Tartarin of Tarascon, in the absence of game, used to shoot at his cap. I prefer that. And above all I prefer the hunting, real hunting, of another fervent consumer of Ants, the Wryneck, the Tiro-lengo of the Provençaux, so-called because of his scientific method of darting his immensely-long [[189]]and sticky tongue across a procession of Ants and then suddenly withdrawing it all black with the limed insects. With such mouthfuls as these, the Wryneck becomes disgracefully fat in autumn; he plasters himself with butter on his rump and sides and under his wings; he hangs a string of it round his neck; he pads his skull with it right down to the beak.
He is then delicious, roasted: small, I admit; no bigger than a Lark, at the outside; but, small though he be, unlike anything else and immeasurably superior to the Pheasant, who must begin to go bad before developing a flavour at all.
Let me for this once do justice to the merit of the humblest! When the table is cleared after the evening meal and all is quiet and my body relieved for the time being of its physiological needs, sometimes I succeed in picking up, here and there, a good idea or two; and it may well be that the Mantis, the Locust, the Ant and even lesser creatures contribute to these sudden gleams of light which flash unaccountably into one’s mind. By strange and devious paths, they have all supplied, in their respective ways, the drop of oil that feeds the lamp of thought. Their energies, slowly developed, stored up and [[190]]handed down by predecessors, become infused into our veins and sustain our weakness. We live by their death.
To conclude. The Mantis, prolific to excess, in her turn makes organic matter, bequeathing it to the Ant, who bequeaths it to the Wryneck, who bequeaths it perhaps to man. She procreates a thousand, partly to perpetuate her species, but far more than she may contribute, according to her means, to the general picnic of the living. She brings us back to the ancient symbol of the Serpent biting its own tail. The world is an endless circle: everything finishes so that everything may begin again; everything dies so that everything may live. [[191]]
CHAPTER X
THE EMPUSA
The sea, life’s first foster-mother, still preserves in her depths many of those singular and incongruous shapes which were the earliest attempts of the animal kingdom; the land, less fruitful, but with more capacity for progress, has almost wholly lost the strange forms of other days. The few that remain belong especially to the series of primitive insects, insects exceedingly limited in their industrial powers and subject to very summary metamorphoses, if to any at all. In my district, in the front rank of those entomological anomalies which remind us of the denizens of the old coal-forests, stand the Mantidæ, including the Praying Mantis, so curious in habits and structure. Here also is the Empusa (E. pauperata, Latr.), the subject of this chapter.
Her larva is certainly the strangest creature among the terrestrial fauna of Provence: [[192]]a slim, swaying thing of so fantastic an appearance that uninitiated fingers dare not lay hold of it. The children of my neighbourhood, impressed by its startling shape, call it “the Devilkin.” In their imaginations, the queer little creature savours of witchcraft. One comes across it, though always sparsely, in spring, up to May; in autumn; and sometimes in winter, if the sun be strong. The tough grasses of the wastelands, the stunted bushes which catch the sun and are sheltered from the wind by a few heaps of stones are the chilly Empusa’s favourite abode.
Let us give a rapid sketch of her. The abdomen, which always curls up so as to join the back, spreads paddlewise and twists into a crook. Pointed scales, a sort of foliaceous expansions arranged in three rows, cover the lower surface, which becomes the upper surface because of the crook aforesaid. The scaly crook is propped on four long, thin stilts, on four legs armed with knee-pieces, that is to say, carrying at the end of the thigh, where it joins the shin, a curved, projecting blade not unlike that of a cleaver.