Underground by Will Hunt

Author:Will Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

WALTER TSCHINKEL PICKED ME UP on a steamy morning in Tallahassee and we drove out to his research station in the Apalachicola National Forest. He was in his late sixties and had been studying ants for a half century. Along the way, we talked about his childhood in Alabama, where he grew up exploring the many caves near his home and following ants, but conversation dwindled and soon we were riding in silence. I could see that he was a taciturn, no-nonsense man, and I held off on telling him the entire story of why I’d come, about the Mole Men and the underground cities, and my questions about our impulse to burrow.

Tschinkel’s research station was a sandy clearing enclosed by scrub trees, which contained nests of two species of ant: Paratrechina arenivaga and Aphaenogaster floridana. In order to locate active nests, we staked pieces of Vienna sausage to the ground and waited for the ants to emerge. In his years of studying nest architecture and trying to understand how ants used the various parts of a nest, Tschinkel had been frustrated by the fact that you could never really see a nest, because in the act of excavating it, you destroyed it. His solution was to make metal casts of the nests.

In a homemade kiln, we melted down scraps of zinc, which he’d salvaged from old anodes at marine shipyards. Then we put on heavy oven mitts, carried the crucible over to each of the nests, and poured the molten zinc into the entrances. The hot silvery liquid pooled and disappeared underground: the nest’s inhabitants were, unfortunately, sacrificed. “Death,” said Tschinkel, “is part of biology.”

Next to one of the nests, we dug a large pit in the ground. The zinc had flowed down into every artery and chamber and node, then hardened. We gingerly picked the mold out of the earth, watching it emerge from the soil like a strange relic from an ancient civilization.

Later, Tschinkel added the casts we’d made to his collection. He displayed it in his garage, where dozens of metal ant nest molds hung from the ceiling like metallic chandeliers. Each, he explained, was the creation of a different species of ant.

Some of which could get to be quite large.

But as I picked up one cast, which was a nest of Aphaenogaster floridana, one of the species whose nest we’d cast in the forest, I had the uncanny feeling that I was holding a precise miniature model of the underground city of Derinkuyu.

We had spent the day working mostly in silence, but now I was no longer able to contain myself and I started telling Tschinkel all about why I’d come to see him: about William Lyttle and about the Cold War burrowing and about the underground cities of Cappadocia and the underground kitchen and the millstones that were rolled into place when enemies invaded.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.