Angels and Insects Read Online Free Page A

prepare their meat in the summer;
    The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks;
    The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands;
    The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings’ palaces.
    Proverbs 30, 24–8’
    ‘It is Eugenia who made this elegant arrangement of the Lepidoptera also. I fear it is not done upon quite scientific principles, but it has the intricacy of a rose window made of living forms, and does show forth the extraordinary brilliance and
beauty
of the insect creation. I am particularly taken with the idea of punctuating the rows of butterflies with the little iridescent green scarabs. Eugenia says she got the idea from silk knots in embroidery.’
    ‘She was describing the work to me last night. She obviously has a very precise hand in handling specimens. And the result is very fine, very delightful.’
    ‘She is a good girl.’
    ‘She is very beautiful.’
    ‘I hope she will also be very happy,’ said Harald Alabaster. He did not sound, William thought, listening for every nuance of meaning,
entirely
convinced that this would be the case.
    Harald Alabaster was tall, gaunt, and slightly stooping. He had a bony, ivory version of the family face, the blue eyes a little watery, the lips buried in the fronds of a patriarchal beard. The beard, and his abundant hair, were largely white, but the original blond lingered here and there, giving the white a stained, brassy look, a paradoxical tarnish. He wore a clerical collar and a black loose jacket over baggy trousers. Over this he wore a kind of monkishgown, black and woollen, with long sleeves and a sort of cowl. This could have had a practical purpose—the far reaches of the hall were bitterly cold, even with fires lit in all the fireplaces, which they mostly were not. William, who had corresponded with him for many years, but was now meeting him for the first time, had imagined a younger, more substantial man, solid and cheerful like the collectors he had met in London and Liverpool, men of business and intellectual adventure together. He had brought down his salvaged treasures, which he now laid out on Alabaster’s desk, unopened.
    Harald Alabaster pulled a kind of dangling bell-rope by his desk, and a soft-footed servant came in with a coffee tray, poured the coffee, and went out.
    ‘You are fortunate to have escaped with your life; we must give thanks for that—but the loss of your specimens must have been a very severe setback. What will you do, Mr Adamson, if you do not think it impertinent to ask?’
    ‘I have hardly had time to think. I had hoped to sell enough to be able to stay in England for some time, write about my travels perhaps—I kept extensive journals—and earn enough money to equip myself to return to the Amazon. We have barely begun to pick up twigs, Sir, those of us who have worked there—there are millions of unexplored miles, unknown creatures … I have particular problems I propose to solve—I have come to be particularly interested in ants and termites—I should like to make a prolonged study of certain aspects of their life. I believe for instance that I may have a better explanation for the curious habits of the leafcutter ants than that put forward by Mr Bates, and I should like also to find the next of the army ants—the Eciton burchelli—which has never been done. I have even wondered if they are perhaps perpetual travellers who form only
temporary encampments
—this is not the nature of the ants we know—but these forage so extensively, so ferociously, it may be that they
must
be perpetually on the move inorder to survive. And then there is the interesting problem of the way in which—and this would reinforce the observations of Mr Darwin—certain ants that inhabit certain Bromeliads appear to have affected the form of the plants over the millennia, so that the plants actually seem to build chambers and corridors for their insect guests in the natural