He perceived the ants were becoming interesting, and the nearer he drew to them the more interesting they became.  Gerilleau abandoned his old themes almost suddenly, and the Portuguese lieutenant became a conversational figure; he knew something about the leaf-cutting ant, and expanded his knowledge.  Gerilleau sometimes rendered what he had to tell to Holroyd.  He told of the little workers that swarm and fight, and the big workers that command and rule, and how these latter always crawled to the neck and how their bites drew blood.  He told how they cut leaves and made fungus beds, and how their nests in Caracas are sometimes a hundred yards across.  Two days the three men spent disputing whether ants have eyes.  The discussion grew dangerously heated on the second afternoon, and Holroyd saved the situation by going ashore in a boat to catch ants and see.  He captured various specimens and returned, and some had eyes and some hadn’t.  Also, they argued, do ants bite or sting?

“Dese ants,” said Gerilleau, after collecting information at a rancho, “have big eyes.  They don’t run about blind—­not as most ants do.  No!  Dey get in corners and watch what you do.”

“And they sting?” asked Holroyd.

“Yes.  Dey sting.  Dere is poison in the sting.”  He meditated.  “I do not see what men can do against ants.  Dey come and go.”

“But these don’t go.”

“They will,” said Gerilleau.

Past Tamandu there is a long low coast of eighty miles without any population, and then one comes to the confluence of the main river and the Batemo arm like a great lake, and then the forest came nearer, came at last intimately near.  The character of the channel changes, snags abound, and the Benjamin Constant moored by a cable that night, under the very shadow of dark trees.  For the first time for many days came a spell of coolness, and Holroyd and Gerilleau sat late, smoking cigars and enjoying this delicious sensation.  Gerilleau’s mind was full of ants and what they could do.  He decided to sleep at last, and lay down on a mattress on deck, a man hopelessly perplexed, his last words, when he already seemed asleep, were to ask, with a flourish of despair, “What can one do with ants?...  De whole thing is absurd.”

Holroyd was left to scratch his bitten wrists, and meditate alone.

He sat on the bulwark and listened to the little changes in Gerilleau’s breathing until he was fast asleep, and then the ripple and lap of the stream took his mind, and brought back that sense of immensity that had been growing upon him since first he had left Para and come up the river.  The monitor showed but one small light, and there was first a little talking forward and then stillness.  His eyes went from the dim black outlines of the middle works of the gunboat towards the bank, to the black overwhelming mysteries of forest, lit now and then by a fire-fly, and never still from the murmur of alien and mysterious activities...