The miller is well-equipped for his work. Look at his trident. On the solid basis of the corselet stand three sharp spears, the two outer ones long, the middle one short, all three pointing forwards. What purpose does this weapon serve? At first sight, one would take it for a masculine decoration, one of so many others, of very varied forms, worn by the corporation of Dung-beetles. Well, it is something more than an ornament: Minotaurus turns his gaud into a tool.
The three unequal points describe a concave arch, wide enough to admit a spherical sheep-dropping. Standing on his imperfect and shaky floor, which demands the employment of his four hind-legs, propped against the walls of the perpendicular channel, how will Minotaurus manage to keep the elusive olive in position and break it up? Let us watch him at work.
PLATE VII
The Minotaurus couple engaged on miller’s and baker’s work.
[[137]]
Stooping a little, he digs his fork into the piece, thenceforth rendered stationary, for it is caught between the prongs of the implement. The fore-legs are free; with their toothed armlets they can saw the morsel, lacerate it and reduce it to particles which gradually fall through the crevices of the flooring and reach the mother below.
The substance which the miller sends scooting down is not a flour passed through the bolting-machine, but a coarse grain, a mixture of pulverized remnants and of pieces hardly ground at all. Incomplete though it be, this preliminary trituration is of the greatest assistance to the mother in her tedious job of bread-making: it shortens the work and allows the best and the middling to be separated straight away. When everything, including the floor itself, is ground to powder, the horned miller returns to the upper air, gathers a fresh harvest and recommences his shredding labours at leisure.
Nor is the baker inactive in her laboratory. She collects the remnants pouring down around her, subdivides them yet further, refines them and makes her selection: this, the tenderer part, for the central crumb; that, tougher, for the crust of the loaf. Turning this way and that, she pats the material with the battledore of her flattened arms; she arranges it in layers, which presently she compresses by stamping on them where they lie, much after the manner of a vine-grower treading his vintage. Rendered firm and compact, the mass will keep better and longer.
After some ten days of this united labour, the couple at last obtain the long, cylindrical loaf. The father has done the grinding, the mother the kneading.