The village was fairly clean, for the dogs, fowls, and goats and the wild birds and animals ate up a great deal of garbage. If rubbish accumulated, it was carried off into the forest at certain times. There was always enough to eat of one kind of food or another, and enough to trade, for most of the things really needed could always be found in the great storehouse of the wilderness. If there had never been anything to be afraid of, the people would have lived comfortably year in and year out. But the shadow of danger was always hanging over them.
The men of the village had had a great deal of talk with the Alo Man about this fear of attack, and he was able to tell them several things about the ways of defending a country and of avoiding trouble, which he had seen in his travels. He had been among many different tribes, and some of the customs of which he told seemed very strange.
For instance, the Alo Man said that the Wa-nkonda built their huts round, with the walls sloping out from the bottom like a basket, and the spaces between the bamboos were not plastered with mud but filled in with round bricks of white clay. This seemed to Mpoko and Nkunda like a great deal of needless trouble, but the Alo Man assured them that the Wa-nkonda would think their huts just as strange and outlandish. In some tribes the warriors used daggers with the ring-shaped hilt, and shields of hide or leather, and some preferred the bow and arrow to the spear. The Alo Man had seen a king’s palace eighteen feet by twenty-five, with plank walls and thatched roof. This king owned ivory bows carved at the ends; the ivory would have snapped like a dry twig in any temperate climate, but the hot steamy air of Equatorial Africa kept it elastic. The same king had double drinking horns made of a pair of eland horns mounted in ivory; he had oil dishes of carved ivory shaped like little canoes or handled cups, and his women had combs and hairpins of carved ivory. The Alo Man had been a guest at a royal banquet, at which they served soup, sweet potatoes, greens, fish, boiled chicken, boiled pork, roast pig, rice pudding, and stewed guava. The women of the village were proud to find that their own feast would have nearly everything on this list and a few other dishes besides.
Mpoko had reached an age when he was beginning to wonder about the reason for things, and he wondered a great deal about the constant danger of raids from enemies outside. He knew that he himself would probably be headman some day, for his mother was of a family even more important than his father’s, and it was the mother’s rank that counted in such matters. He asked the Alo Man some questions about the best way of defending one’s village, and without saying anything very definite in reply the Alo Man went on to tell the story of the Quarrelsome Ants. The story perhaps gained in interest from the fact that several different kinds of ants were just then busy in plain sight.
I often see things [the Alo Man began] that remind me of the time when all the Ants met together in palaver under a large tree, like this one, to try to find some way of protecting themselves from their enemies.
“We have more enemies than any other creatures on earth,” groaned the Black Ants.
“We are perfectly helpless, whatever happens,” wailed the Red Ants. “A Centipede came to our village yesterday and ate up all our slaves before we could do anything.”
“The other creatures are so large,” lamented the Rice Ant. “They are provided with weapons suited especially to hurt us. The Anteater came to our hill and poked his long, slender tongue down every corridor and into every hole, and licked us up by the hundred.”
