imagination was not on the list.
F or several days thereafter we rested, while the peculiar aftertaste of our encounter in the ravine gradually wore off. It had left its mark on me, however, if for no
other reason than that for the first time I had had an
opportunity to see four more inhabitants of the country at
close range; and the resultant conclusion was hard to
evade.
You may have noticed that up to now, although I had
accepted Atta and his story at face value, I had carefully
refrained from emphasizing the one fateful question
that had lain at the back of my mind ever since I had
A T T A
45
come upon my new and strange companion. Waking and
sleeping, this question had already beat upon my unwilling brain until I could scarcely endure a repetition of its unwelcome attentions. But now, with the four black
strangers still vivid in my memory, it became a question
that I could no longer ignore.
Put into cold words instead of the nameless apprehensions of my first moments in the ravine, it amounted to this: What kind of people were these on whom I had
stumbled in this incredible, uncharted place? Had I, by
some legerdemain, been transferred to an unknown and
distant part of the earth where creatures of a familiar
species, grown to gigantic size, occupied the place of the
inhabitants with whom I had been brought up?
To be specific: Was my host Atta himself nothing more
than a species of gargantuan, highly developed ant, and
his enemies and companions other ants with whom I was
condemned to struggle on some obscure continent hitherto undiscovered?
Historically, I knew, the fate of certain species of the
past presented an almost total mystery to the best scientific minds. Were there possibly sections of the earth inhabited, not by men at all, but by gigantic insects possessed of an intelligence which some trick of Nature had stopped dead in the insects I knew, but which was here
still present and evolving?
The possibility struck me hard as I remembered the
black strangers and gazed appraisingly at Atta. I noticed
his peculiar build, his beak and gentle eyes, and the manner in which his legs and feelers were attached to his body. Even his high-domed forehead and his brushed-back hair bore out such a conjecture. Certainly, whether
engaged in conversation with me or busy in his mushroom cutting activities or sitting back with his legs crossed watching the rain, he resembled nothing so much
as a gigantic and exaggerated reproduction of the ants
I had seen on photographic plates at agricultural college.
48
A T T A
If this were so, my case might not be so mysterious after
all.“Have you ever seen or heard of a creature like me before?” I ventured to ask Atta one day during our siesta.
No, he hadn’t, he admitted rather humorously.
“I’ve just been wondering,” I said frankly, “if perhaps
I arrived in this country' through the air.”
“Through the air!” he repeated, as he often did when
he was puzzled. “What do you mean by ‘through the
air?” He sat polishing his armor when he said this, and
he stopped to stare at me “You have no wings,” he added.
“How could you have come through the air?”
“I mean, picked up by some huge flying creature,” I explained. “One that dropped me from the sky by accident.”
“That is possible,” he said slowly. “But I have never
known a Formican to be thus caught up and carried
away.”
“But you have seen flying creatures big enough to do
it—and plenty of them,” I pointed out. “Could not one of
your larger ones have roamed as far as my country and
seized me in my own fields?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But it makes no difference, does
it? You are here—and not there.”
“It might make a great deal of difference,” I said rather
testily, “since it would solve the mystery of my presence.”
“There is nothing to be gained by considering mysteries,” said Atta irritably.
And thereafter he refused to discuss the subject at all.
Strange as this was—an attitude so extraordinary that
I did not fully comprehend it at once—it was not calculated to encourage further open speculation on my part, and I too dropped the idea for the time being. For as a
called all the surrounding country—it brought up nearly
as many questions as it answered.
Nevertheless the basic thought behind it—that somehow, in some logical manner, I had been merely trans-
A T T A
47
ferred to another life in an unexplored section of the
earth—this basic thought remained and gave me a certain
amount of cold comfort: the comfort of reason and sanity.
Mainly because of it I got Atta to answer as many questions as I could about himself and his country, and out of these grew eventually those long conversations that finally produced such a remarkable result.
~~
Meanwhile the practical problem of my eventual survival still bothered me, and so did the rude savagery of our dwelling. But I now had the raw materials for tools
and weapons, and, having been brought up on a farm,
I knew how to use my hands and moreover possessed a
kind of native Yankee inventiveness. These advantages
now stood me in good stead. Within a few days I had
contrived, out of my new collection of sharp glass, a
fairly complete set of carpenter tools, and with these and
my ax I was soon able to make a greater variety of useful
articles than perhaps would seem possible to those who
have never been thrown upon their own resources or
been out of touch with our complicated civilization and
its inexhaustible roster of manufactured products. Life is
fascinating to the handyman, and all these things, particularly the roof gutter and rain barrel that I constructed for drinking and washing water, took my mind off my
larger problem. They also interested Atta excessively, although he complained that we should be unable to take them with us when finally we were free to move; therefore why make them?
