allen over backwards and been powerless to rise
or move, I should have been killed within half an hour, for a stray
column of army ants was passing within a yard of me, and death would
await any helpless being falling across their path. But by searching
out a copperhead and imitating Cleopatra, or with patience and
persistence devouring every toadstool, the same result could be
achieved in our home-town orchard. When on the march, the army ants
are as innocuous at two inches as at two miles. Had I sat where I was
for days and for nights, my chief danger would have been demise from
sheer chagrin at my inability to grasp the deeper significance of life
and its earthly activities.

III

THE HOME TOWN OF THE ARMY ANTS

From uniform to civilian clothes is a change transcending mere
alteration of stuffs and buttons. It is scarcely less sweeping than
the shift from civilian clothes to bathing-suit, which so often
compels us to concentrate on remembered mental attributes, to avoid
demanding a renewed introduction to estranged personality. In the home
life of the average soldier, the relaxation from sustained tension and
conscious routine results in a gentleness and quietness of mood for
which warrior nations are especially remembered.

Army ants have no insignia to lay aside, and their swords are too
firmly hafted in their own beings to be hung up as post-bellum mural
decorations, or--as is done only in poster-land--metamorphosed into
pruning-hooks and plowshares.

I sat at my laboratory table at Kartabo, and looked down river to the
pink roof of Kalacoon, and my mind went back to the shambles of Pit
Number Five.[1] I was wondering whether I should ever see the army
ants in any guise other than that of scouting, battling searchers for
living prey, when a voice of the jungle seemed to hear my unexpressed
wish. The sharp, high notes of white-fronted antbirds--those
white-crested watchers of the ants--came to my ears, and I left my
table and followed up the sound. Physically, I merely walked around
the bungalow and approached the edge of the jungle at a point where we
had erected a small outhouse a day or two before. But this two hundred
feet might just as well have been a single step through quicksilver,
hand in hand with Alice, for it took me from a world of hyoids and
syrinxes, of vials and lenses and clean-smelling xylol, to the home of
the army ants.

[Footnote 1: See _Jungle Peace_, p. 211.]

The antbirds w