The Sacred Beetle, and Others

by Jean-Henri Fabre

The four weeks passed, behold the Sacred Beetle in his final shape: the shape, yes, but not the colouring, which is very strange when the nymph casts its skin. The head, legs and thorax are dark-red, except the denticulations of the forehead and fore-arms, which are smoky-brown. The abdomen is an opaque white; the wing-cases are semitransparent white, very faintly tinged with yellow. This imposing raiment, blending the scarlet of the cardinal’s cassock with the white of the celebrant’s alb, a raiment that harmonizes with the insect’s hieratic character, is but temporary and turns darker by degrees, to make way for a uniform of ebon black. About a month is needed for the horny armour to acquire a firm consistency and a definite hue.

At last the Beetle is fully matured. Awakening within him is the delicious restlessness born of coming freedom. He, hitherto a son of the darkness, foresees the gladness of the light. Great is his longing to burst the shell so that he may emerge from his underground prison and come into the sun; but the difficulty of liberating himself is no small [[108]]one. Will he or will he not escape from the natal cradle, which has now become a hateful dungeon? It depends.

Generally in August the Sacred Beetle is ripe for release: in August, save for rare exceptions, the most torrid, dry and scorching month of the year. If therefore no shower come from time to time to give some slight relief to the panting earth, then the cell to be burst and the wall to be breached defy the strength and patience of the insect, which is helpless against all that hardness. Owing to prolonged desiccation, the soft original matter has become an insuperable rampart; it has turned into a sort of brick baked in the kiln of summer.

I have, of course, made experiments on the insect in these difficult circumstances. I gather pear-shaped shells containing the adult Beetle, who is on the point of emerging, in view of the lateness of the season. These shells are already dry and very hard; and I lay them in a box where they retain their dryness. Sooner or later I hear the sharp grating of a rasp inside each cell. It is the prisoner working to make himself an outlet by scraping the wall with the rake of his forehead and fore-feet. Two or three days elapse; and the process of deliverance seems to be no further advanced.

I come to the assistance of a pair of them by myself opening a loophole with a knife. My idea is that this first breach will help the egress of the recluse by giving him a place to start upon, an exit that will only need widening. But not at all: these favoured ones make no more progress with their work than the others.

In less than a fortnight silence prevails in all the shells. The prisoners, worn out with vain endeavours, have perished. I break the caskets containing the deceased. A meagre pinch of dust, hardly as much as an average pea [[109]]in bulk, is all that those powerful implements, rasp, saw, harrow and rake, have succeeded in detaching from the invincible wall.

I take some other shells, of equal hardness, wrap them in a wet rag and put them in a flask. When the moisture has soaked through them, I rid them of their wrapper and keep them in the corked flask. This time events take a very different course. Softened to a nicety by the wet rag, the shells open, burst by the efforts of the prisoner, who props himself boldly on his legs, using his back as a lever; or else, scraped away at one point, they crumble to pieces and reveal a yawning breach. The experiment is a complete success. In every case the release of the Beetles is safely accomplished: a few drops of water have brought them the joys of the sun.

For the second time Horapollo was right. True, it is not the mother, as the ancient writer says, who throws her ball into the water: it is the clouds that provide the liberating douche, it is the rain that brings about the ultimate release. In the natural state things must happen as in my experiments. When the soil is burnt by the August sun, the shells, baked like bricks under their thin covering of earth, are for most of the time hard as stones. It is impossible for the insect to wear away its casket and escape. But let a shower come—that life-giving baptism which the seed of the plant and the family of the Beetle alike await within the cinders of the earth—let a little rain fall; and soon there will be a resurrection in the fields.

The earth becomes soaked. There you have the wet rag of my experiment. At its touch the shell recovers the softness of its early days, the casket becomes yielding; the insect makes play with its legs and pushes with its back; it is free. It is in fact in September, during the [[110]]first rains that herald autumn, that the Sacred Beetle leaves his native burrow and comes forth to enliven the pastoral sward, even as the former generation enlivened it in the spring. The clouds, hitherto so ungenerous, at last set him free.

When the earth is exceptionally cool, the bursting of the shell and the deliverance of its occupant can occur at an earlier period; but in ground scorched by the pitiless summer sun, as is usually the case in my district, the Beetle, however eager he may be to see the light, must needs wait for the first rain to soften his stubborn shell. A downpour is to him a question of life and death. Horapollo, that echo of the Egyptian magi, saw true when he made water play its part in the birth of the sacred insect.