To my need for weapons, however, he was more sympathetic. With his help I made a bow from the springly wood of the near-by trees, strung it with a twisted rope
strand, and then fashioned eleven straight arrows, which
I tipped with the needle-sharp crystals from the ravine.
To hold them steady in their flight I used a material resembling coarse thistledown to feather them. This came from a mass of the stuff that had become entangled in
our grove; it had plumes nearly four feet long. Inci
48
A T T A
dentally I made a rough carpet from this material, too,
a pallet for myself, and a curtain for the circular door.
I also planted some of its seeds in a thick row around
the house at a distance of some hundred feet, for according to Atta, it was a plant that grew very quickly and would serve to screen us from the observation of our still
ever-present enemies. He was right; the seeds soon
sprouted and grew with astonishing rapidly, as for that
matter did all the vegetation in this strange country—
twenty-four inches in a night sometimes—and before
many
days had passed we had a thick hedge twenty feet
high around our domain. It not only hid us from view,
but it also formed a fairly effective barrier against sudden
mass attack, for the trunks were covered with sharp
spines through which even an aggressive enemy could
not penetrate without difficulty.
Indeed, with Atta’s help I soon transformed the house
into a small fortress capable of standing siege for an indefinite time. I made a rough door that opened inward, swung from the top by rope hinges; it could be fastened
up during the day, but at night or in case of attack it
could be held shut by pins that dropped into holes cut
in the floor. With much labor, I cut two very narrow
windows in the wall, one on each side of the door. These
admitted plenty of fresh air and gave me apertures
through which I could shoot my arrows should anyone
attempt to force an entrance.
I also made a ladder, for the door was six feet above the
ground, and this I pulled up at night.
One problem that gave me considerable trouble was
how to lock the door on the outside. It was quite possible
that on our return from an exploring expedition we might
find our house occupied by a wild beast or even a party of
savage marauders, in which event we should have to
search for another residence. I puzzled over this for
several days, and at last I hit upon a device which,
though it may have shown no great ingenuity, served
the purpose admirably. I knotted a short piece of rope to
A T T A
49
a billet of wood, passed the free end through a small
hole which I bored in the center of the door, and fastened
it to a stout four-foot stick, tying it as closely as I could
to the outer surface of the door. Our doorway was irregularly oval, a little over four feet high but only three feet wide. It will be seen that, when the door was closed
from the outside, the stick could be twisted crossways
until it overlapped the edges on either side, and that to
open the door again the stick must be twisted back to
the perpendicular in order to pass through the opening.
A man, of course, would have understood it at a glance,
but our savage neighbors, Atta said, although their
strongholds had gates that were closed at nightfall, did
not understand the use of the simplest locks, and he assured me that the thought of twisting the bar to obtain entrance would never occur to any of them.
When I had completed these arrangements for our
safety I spent many hours practising with my bow and
arrows and with a lasso that I made from some more
unraveled strands of the rope. To my pleasure, my boyhood proficiency soon returned, and I found that with a little practice I could rope Atta, jerk him from his feet
with an unexpected tug, and tie him fast before he could
seize me with his beak. He displayed a never-failing interest in this game, though I found it impossible to teach him to throw the rope himself. Occasionally he would
challenge me to a wrestling bout, but his strength was
so much greater than mine that, once he had seized me,
I was helpless as an infant. The wrestling taught me one
useful thing, however. Although the Formican, as Atta
named his race, can run swiftly enough in a straight line,
he cannot turn quickly and is thus far easier to dodge
than, say a charging bull. This piece of knowledge increased my confidence in my ability to defend myself, for I felt that with my ax and lasso I was more than a match
for the most powerful enemy.
