They work without seeing their work. They have no eyes, at least none which are visible. Very probably, the darkness in which they live destroys their ocular organs, as is the case with a species of duck found in the subterranean lakes of Carinthia. The rare species of termites which venture forth into the daylight have very conspicuous and perfectly formed eyes.
The darkness and the persecution to which they are exposed under the light, seem to have developed their singular industry. Against that world of day which shows them so bitter a hostility, they have built, as they have been able, this little world of the shadows, in which they exercise their arts. They issue forth only in search of food, and the gum and other substances of which they make their magazines.
Their attachment is extreme for these cities of darkness. They defend them obstinately. The first blow that is given each resists in his own fashion; the workmen plastering the interior with a kind of mortar which closes up the holes, the soldiers attacking the assailants and drawing blood with their sharp pincers, clinging to the wound, and suffering themselves to be crushed rather than let go. A naked man (like the negro) shrinks under these bites, grows discouraged, and is conquered.
If you still persist, if you penetrate, you admire the palace, its circuits, its corridors, its aërial bridges, the halls or saloons where the population lodge, the nurseries for the eggs, the caves, cellars, or magazines. But, above all, search to the centre. There lurks the mystery of this little world; there is its palladium, its idol, incessantly surrounded by the cares of an enthusiastic crowd. A strange and shocking object, which is not the less obeyed, and visibly adored!
It is the queen, or common mother, frightfully fecund, from whose body issues an uninterrupted flood of about sixty eggs per minute, or eighty thousand eggs per day!
You can conceive of nothing more fantastic. These strange creatures, which we compare to vermin, have nevertheless their moment of supreme poesy, their hour of love; for a moment their wings uplift them, and almost immediately they sink. The couples thus bereft, having neither refuge nor strength, and no means of resistance, are a prey for all the insects,—a manna upon which they straightway throw themselves. The working termites, which have neither love nor wings, endeavour to save a couple of the victims, welcome them,—weak, and fallen, and wretched as they are,—and make them monarchs.
They remove them to the centre of the city, and establish them in the saloon on which all the apartments and corridors abut. There they are revived, recruited, and nourished day and night; and the female gradually assumes an enormous size, until in body and stomach she is two thousand times larger than her natural condition,—though, by a hideous contrast, the head does not increase. For the rest, immovable, and therefore captive, the doors through which she entered have become infinitely too narrow to admit of the egress of such a monster. Accordingly, there she will remain, pouring out, until she splits asunder, that torrent of living matter which the termites day and night collect, and which, to-morrow, will be the People.
This soft and whitish-looking creature, a stomach rather than a being, is at least of the size of the human thumb: a traveller pretends to have seen one as large as a crab.
The bigger she is, the more fertile, the more inexhaustible, this terrible mother of lice seems the more enthusiastically worshipped by her fanatical vermin. She appears to be their ideal, their poetry, their ecstasy. If you carry them off, with a fragment, a ruin of the city, you may see them, under a glass shade, instantly set to work to build an arch for the protection of the mother's venerated head, to reconstruct her royal hall, which will become, if the materials be sufficient, the centre and basis of the resuscitated community.