The mother, more skilled in nursery matters, occupies the lower floor. She alone digs, versed as she is in the properties of the perpendicular, which economizes work while giving the greatest depth. She is the engineer, always in touch with the working-face of the gallery. The other is her journeyman-mason. He is stationed at the back, ready to load the rubbish on his horny hod. Later, the excavatrix becomes a baker: she kneads the cakes for the children into cylinders; the father is then her baker’s boy. He fetches her from outside the wherewithal for making flour. As in every well-regulated household, the mother is minister of the interior, the father minister of the exterior. This would explain their invariable position in the tubular home. The future will tell us if these conjectures represent the reality as it is. For the moment, let us make ourselves at home and examine at leisure the central clod so laboriously acquired. It contains preserved foodstuffs in the shape of a sausage nearly as long and thick as one’s finger. This is composed of a dark, compact matter, arranged in layers, which we recognize as the sheep-pellets reduced to morsels. Sometimes, the dough is fine and almost homogeneous from one end of the cylinder to the other; more often, the piece is a sort of hardbake, in which large fragments are held together by a cement of amalgam. The baker apparently varies the more or less finished confection of her pastry according to the time at her disposal. The thing is closely moulded in the terminal pocket of the burrow, where the walls are smoother and more carefully fashioned than in the rest of the pit. The point of the knife easily strips it of the surrounding earth, which peels like a rind or bark. In this way, I obtain the food-cylinder free of any earthy blemish. Having done this, let us look into the matter of the egg; for the pastry has certainly been manipulated in view of a grub. Guided by what I learnt some time ago from the Geotrupes, who lodge the egg at the lower end of their pudding, in a special recess contrived in the very heart of the provisions, I expect to find Minotaurus’ egg right at the bottom of the sausage. I am ill-informed. The egg sought for is not at the expected end, nor at the other end, nor at any point whatever of the victuals. A search outside the provisions shows it me at last. It is below the food, in the sand itself, deprived of all the finikin cares dear to mothers. There is here not a smooth-walled cell, such as the delicate epidermis of the new-born grub would seem to call for, but a rough cavity, the result of a mere landslip rather than of maternal industry. The worm is to be hatched in this rude berth, at some distance from its provisions. To reach the food, it will have to demolish and pass through a ceiling of sand some millimetres thick.