We had now, as I have said, fortified the house so that
it would be capable of standing a prolonged siege. But
50
A T T A
there was still one difficulty: the food supply. As long as
Atta could procure leaves for our mushroom, cellgr we
should not lack for food and drink, but if the supply were
discontinued, as it would be during a siege, the garden
would cease bearing and we should sooner or later be
forced to surrender. I had cudgeled my brains in vain
for some way out of this difficulty, A chance remark of
Atta’s one evening finally gave me an idea. He had been
telling me nostalgically of the great cities of his homeland; how they were built, not as we build houses of stone or wood, but hollowed out of the ground, story below story, all connected by inclined corridors.
“It must require a tremendous labor force,” I observed,
“to build a city such as you describe.”
“Not so much as you might think,” replied Atta. “For-
micans are strong, and they understand the work.” And
he went on to tell me of the great length of the corridors
or streets, fifteen miles long, some of them, as nearly as
I could guess. He himself, he said, had once superintended the driving of a tunnel under the wide bed of a flowing river, in order to reach a particular forest whose
leaves were useful in cultivating certain delicate varieties
of mushroom.
At this point I sprang to my feet with a shout.
“What is wrong with you?” he exclaimed, tapping the
floor testily with his foot. He was very methodical in
everything he did, and he hated above all things to be
interrupted when he was explaining something practical.
“Why,” I exclaimed, “don’t you see? If your people
could dig a tunnel like that without any tools, you and I
can do the same thing on a smaller scale. We can cut
through our cellar floor and run an underground passage beneath the hedge and up into the grove. Then, no matter what happens, we shall always be able to get
plenty of leaves for the garden.”
Atta looked at me with admiration. ‘1 should never
have thought of that,” he confessed, “although I knew
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51
we should have to do something of the kind if these savages stay around until the Great Cold comes.”
"Winter!” I exclaimed. “Then you have winter here?”
For the profuse and luxuriant vegetation had latterly
led me to believe that the climate must be semitropical.
Naturally there was winter, Atta replied; white crystals
sometimes fell to an unbelievable depth.
“Then what do you do for food in your cities?” I asked.
“We store it,” Atta replied. "We have to go down many
stories, though, to keep it warm.”
“Well, well cross that bridge when we come to it,” I
said. “But the first thing to do is to begin a tunnel, and
we might as well start at once.”
I picked up my ax and let myself down into the cellar,
followed by Atta. Only a very faint light came through
the hole in the floor above us, but it was sufficient to enable me to set to work, and in two hours’ time I had a gap three feet across cut through the floor. Then Atta
took my place and began to dig.
It was astonishing, the rate at which he worked. He
was practically tireless, and though it took many days of
unremitting toil to complete our underground passage
he worked almost constantly, breaking off only occasionally to eat or to accompany me on the little excursions that I insisted on making into the surrounding country.
It was pitch black in the t
unnel, of course, but Atta
could see in the dark as well as in the bright sunlight,
and as far as I could make out he seldom slept. At night
when I threw myself on my soft bed of thistledown, exhausted from the long hours of carrying heavy loads of earth up into the cellar, he would be digging away in the
tunnel. When I woke up in the morning he would be at
it again, and only with difficulty could he be persuaded
to come up for breakfast. He kept at it; and so exact was
his engineering mind that when he finally said we had
gone far enough and he would now go outside and dig
down in the grove for an entrance, he proved to be less
than half a foot off in his calculations. In all he had taken
52
A T T A
less than twelve days, and the tunnel was at least two
hundred yards long.
It was a remarkable achievement—one that I thought
called for a celebration. “We ought to have wine!” I exclaimed, “or something different, at least. I’m sick to death of these mushrooms. Don’t you have any change of diet
in your cities?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “In Fusa there is grain. The planters
grow it outside the city.”
“No,” I said, “I mean something to drink. “Don’t you
ever have anything to drink?”
He looked a little reflective at this, I thought, and after
some prodding he admitted that naturally there was
plenty of nectar in all the big towns. Skins of it hung in
the market-places, and everyone drank. But it was out of
the question in the wilderness. Herds of aphids were required, and workers to feed and milk them,
“Wouldn’t there be any aphids around here?” I inquired.
Only wild ones, he said; though they were a tame sort
of creature at best. And with this he indicated, as was his
habit, that he should like to drop the subject.
But my curiosity had been aroused—our mushroom
diet had decidely begun to pall on me—and I kept at him
until finally he admitted that, yes, almost anyone could
milk an aphid and that in all likelihood there were plenty
of wild ones in the lush green uplands beyond the
plateau where we had found the rope and encountered