“The Ants Kingdom” by Wells in summary


Captain Gerillo was ordered to help the people of Badam to fight the invasion of ants. The captain suspected that the authorities simply mock him. He was a Creole and had a purely Portuguese notion of etiquette and discipline. He trusted only Holroyd and Lancashire, a young engineer on the ship. In this journey through the little-known corners of the Amazon to Holroyd, the insignificance of man has been revealed: man is a rare animal that has been unstable on this earth. In England, he used to think that the earth belongs to man. In England, it really belonged to a man. On all the ship there was a cheerful and seductive pagan deity in the form of a large wine jar.

According to Gerillo, the ants come and go, but the man has nothing to do here. But these ants, oddly enough, were not going anywhere. Man needed some millenniums to move from barbarism to civilization and feel himself to be the masters of the future and rulers of the earth on this basis. But what can stop ants from

going through the same evolution? They have a tongue, they have a mind! On the river, they saw an abandoned cuberta carrying two corpses on board. There were also ants on it. They did not move like ordinary insects, but as if making a military operation. On the larger ones there was a gray garment. The captain gave the order to the lieutenant and the two crew members to board the cuberta and examine it. The lieutenant refused for a long time, but then obeyed the order. An ants bitten him on a cube, and died at night.

Swam to the place, they saw only abandoned buildings and ants. No one ventured to go ashore. The captain twice shot a cannon and decided that it was necessary to go back behind the directions. The last chapter is an ironic story about new contenders for world domination. They persistently advanced, capturing all new territories, forcing them to flee or to carry death to all people living here. Their numbers are growing rapidly, and Holroyd is firmly convinced that in the end they will dislodge a man from the entire tropical zone of South America. On this they are unlikely to stop. And according to the author’s calculations, by the middle of the 20th century, Europe will be opened.


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“The Ants Kingdom” by Wells in summary