There was no order of packing. The larvæ were fitted together anyway, and meagerly covered with dust of wood and shreds of cloth. One big tissue of wood nearly an inch square was too great a temptation to be let alone, and during the course of my observation it covered in turn almost every group of larvæ in sight, ending by being accidentally shunted over the edge and killing a worker near the kitchen middens. There was only a single layer of larvæ; in no case were they piled up, and when the platform became crowded, a new column was formed and hundreds taken outside. To the casual eye there was no difference between these legionaries and a column bringing in booty of insects, eggs, and pupæ; yet here all was solicitude, never a bite too severe, or a blunder of undue force. The sights I saw in this second day's accessible nest-swarm would warrant a season's meditation and study, but one thing impressed me above all others. Sometimes, when I carefully pried open one section and looked deep within, I could see large chambers with the larvæ in piles, besides being held in the mandibles of the components of the walls and ceilings. Now and then a curious little ghost-like form would flit across the chamber, coming to rest, gnome-like, on larva or ant. Again and again I saw these little springtails skip through the very scimitar mandibles of a soldier, while the workers paid no attention to them. I wondered if they were not quite odorless, intangible to the ants, invisible guests which lived close to them, going where, doing what they willed, yet never perceived by the thousands of inhabitants. They seemed to live in a kind of fourth dimensional state, a realm comparable to that which we people with ghosts and spirits. It was a most uncanny, altogether absorbing, intensely interesting relationship; and sometimes, when I ponder on some general aspect of the great jungle,--a forest of greenheart, a mighty rushing river, a crashing, blasting thunderstorm,--my mind suddenly reverts by way of contrast to the tiny ghosts of springtails flitting silently among the terrible living chambers of the army ants. On the following morning I expected to achieve still greater intimacy in the lives of the mummy soldier embryos; but at dawn every trace of nesting swarm, larvæ, pupæ and soldiers was gone. A few dead workers were being already carried off by small ants which never would have dared approach them in life. A big blue morpho butterfly flapped slowly past out of the jungle, and in its wake came the distant notes--high and sharp--of the white-fronted antbirds; and I knew that the legionaries were again abroad, radiating on their silent, dynamic paths of life from some new temporary nest deep in the jungle. IV A JUNGLE BEACH