I now flattened myself on an antless area at the edge of the pit and studied the field of battle. In another half-hour the massacre was almost over. Five double, and often quadruple, columns were formed up the sandy cliffs, and the terrific labor of carrying out the dead victims began. The pit was five feet deep, with perfectly straight sides, which at the rim had been gutted by the rain, so that they actually overhung. Yet the ants which had half-climbed, half-tumbled and rolled their way to the bottom in the wake of their victims, now set themselves to solving the problem of surmounting these cliffs of loose, crumbling grains, dragging loads which, in most cases, were much heavier than themselves. Imagine a gang of men set to carrying bundles of one to two hundred pounds up perpendicular cliffs twelve hundred feet in height, and the task of the army ants is made more vivid. So swiftly did they work and so constantly shifted their formations and methods of meeting and surmounting difficulties, that I felt as I used when looking at a three-ring circus. I could perceive and record only a small part of the ingenious devices and the mutual assistance and sharing of the complicated conditions which arose at every step. Among the frightened victims, even for those endowed with excellent eyesight and powerful flight, there was only hopeless confusion and blind terror. Instead of directing their flight upward, they drove from side to side. Those whose leaps should have carried them out, simply kicked out blindly and brought up against the sandy walls. If leaf-cutting ants had been at work here, there would have been a certain amount of cooperation. Certain ones would have cut leaves, other individuals would have picked them up and transported them. But with the army ants this mutual assistance was sublimated, developed to a quintessence of excellence. If I, seated on the rim, overlooking the whole, had been an all-powerful spirit, gifted with the ability to guide by thought simultaneously all the ants within sight, such guidance could not have bettered the cunning cooperation, the unexpectedly clever anticipation of trouble, the marvelous singleness of purpose and manifold effectiveness exhibited by these astounding creatures. First, as to the personnel of the army ants. Roughly I divided them into two categories, white-heads and black-heads. The latter were by far the more numerous and, as a rule, were smaller, with less powerful jaws. But this did not mean that the white-heads were all soldiers. Most of them indeed were the hardest workers. Between the great extremes of size in each of these two types, there seemed to exist only a difference of degree. The smallest black-head laborers, only a little more than one-fifth of an inch long, did their bit, flew like bull pups at any prey which showed signs of life, and staggered bravely along with any piece of loot which their short legs could straddle.