Read Chapter 6: The Ants' March

The first ants came at midday, a black seam stitching itself across the red earth a hundred yards ahead. Émile raised his hand, and the column halted, the porters letting their loads slide to the ground with grateful groans.

"Fourmis," Bakary said, without urgency. He squinted at the advancing line. "We wait. They pass."

But they did not pass. The seam thickened into a river, then a flood—legions upon legions pouring from the northeast in a width that defied sense. Émile watched, fascinated despite himself, as the column cut through a termite mound the size of a cannon carriage, the structure dissolving as if eaten by fire. The ants moved with terrible purpose, each one identical to the next, a single mind stretched across ten million bodies.

"Too many," Mamadou muttered from the rear. He was already retying his load, preparing to move.

"We go around," Henri said, already consulting his map. "Five miles north, the terrain rises. We can circle past—"

"No." Émile said it before he understood why. He was staring at the column's line of march. It did not bend. It did not duck around rocks or follow the natural drainage of the land. It cut straight as a surveyor's cord across a dry wadi bed, up a slope of loose shale, and through a thicket of thorn acacia where the ants would have to climb over—not around—every obstacle. A living line drawn by an instrument, not an instinct.

"What is it?" Henri said.

Émile shook his head, but he was already pulling out his notebook. The pages were blank—still blank, the erasure from this morning refusing to heal—but he had learnt to carry a separate roll of oilcloth, hidden in his boot, for the observations that would not hold in ink. He pulled it free and uncapped his pencil.

"Get me bearings," he said. "That point where the column entered that wadi, and the point where it's exiting the acacia. Distances approximate."

Henri looked at him as if he had grown a second head. "Fournier, we need to move. Those are driver ants. They strip flesh from bone in minutes."

"They're moving in a straight line," Émile said. He was sketching now, the column's path traced as a single ruled line across his paper. "No animal moves in a straight line through this terrain. River courses meander. Game trails follow contours. Even the most disciplined army column bends around obstacles."

"Then what are they following?"

Émile did not answer. He extended the line backward from where the ants had emerged, through the distant heat-shimmer, to a point on his rough chart where nothing but blank paper lay. The blank the cartographers had left unfilled. He extended it forward, through the acacia, and his pencil stopped at a low place in the distant hills—a dry depression that the maps marked with nothing at all.

But Émile had crossed enough of Africa to read the land beneath the cartographer's lies. That depression would fill with water in the wet season. It had the shape of an ancient lakebed, gone now or not yet come. And the ants were marching toward it in a line as straight as a shot from a rifle.

"Something is drawing them," he said quietly. "Or something is pushing them, and they have no choice but to go."

Bakary's face had gone still. He walked to Émile's side and looked down at the oilcloth sketch, then back at the marching column.

"Not following," Bakary said. "Running. The land drives them. Same way it drives us, if we stay too long."

"The ants don't know where they're going," Émile said. "But the land does."

He looked up from his sketch. The column was wide enough now that it had become a moving plain of black, roiling as individual insects clambered over one another. The sound of it was beginning to reach them—a whispering, chittering tide that raised the hairs on Émile's arms. The porters had begun to murmur among themselves. One of them, the youngest, had climbed onto a flat rock and was pulling his feet up off the ground.

"We can't go around," Émile said.

Henri's head snapped toward him. "We absolutely can. We go north five miles, we cross their line behind them, we continue west. We lose half a day at most."

"We don't have half a day." Émile tapped the sketch. "These ants are moving toward something. The same something that has been erasing our maps and eating our memories. If they're running from it, their line of march points away from it. But if they're being driven *toward* it—"

"Driven toward what? There's nothing there. The maps show—"

"The maps show nothing." Émile's voice was flat. "That's the point. The maps show nothing because nothing has been surveyed. But the land doesn't care what the maps show. Something is there, and these ants know it. Their line of march is a survey line. A boundary marker. It points to a lake."

Henri stared at him. "You want to follow the ants."

"I want to find the lake."

"The lake that doesn't exist on any map?"

"The lake the ants are marching to." Émile folded the oilcloth and tucked it back into his boot. "Bakary's uncle crossed into this land and came back without his name. The river we crossed this morning is ahead of us again. The land is folding, Henri. It's bending us around something. And I want to know what it's protecting."

"You want to know what it's protecting, or you want to prove you're right about all of this?"

Émile met his eyes. "Armand Chenier came through this region in 1879. He was heading for the edge of the surveyed world. He intended to map the unknown. He believed—" Émile stopped. The words would not come. He felt the familiar pressure at the back of his throat, the seal that clamped down whenever he tried to speak the full truth of the astrolabe, of Armand, of the summons that had pulled him across two thousand miles of river and desert.

He forced the words through. They came out wrong, twisted.

"Armand believed there was something here worth mapping."

Henri's face flickered. "That's not what you were going to say."

"It's what I can say."

The column of ants had not thinned. If anything, it had grown. Émile could see now that it was not a single column but three, moving in parallel, equally spaced—as if measured. As if each column was maintaining a precise distance from its neighbour. No natural creature marched in such formation. No instinct produced such regularity.

Mamadou spoke, and Bakary translated without looking away from the ants. "He says the stones will protect us if we pass through the line. But we must mark ourselves. Name ourselves aloud, so the land knows we are not part of it."

Émile looked at the porters. They were frightened, their eyes on the tide of black that had begun to curve around the flanks of their position, leaving them trapped on a narrowing island of bare rock.

"We're going to cross," Émile said. "We're going to cross the line, and we're going to follow the ants' heading west. And when we reach the lake, we're going to find out what's waiting there."

"You don't know there's a lake," Henri said.

Émile didn't answer. He was already walking toward the edge of the island, his boots crunching on the dry stone. Behind him, the porters began to gather their loads, and above them, the sun beat down on a land that had no name.

---

The crossing took four hours. They moved through the ant columns in single file, each man shouting his own name as he passed through the line—not for courage, Émile realised, but to keep the name fixed in his own mouth, to hold it against the silence of the land that wanted to take it. Mamadou had pressed a smooth stone into Émile's hand, a pebble with a single carved mark on it, and Émile found himself clutching it so hard the edges bit into his palm.

When they reached the far side, bleeding from a dozen small bites, Émile pulled out his compass. The needle swung once, twice, then settled.

It was not pointing north.

It was pointing west-southwest, toward the distant depression, toward the unseen water.

Émile looked back at the ant columns, still marching in their impossible straight lines, and understood that they had not been fleeing or driven at all. They had been marching in formation for the same reason he had come here.

They had been called.