The Empire of the Ants

When Captain Gerilleau received instructions to take his new gunboat, the
_Benjamin Constant,_ to Badama on the Batemo arm of the Guaramadema
and there assist the inhabitants against a plague of ants, he suspected
the authorities of mockery. His promotion had been romantic and irregular,
the affections of a prominent Brazilian lady and the captain's liquid eyes
had played a part in the process, and the _Diario_ and _O
Futuro_ had been lamentably disrespectful in their comments. He felt he
was to give further occasion for disrespect.

He was a Creole, his conceptions of etiquette and discipline were
pure-blooded Portuguese, and it was only to Holroyd, the Lancashire
engineer who had come over with the boat, and as an exercise in the use of
English--his "th" sounds were very uncertain--that he opened his heart.

"It is in effect," he said, "to make me absurd! What can a man do against
ants? Dey come, dey go."

"They say," said Holroyd, "that these don't go. That chap you said was a
Sambo----"

"Zambo;--it is a sort of mixture of blood."

"Sambo. He said the people are going!"

The captain smoked fretfully for a time. "Dese tings 'ave to happen," he
said at last. "What is it? Plagues of ants and suchlike as God wills. Dere
was a plague in Trinidad--the little ants that carry leaves. Orl der
orange-trees, all der mangoes! What does it matter? Sometimes ant armies
come into your houses--fighting ants; a different sort. You go and they
clean the house. Then you come back again;--the house is clean, like new!
No cockroaches, no fleas, no jiggers in the floor."

"That Sambo chap," said Holroyd, "says these are a different sort of ant."

The captain shrugged his shoulders, fumed, and gave his attention to a
cigarette.

Afterwards he reopened the subject. "My dear 'Olroyd, what am I to do
about dese infernal ants?"

The captain reflected. "It is ridiculous," he said. But in the afternoon
he put on his full uniform and went ashore, and jars and boxes came back
to the ship and subsequently he did. And Holroyd sat on deck in the
evening coolness and smoked profoundly and marvelled at Brazil. They were
six days up the Amazon, some hundreds of miles from the ocean, and east
and west of him there was a horizon like the sea, and to the south nothing
but a sand-bank island with some tufts of scrub. The water was always
running like a sluice, thick with dirt, animated with crocodiles and
hovering birds, and fed by some inexhaustible source of tree trunks; and
the waste of it, the headlong waste of it, filled his soul. The town of
Alemquer, with its meagre