Chapter 5: Trapped

On along the tunnel they went. And as they progressed, Dennis got the answer to something that had troubled him a great deal before their entrance here--a problem which had been solved, rather amazingly, of itself.

Termitaries, as far as the entomologist knew, were pitch-black places which no ray of light ever entered. He had been afraid he would be forced to stumble blindly in unlit depths, able to see nothing at all, on a par with the blind creatures among whom he moved. Yet he and Jim could see in this subterranean labyrinth.

He observed now the reason for that. The walls on all sides, made of half-digested cellulose, had rotted just enough through long years to be faintly phosphorescent. And that simple natural fact was probably going to mean all the difference between life and death: it gave the two men at least the advantage of sight over the eyeless savage creatures among whom, helped by the termite-smell given by the paste, they hoped to glide unnoticed.

However, even the termite-paste, and the fact that the termitary citizens were blind, didn’t seem enough to account for the immunity granted the two men as they began to come presently to more crowded passages and tunnels near the center of the mound.

On every side of them now, requiring the utmost in agility to keep from actually brushing against them, were hordes of the worker termites, and dozens of the frightful soldiers. Yet on the two men moved, ever more slowly, without one of the monsters attempting to touch them. It was odd--almost uncanny.

“Surely the noise of our walking, tiptoe as we may, must be heard by them--and noted as different from theirs,” whispered Dennis. “Yet they pay no attention to us. If it is due to the paste, I must say it’s wonderful stuff!”

Jim nodded in a puzzled way. “It’s almost as if they wanted to make our inward path easy. I wonder--if it’s going to be different when we try to get out again!”

Dennis was wondering that, too. It seemed absurd to suspect the things of being intelligent enough to lay traps. But it did look almost as though they were encouraging their two unheard-of visitors from another world to go on deeper and deeper into the heart of the eerie city (all the tunnels sloped down now), there perhaps to meet with some ghastly imprisonment.

He gave it up. Sufficient for the moment that they were unmolested, and that he had a chance at first hand to make observations more complete than the world of entomology had ever dreamed of.

They stumbled onto what seemed a death struggle between one of the giant soldiers and an inoffensive-looking worker. The drab, comparatively feeble body of the worker was wriggling right in the center of the great claws which, with a twitch, could have sliced it in two endwise. Yet the jaws did not twitch; and in a few moments the worker drew unconcernedly out and moved away.

“The soldier was getting his meal,” whispered Denny, enthralled. “Their mandibles are enlarged so enormously that they can’t feed themselves. The workers, who digest food for the whole tribe, feed them regularly. Then if a soldier gets in the least rebellious, he can simply be starved to death at any time.”

“Ugh!” Jim whispered back. “Fancy being official stomach to three or four other people! More of your wonderful ‘organization, ‘ I suppose.”

They went on, down and down, till Denny calculated they had at last reached nearly to the center of the vast city. And now they stumbled into something weird and wonderful indeed. Rather, they half fell into it, for it lay down a few feet and came as a complete surprise in the dimness; and not till they had recovered from their near fall and looked around for a few seconds did they realize where their last few steps--the last few steps of freedom they were to have in the grim underground kingdom--had taken them.

They were in a chamber so huge that it made the largest of man-made domes shrink to insignificance by comparison.

A hundred yards or more in every direction, it extended. And far overhead, lost in distance, reared the arched roof. A twenty-story building could have been placed under that roof without trouble.

Lost in awe, Dennis gazed about him; and he saw on the floor, laid in orderly rows in countless thousands, that which gave further cause for wonderment: new-hatched larvae about the size of pumpkins but a sickly white in color--feeble, helpless blobs of life that one day develop into soldiers and workers, winged rulers or police. The termite nursery.

“Whew!” gasped Jim, wiping his face. “From the heat in here you’d think we were getting close to the real, old-fashioned hell instead of an artificial, insect-made one. What are all these nauseating-looking blobs of lard lying about here, anyway?”

Denny told him. “Which is the reason for the heat,” he concluded. “Jim, it’s twenty degrees warmer in here than it is outdoors. How--how--can these insects regulate the temperature like that? The work of the ruling brain again? But where, and what, can that brain be?”