"Very well," began Alice, trying her best to keep her anger in check, "what is your name, Miss Computermite?"

"Name?" squeaked the termite. "Names, names, names! What would I know about names? I'm a termite, for digging's sake! Termites don't have names! Whatever next? You'll be asking if we've got bicycles in a minute!"

Just then, Alice heard a trundling noise coming from behind her, and when she turned to look, what should appear around the corner but a male termite, on a bicycle!

It was quite an ordinary bicycle except that it had two sets of pedals (rather like a tandem) which the male termite pedalled at furiously with his middle and his hind legs, whilst clinging to the handlebars with his forelegs. (This is one of the few cases when two plus two plus fore equals six.) Alice knew it was a male termite because of the wings on his back, and she felt rather proud to have worked out this piece of logic, although why he wasn't flying through the tunnel rather than bicycling through it was quite another question. However, the male termite never gave her a chance to ask this question because he was obviously in a terrible hurry; he simply pedalled past Alice and the female termite at a terrific speed, shouting at them as he did so, "Come on, you two, hop to it! The Queen of the Mound has received a question from Captain Ramshackle and we must answer it immediately. Chop chop!" And with that he disappeared around the curve in the tunnel.

Alice was quite taken aback by this whirlwind appearance. "Who on earth is Captain Ramshackle?" she asked of Miss Computermite, but the female termite was already hurrying along the tunnel after the bicycle. "Come on then," the termite shouted back at her, "there's no time for questions, we've got a question to answer!" Alice thought that sentence completely illogical. "Oh dear, Celia," she said to her doll, "we shall never be home in time for our writing lesson now." And it wasn't until after she'd finished the sentence that Alice realized she no longer had Celia in her hands. "Oh bother!" she said to herself. "Not only have I lost Whippoorwill, I've also lost Celia. And not only that, I've also lost myself! Great Aunt Ermintrude is going to be very, very angry."