All life, except one, and that the keenest--a consuming and burned-up life, it seems--the life of those beings powerful under an infinitely little form, in which one might have readily concluded that a black flame, shining fitfully, had consumed all that was material, and reserved only what was spiritual. [Illustration] The _coup de théâtre_ was violent, and the immense swarming had its effect. A vivid and unwonted joy agitated the much-moved hand that had made the happy discovery; and in proportion to the full revelation of its greatness, a wild vertigo passed from the distracted people to the author of this great ruin. The walls of the city fell down, and revealed the interior of the edifice; innumerable halls and galleries were laid bare; generally four to five inches in length, and about half an inch in height,--a height certainly quite sufficient, and even majestic, if we take into account the size of the members of the community. A true palace, or rather a vast and superb city; limited in breadth, but to what depth may it not penetrate the earth? It is said that some have been found which, perseveringly excavated, have numbered no fewer than seven hundred stories. Thebes and Nineveh were insignificant! Babylon and Babel alone might have sustained, in their audaciously towering piles, a comparison with these shadowy Babels which continually expanded in the abyss. But more astonishing than the grandeur is the interior aspect of these habitations: without, all damp, and mossy, and overgrown with tiny cryptogams; within, an astonishing dryness, and an admirable cleanliness--every partition firm though soft, just as if it had been tapestried with cotton velvet, very heavy and lustreless. Is this black velvet produced from the wood itself, after undergoing powerful modification, or by an extremely delicate layer of microscopic fungi which may have been established in the tree while it was still moist, and before it received its all-powerful necromancers? The agent of the transformation betrayed itself directly: each separate cell, if closely smelt, betrayed the pungent odour of formic acid, by means of which the busy race had effected the metamorphosis of its abode, had burned it and purified it with its flame, had dried it and rendered it wholesome with its useful poison. [Illustration]