In less than a fortnight, silence prevails in all the shells. The prisoners, worn out with ineffectual efforts, have perished. I break the caskets containing the deceased. A meagre pinch of dust, representing hardly an average pea in bulk, is all that the sturdy implements—rasp, saw, harrow and rake—have succeeded in sundering from the invincible wall. Other shells, of a similar hardness, are wrapped in a wet rag and enclosed in a flask. When the moisture has soaked through them, I relieve them of their wrapper and keep them in the corked flask. This time, events take a very different turn. Softened to a nicety by the wet rag, the shells burst, ripped open by the shove of the prisoner, who props himself boldly on his legs, using his back as a lever; or else, scraped away at one point, they crumble to pieces and yawn with a wide breach. The success is complete. In each case, the delivery is effected without impediment; a few drops of water have brought them the joys of the sun. For the second time, Horapollo was right. Certainly, it is not the mother, as the old author says, who throws her ball into the water: it is the clouds that provide the liberating ablution, the rain that facilitates the ultimate release. In the natural state, things must happen as in my experiments. In August, in a burnt soil, under a thin screen of earth, the shells, baked like bricks, are for most of the time as hard as pebbles. It is impossible for the insect to wear out its casket and escape from it. But, should a shower come upon the scene—that life-giving baptism which the seed of the plant and the family of the Scarab alike await within the ashes of the soil—should a little rain fall, soon the fields will present the appearance of a resurrection. The earth is soaked. This is the wet rag of my experiment. At its touch, the shell recovers the softness of its early days, the casket becomes yielding; the insect makes play with its legs, pushes with its back; it is free. It is, in fact, in the month of September, during the first rains which herald the coming autumn, that the Scarab leaves the native burrow and comes to enliven the pastoral sward, even as the former generation enlivened it in the spring. The clouds, hitherto so chary, have come at last to set him free. Under conditions of exceptional coolness of the earth, the bursting of the shell and the emerging of its occupant can occur at an earlier period; but, in ground scorched by the fierce sun of summer, as is usually the case in these parts, the Scarab, however eager he may be to see the light, must needs wait for the first rains to soften his stubborn shell. A downpour means to him a question of life and death. Horapollo, that echo of the Egyptian magi, saw true when he made water play its part in the insect’s birth.