his hat to cover the blistering skin. It strikes in his eyes and burns his
lips until they swell and feel like bursting. The barrel of his rifle grows
hotter and hotter, until his fingers feel as if glued to a gridiron. The
very clothes upon his body burn the skin beneath. He feels desperate; he
must shift one arm, for the anguish is intolerable. He makes an almost
imperceptible movement of his shoulder, and glances towards his guards. The
man on his right front lays his pipe quickly in the grass, and swiftly
lifts his Mauser to his shoulder. The wretch on the ant-heap closes his
eyes with a groan, and stands as still as a Japanese god carved out of
jute-wood. The guard lays down his rifle and picks up his pipe.

The sun climbs higher and higher, until it gleams down straight into the
ant-heap; the scorching heat penetrates into the unprotected cells, and
enrages the dwellers inside. They swarm out full of fight, like an army
lusting for battle. Their home has been ravished of the protection they had
raised with half a lifetime of labour, and in their puny way they want
vengeance. They find a foe on top, a man ready to their wrath. They crawl
into his scorched boots, over his baked feet, guiltless of stockings; they
charge up the legs, on which the trousers hang loosely, and as they charge
they bite, because they are out for business, not for a picnic. The very
stillness of their victim seems to enrage them. The first legion retires at
full speed down into the ant-heap again. They have gone for recruits. In a
few seconds up they come again, until the very top of the heap is alive
with them. They climb one over another in their eagerness to get in their
individual moiety of revenge. Down into the veldtschoon, up the bare, hairy
legs, over the hips, round the waist, over the lean ribs, along the spine,
under the arms, round the neck, over the whole man they go, as the
Mongolian hordes will some day go over the Western world. And each one digs
his tiny prongs into the smarting, burning, itching poor devil on top of
their homestead. He shifts a leg the hundredth part of an inch. The guard