The narrative proper begins in the desert. The narrator (Lyle Talbot) mocks the overblown ego of humanity, a race of puny bipeds which claims to own planet Earth and every living thing on it. Yet they are outnumbered by the insects, and the hexapods are likely to survive longer than the humans. The narrator then claims that when men or women venture off ""the well-beaten path of civilization"" and deal with the unknown, the price of their survival is the loss of their sanity.