Leiningen Versus the Ants
Kuvakäsikirjoitus Teksti
- Leiningen, a plantation owner in Brazil, talking to the District Commissioner, who is warning the planter to leave before a troupe of flesh-eating ants—“ten miles long, two miles wide”descends and eats him alive. Leiningen refuses, arguing that he’s no “old woman” and will simply “use his intelligence”to fend off the hungry horde of ants. He also believes that he’s lived in Brazil long enough to know how to defend himself, his 400 workers, and his plantation against the fearsome insects.
- That evening, Leiningen gathers his plantation workers and tells them that the ants will soon arrive. The workers—all of whom are indigenous people—listen calmly, “unafraid” and “alert”. They are confident in their boss’s wisdom. The ants arrive the next afternoon. The horses first sense the insects’ arrival, becoming “scarcely controllable now install or under rider” . Then “a stampede of animals” , big and small, rushes from the jungle—stags, lizards, jaguars, cattle, and monkeys—to escape the oncoming ants. The animals run along the riverbank and then disappear.
- Leiningen, however, has prepared for the ants by constructing a “water-filled ditch” in the shape of a horseshoe. The ditch empties into the river. He’s also built a dam, which allows him to reroute water from the river into the 12-foot ditch. Leiningen plans to open the dam, allowing river water to flood around the plantation. This would create a kind of moat, supposedly making it impossible for the ants to reach him and the workers
- For further protection, Leiningen cuts the branches of large tamarind trees that hang over the ditch, making it so that the ants cannot use the branches as a bridge to the moat.
- Leiningen orders some workers to line up along the water ditch to keep a look-out. Meanwhile, he rests in his hammock, puffing on a pipe. A worker alerts him that the ants are some distance to the south. Leiningen rises, mounts his horse, and rides south. Over the hills, he spies “a darkening hem”
- The ants get closer to the water ditch. Then, two flanking sides of the advancing ant army “[detach] themselves from the main body and [march] down the eastern and western sides of the ditch”. Both Leiningen and the natives sense that the ants, as primitive as they are, are thinking about how best to reach them and gnaw at their flesh.
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