Everywhere the walls were about one foot in thickness, and there was a distance between the stories of cells which adorned them.
We may be astonished at the construction of such monuments, due to these industrious swarms of insects, but it is true that they are frequently found in the interior of Africa.

Smeathman, a Dutch traveler of the last century, with four of his companions, occupied the top of one of these cones.

In the Lounde, Livingstone observed several of these ant-hills, built of reddish clay, and attaining a height of fifteen and twenty feet.

Lieutenant Cameron has many a time mistaken for a camp these collections of cones which dotted the plain in N'yangwe.

He has even stopped at the foot of great edifices, not more than twenty feet high, but composed of forty or fifty enormous rounded cones, flanked with bell-towers like the dome of a cathedral, such as Southern Africa possesses.
To what species of ant was due, then, the prodigious style of architecture of these cones?
"To the warlike termite," Cousin Benedict had replied, without hesitating, as soon as he had recognized the nature of the materials employed in their construction.
And, in fact, the walls, as has been said, were made of reddish clay.
Had they been formed of a gray or black alluvian earth, they must have been attributed to the "termes mordax" or the "termes atrox." As we see, these insects have not very cheering names--a fact which cannot but please a strong entomologist, such as Cousin Benedict.
The central part of the cone, in which the little troop had first found shelter, and which formed the empty interior, would not have contained them; but large cavities, in close contact, made a number of divisions, in which a person of medium height could find refuge.
Imagine a succession of open drawers, and at the bottom of those drawers millions of cells which the termites had occupied, and the interior disposition of the ant-hill is easily understood.