Not only do they eat up the
insects in their line of march, but they fall even upon larger creatures
and upon big snakes, which they attack first in the eyes, the most
vulnerable portion. When they reach a negro village the inhabitants turn
out _en masse_, and run away, exactly as if the visitors were English
explorers or brave Marines, bent upon retaliating for the theft of a
knife by nobly burning down King Tom's town or King Jumbo's capital.
Then the negroes wait in the jungle till the little black army has
passed on, after clearing out the huts by the way of everything eatable.
When they return they find their calabashes and saucepans licked clean,
but they also find every rat, mouse, lizard, cockroach, gecko, and
beetle completely cleared out from the whole village. Most of them have
cut and run at the first approach of the drivers; of the remainder, a
few blanched and neatly-picked skeletons alone remain to tell the tale.
As I wish to be considered a veracious historian, I will not retail the
further strange stories that still find their way into books of natural
history about the manners and habits of these blind marauders. They
cross rivers, the West African gossips declare, by a number of devoted
individuals flinging themselves first into the water as a living bridge,
like so many six-legged Marcus Curtiuses, while over their drowning
bodies the heedless remainder march in safety to the other side. If the
story is not true, it is at least well invented; for the
ant-commonwealth everywhere carries to the extremest pitch the old Roman
doctrine of the absolute subjection of the individual to the State.
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