The scene, regarded from a near point of view, was frightful. Whatever admiration the little ones merited for their heroic courage, their fury made one shudder. It was impossible to see without a feeling of pity these poor garotted giants, dragged miserably to and fro,--fired at from right and left,--floating as in an open sea on these billows of rage and impetuosity,--blind, powerless, and incapable of resistance,--like lambs beneath the butcher's knife. * * * * * We longed to separate them. But how was it to be done? We were in the presence of infinity. A man's strength was nothing when tested against such multitudes. We might have proceeded to the extremity of a universal deluge,--a moment's _noyade_[P]--but even this would have proved insufficient. They would not have let go their death-grasp; and when the torrent had flowed by, the massacre would have continued. The sole remedy, and an atrocious one--worse even than the evil--would have been to have burned alive, with a wisp of flaming straw, the two contending hosts, the conquerors and the conquered. [Footnote P: The wholesale drownings which took place at Lyons during the Reign of Terror were known as _noyades_.--Translator.] We were particularly struck by the fact that, after all, it was only a very few of the big ants that were garotted and captured; and that if those which remained free had fallen upon the assailants, they might easily have wrought a frightful carnage, their action being so rapid, and one blow inflicting death. But no such idea occurred to them. They ran hither and thither in a panic of fear, and rushed into the very throes of danger, into the thickest press of the hostile masses. Alas, they were not only vanquished, but seemed to have lost their senses! While the little ants, feeling themselves at home, on their native soil, showed so firm a front, the gigantic foreigners,--without any stake in the ground,--a desperate fragment of an annihilated city,--wholly ignorant of the country whither they had been transplanted,--recognized that everything was antagonistic to them, that a snare was hidden at every step, that no refuge was open to their scattered forces. Ah, woful condition of a people whose fatherland has perished, and who have lost their gods! * * * * * Yes, I excuse them. We ourselves were almost terrified at the sight of those legions of death,--that formidable army of little black skeletons which had all escaladed the earthen vase, and in that confined region, choked and burning, crowded and furious, mounted one upon another. As the discomfiture of the giants became a thing assured, horrible appetites were revealed among the blacks. An opportune moment arrived. It was a dramatic stroke! In their mute but terribly eloquent pantomime, we heard this cry: "Their young ones are fat!"