Ant

Ants are an image of collective human labor in Oran’s coastal construction works. The comparison does not describe literal insects as characters; it reduces the workers’ apparent scale against the mountain while emphasizing their ceaseless movement across a project whose purpose is to remake the shoreline. In that compressed image, labor becomes both magnificent and troubling: organized bodies swarm over an inhuman landscape, yet the workers remain nearly interchangeable within the vast operation.

The Construction Landscape

The ant image belongs to the western coast of Oran, where public works are transforming a luminous bay into a gigantic harbor. The scene is introduced through the recurring Flemish subject of the Tower of Babel: immense rocks rise toward heaven, slopes teem with workmen, animals, ladders, machines, cords, and pulleys, while human beings provide scale for a construction whose dimensions exceed them. Oran’s coast evokes precisely this reversal, in which the landscape appears primary and people seem minute within it.

Labor Against Stone

The workers cling to enormous slopes among rails, dump-cars, cranes, and toy-like trains. Under a broiling sun, locomotives circle huge blocks of stone amid whistles, dust, and smoke. The prose calls them a nation of ants bustling over the smoking carcass of the mountain, a collective body without an individually developed identity. Men press their bellies against the handles of automatic drills while suspended along the cliff; the drills vibrate in empty space, breaking off masses of rock that crash downward in dust and rumbling. Elsewhere, dump-carts tip their loads over the slopes, and detonations, occurring both at night and in daylight, shake the mountain and stir the sea.

The metaphor therefore joins repetition to danger. Like ants, the workers are numerous, coordinated, and persistent, but their activity is also governed by a scale of production that makes individual bodies seem fragile. The work is not presented as effortless progress. It depends on harsh slavery, even though the spectacle of human beings attacking stone can momentarily command admiration. The image holds those responses together rather than resolving them into either celebration or condemnation.

From Mountain to Harbor

The stones torn from the mountain are piled beneath the first waves, gradually emerge, and become a jetty that advances toward the open sea. Steel jaws bite into the cliff, rotate, and pour gravel into the water while the coast is progressively lowered and pushed outward. The ants’ apparent disorder thus serves a precise collective transformation: their movement transfers stone from cliff to sea and converts labor into harbor infrastructure.

Yet the achievement remains temporary against geological duration. Stone cannot truly be destroyed; it is only moved, and it will outlast the people who use it. The coastal heaps will testify to the men in masks of dust and sweat, but in a hundred years the work will have to begin again. The ant metaphor consequently describes not only organization but recurrence: an immense enterprise whose human value lies in doing rather than in final mastery.

Symbolic and Social Significance

Across the book, repetitive labor can awaken consciousness when its mechanical rhythm becomes visible, as in the daily sequence of work, meals, travel, and sleep, or in the fate of Sisyphus, condemned to roll his stone upward only to watch it fall. The Oran workers occupy a social and material counterpart to that pattern. Their labor produces a visible object, the harbor, but the larger effort remains vulnerable to futility because stone, time, and mortality exceed the builders.

The ants also contrast with the body-centered life associated with Algiers, where swimmers and beachgoers appear as bodies immersed in sunlight, and with the stone-bound civic monuments of Oran, including the Maison du Colon. In the construction scene, bodies are neither leisurely nor commemorative: they are instruments of collective action. The image gives them scale and motion while simultaneously showing how an industrial project can absorb their individuality into a vast, repetitive process.

As a literary figure, the ants make the workers legible within the landscape without pretending that the landscape belongs to them. They expose the human desire to impose form on an indifferent world, while the mountain, sea, and stone retain their superiority in duration and force. What remains is a severe image of labor: coordinated, dangerous, materially effective, and destined to be measured against the persistence of the earth.