Max Brooks

Any survival guide will tell you, don't buy a pair of combat boots before any disaster. They'll tear your feet up. Or water - don't bring water with you because it'll tire you out and you'll lose too much fluid. Bring a water pump.

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.