching-chamber. Here is laid the egg, which I find in its place, but dried up; here is hatched the worm, which, to reach the nourishing ball, must previously open a trap-door through the partition separating the two storeys.