ruggle of giant trees, of strangulating
creepers, of assertive flowers, everywhere the alligator, the turtle, and
endless varieties of birds and insects seemed at home, dwelt
irreplaceably--but man, man at most held a footing upon resentful
clearings, fought weeds, fought beasts and insects for the barest
foothold, fell a prey to snake and beast, insect and fever, and was
presently carried away. In many places down the river he had been
manifestly driven back, this deserted creek or that preserved the name of
a _casa_, and here and there ruinous white walls and a shattered
tower enforced the lesson. The puma, the jaguar, were more the masters
here...

Who were the real masters?

In a few miles of this forest there must be more ants than there are men
in the whole world! This seemed to Holroyd a perfectly new idea. In a few
thousand years men had emerged from barbarism to a stage of civilisation
that made them feel lords of the future and masters of the earth! But what
was to prevent the ants evolving also? Such ants as one knew lived in
little communities of a few thousand individuals, made no concerted
efforts against the greater world. But they had a language, they had an
intelligence! Why should things stop at that any more than men had stopped
at the barbaric stage? Suppose presently the ants began to store
knowledge, just as men had done by means of books and records, use
weapons, form great empires, sustain a planned and organised war?

Things came back to him that Gerilleau had gathered about these ants they
were approaching. They used a poison like the poison of snakes. They
obeyed greater leaders even as the leaf-cutting ants do. They were
carnivorous, and where they came they stayed...

The forest was very still. The water lapped incessantly against the side.
About the lantern overhead there eddied a noiseless whirl of phantom
moths.

Gerilleau stirred in the darkness and sighed. "What can one _do?_" he
murmured, and turned over and was still again.

Holroyd was roused from meditations that were becoming sinister by the hum
of a mosquito.

II.

The next morning Holroyd learnt they were within forty kilometres of
Badama, and his interest in the banks intensified. He came up whenever an
opportunity offered to examine his surroundings. He could see no signs of
human occupation whatever, save for a weedy ruin of a house and the
green-stained facade of the long-deserted monastery at Moju, with a forest