The pellet therefore is inserted, half in and half out of the partly-formed basin. The mother, underneath, gets her legs round it and pulls; the father, above, lets it down gently and sees that the hole is not choked up with falling earth. All goes well. The digging is resumed and the descent continues, always with the same [[244]]caution, one of the Sisyphi pulling the load, the other regulating the drop and clearing away anything that might hinder the operation. A few more efforts; and the ball disappears underground with the two miners. What follows for some time to come can be only a repetition of what we have just seen. Let us wait half a day or so.
If we have kept careful watch, we shall see the father come up again to the surface by himself and crouch in the sand near the burrow. Detained below by duties in which her companion can be of no assistance to her, the mother usually postpones her appearance till the morrow. At last she shows herself. The father leaves the place where he was snoozing and joins her. The reunited couple go back to the heap of victuals, refresh themselves and then cut out another piece, on which again the two work together, both as regards the modelling and the carting and storing.
I am delighted with this conjugal fidelity. That it is really the rule I dare not declare. There must be flighty Beetles who, in the hurly-burly under a spreading cake, forget the first fair pastry-cook whom they helped with her baking and devote themselves to others, met by chance; there must be temporary couples, who divorce each other after producing a single pill. No matter: the little that I have seen gives me a high opinion of the Sisyphus’ domestic habits.
Let us recapitulate these habits before passing on to the contents of the burrow. The father works just as hard as the mother at extracting and modelling the lump that is to constitute a larva’s dowry; he shares in the carting, even though he plays a secondary part; he keeps watch over the loaf when the mother is absent looking for a spot at which to dig the burrow; he helps [[245]]in the work of excavation; he carries outside the rubbish from the cavity; and lastly, to crown these good qualities, he is to a large extent faithful to his spouse.
The Scarabæus displays some of these characteristics. He readily helps in manipulating the pill; when it has to be carted, he takes his place in a team of two, one pulling and one pushing. But let me repeat that the motive of this mutual service is selfishness: the two fellow-workers labour and cart the lump only for their own purpose. To them it is a gala cake and nothing more. In that part of her work which concerns the family, the Scarabæus mother has no assistant. Alone she rounds her sphere, extracts it from the pile, rolls it backwards by herself in the head-downward posture adopted by the male of the Sisyphus couple; alone she digs her burrow; alone she stores away its contents. Heedless of the laying mother and the brood, the other sex does not assist at all in the exhausting task. How different from the pigmy pill-roller!
It is time to inspect the burrow. At no great depth we find a tiny niche, just large enough to allow the mother to move around her work. The smallness of the chamber tells us that the father cannot remain there for long. When the studio is ready, he must go away to leave the sculptress room to turn. We have already seen him coming back to the surface some time before the mother.
The contents of the cellar consist of a single pill, a masterpiece of plastic art. It is a copy of the Sacred Beetle’s pear on a very much reduced scale, its smallness making the polish of the surface and the elegance of the curves all the more striking. Its main diameter varies between one-half and three-quarters of an inch. It is the most artistic achievement of the Dung-beetle’s art. [[246]]
But this perfection is of brief duration. Soon the pretty pear is covered with knotty excrescences, black and twisted, which disfigure it with their blotchy lumps. A part of the surface, otherwise intact, disappears beneath an amorphous mass of eruptions. The origin of these ugly warts baffled me at first. I suspected some fungous growth, some Sphæriacea, for instance, recognizable by its black and pimply crust. The larva showed me my mistake.
As usual, this is a grub bent into a hook and carrying on its back a large pouch or hump, the emblem of a ready evacuator. Like the Sacred Beetle’s, indeed, it excels at stopping up any accidental holes in its shells with an instantaneous spray of stercoral cement, of which it always keeps a supply in its knapsack. It practises moreover an art of vermicelli-making which is unknown to the pill-rollers, except the Broad-necked Scarab, who however but seldom makes use of it.
The larvæ of the various Dung-beetles employ their digestive residues for plastering their cell, whose dimensions lend themselves to this method of riddance, without the necessity of opening temporary windows through which to expel the ordure. Whether because of insufficient space or for other reasons which escape me, the Sisyphus-larva, after allowing for the regulation coating of the interior, ejects the excess of its products outside.