Helen Garner

I had ordered long legs, but they never arrived. My eyes are weird too, one is gray and the other is green. I have a crooked smile and my nose looks like a ski slope. No, I would not win a Miss contest.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.