His long trails on the sand tell us of nocturnal rounds in search of big game, often the Pimelia, sometimes the Half-spotted Scarab.[5] The find is not consumed on the spot. To enjoy it at his ease, he needs the peaceful darkness of the underground manor; and so the captive, seized by one leg with the pincers, is forcibly dragged along the ground. [Footnote 5: Cf. _The Sacred Beetle and Others_: chaps. ii. and vii.-- _Translator's Note_.] If no precautions were taken, the introduction of the victim into the burrow would be impracticable, with a huge quarry offering a desperate resistance. But the entrance to the tunnel is a wide crater, with crumbling walls. However large he be, the captive, tugged from below, enters and tumbles into the pit. The crumbling rubbish immediately buries him and paralyses his movements. The thing is done. The bandit now proceeds to close his door and empty his prey's belly. CHAPTER XIV THE SIMULATION OF DEATH The first insect that we will put to the question is that audacious disemboweller, the savage Scarites. To provoke his state of inertia is a very simple matter: I handle him for a moment, rolling him between my fingers; better still, I drop him on the table, twice or thrice in succession, from a small height. When the shock due to the fall has been administered and, if need be, repeated, I turn the insect on its back. This is enough: the prostrate Beetle no longer stirs, lies as though dead. The legs are folded on the belly, the antennae extended like the arms of a cross, the pincers open. A watch beside me tells me the exact minute of the beginning and the end of the experiment. Nothing remains but to wait and especially to arm one's self with patience, for the insect's immobility lasts long enough to become tedious to the observer watching for something to happen. The duration of the lifeless posture varies greatly on the same day, under the same atmospheric conditions and with the same subject, though I cannot fathom the causes which shorten or lengthen it. How to investigate the external influences, so numerous and often so slight, which intervene in such a case; above all, how to scrutinize the insect's private impressions: these are impenetrable mysteries. Let us confine ourselves to recording the results. Immobility continues fairly often for as long as fifty minutes; in certain cases, even, it lasts more than an hour. The most frequent length of time averages twenty minutes. If nothing disturbs the Beetle, if I cover him with a glass shade, protecting him from the Flies, who are importunate visitors in the hot weather prevailing at the time of my experiment, the inertia is complete: not a quiver of the tarsi, nor of the palpi, nor of the antennae. Here indeed is a simulacrum of death, with all its inertia.