Shadowland. Spider World 06 by Colin Wilson

At the other end of the cave, the same thing was happening: a bubble of yellow light with hairy protuberances floated down from the roof, hit one of the chameleon men on the head, bounced off him like a balloon, then drifted to the floor and sank into it.

Niall bit into another kind of root, and was surprised to find that once again its taste was impossible to compare with anything he already knew. It was stronger than the other flavor, as an onion is stronger than a potato. But other than that, it was impossible to classify.

Again, as he focused his attention on it, it seemed to absorb his sense of identity. He became the taste of what he was eating. It was not unlike floating out of his body.

As he crunched it, he was startled to see a kind of tentacle emerge from the wall opposite; it was like a furry green cat’s tail, and it waved as gently as seaweed in a current. Then it split into a dozen other “tails,” which looked like long strands of some kind of waterweed. These also subdivided, then subdivided further, until they turned into a faint haze of green light that swirled for a moment like mist, then vanished.

By now, he was beginning to suspect that these strange entities were a delusion induced by what he was eating, and that he alone could see them. He decided to experiment. Reaching into the bowl, he found a green-colored fragment that was roughly cubic in shape. It was harder to chew than the others, and had an acid, almost fruity flavor. And as he concentrated on it and allowed his sense of identity to dissolve, the air became full of diamond-like purple shapes that drifted down as gently as autumn leaves. They seemed to be soft and alive, and they twisted with a lazy, flamelike motion. One settled on the back of his hand, and he was surprised to find it distinctly cold, like a snowflake.

He concluded that the roots he was tasting were acting upon him like drugs, yet produced their effect only because he was in a state of supersensitivity. It was as if each one was speaking to him, trying to tell him something with its own individual voice.

He actually recognized one root as celeriac. When he chewed this, nothing at first seemed to happen. Then he noticed that a brown tree root sticking through the roof was glowing with a pulsating blue color. When he stood up and peered closely at it, he saw that it seemed to be covered with tiny moving bodies like grubs, each one an electric blue. They seemed to belong to the root, as if they were part of it. But when he tried to focus on them to look more closely, they simply disappeared, leaving him staring at a mud-colored root. As soon as he ceased to try to focus, the colored grubs reappeared.

Now intensely curious, he lifted another piece of root to his mouth, and focused his mind on it as he chewed. There was the dizziness he had come to expect, due to the momentary loss of identity, then he became aware of a pulsating shape of blue-green light that seemed to be turning itself continuously inside out. So long as he maintained the sense of nonidentity, he remained aware of the pulsing shape. Then one of the yellow globes drifted toward it, and made a sudden dart at it, gulping it down like a large fish eating a shrimp.

Toward the bottom of the bowl, he came upon a number of smaller pieces of root, some hardly bigger than a fingertip. It occurred to him to wonder what would happen if he put half a dozen into his mouth at the same time. Would he see a half a dozen different hallucinations all at once?

He immediately regretted his rashness. Even before he began to chew, he was assailed by such a rush of strange sensations that he was overwhelmed, and felt his own identity flung far away from him. His mind had become blank. All sense of who he was and where he was abruptly vanished. It was like being suspended in a white void.

When, after several minutes, normality returned, he found himself surrounded by a dizzying variety of semitransparent floating shapes, shapes of so many forms and colors and sizes that he felt as if he had been plunged into some overcrowded aquarium. These living freaks glowed with such an intensity of reality and color that his suspicion that they were optical illusions disappeared. They were undoubtedly real — part of a reality that his senses usually ignored. The same was true of the cave he was sitting in, and the earth that stretched above him; he now realized that these were full of vibrations: the vibrations of tree roots, of living mold that constantly transformed the soil, of tiny worms and grubs and microorganisms that received their life from the mold, and even of clay and stones.

These vibrations occasionally seemed to reach a pitch of intensity where they were transformed into tiny blue-colored bubbles that floated in the air, and that attached themselves to the nearest material objects. They seemed to have a particular affinity for the brown-colored moss that covered the walls of the cave, and they clung to it like a kind of glittering light-blue frost. But sometimes these bubbles became so crowded that they combined to form larger bubbles, which then drifted gently in the air. These, Niall realized instinctively, were one of the simplest forms of life. When he reached out and touched a particularly large one, it burst and transmitted to his finger end an electrical tingle as sharp as a pinprick.

And this, he suddenly realized, explained why the chameleon men had given him the earthy water to drink and the earthy roots to eat. They were intended to make him aware that he was living in a world of rich life-forms of which he normally was unaware.

Why was he so much less aware than his companions? The answer was obvious. Because his mind was moving too fast. He was like a man on a galloping horse, for whom the passing scenery was just a blur.

A better image, he realized, was his watch, now lying somewhere at the bottom of the river. When Dorion, the best mechanic in the city of the beetles, had first given it to him, he had spent minutes at a time staring at its face, hypnotized by the slow movement of the second hand. If he then looked closely at the end of the minute hand, he could also see it moving. But if he transferred his attention to the hour hand, it was far more difficult to see its movement. His mind refused to slow down for long enough.

But now that he had passed the point of deep relaxation, it would have been as easy to see the movement of the hour hand as the second hand.

At that point he suddenly realized that, although they were not looking at him, each of the chameleon men was intensely aware of his presence. They had tuned in to his mind, and were aware of everything he had been thinking and feeling since he began eating.

For a moment he felt embarrassed, like someone who had been caught talking to himself. Then he saw there was no cause for embarrassment. They were not eavesdropping. They were simply reading his mind — just as he was able to read theirs. And, as odd as it seemed, they found him as strange and exotic as he found them. They were fascinated by the sheer headlong movement of his consciousness — although they found it hard to understand why he wanted to concentrate so hard and move so fast. For them, he was a being whose normal life was lived at a pace that made them feel dizzy.

Now that they had succeeded in making Niall slow down to their own speed, he recognized that this had been their aim ever since they had rescued him from the river. It had been impossible to communicate with him until his mind reached a certain point of relaxation. And now that he had reached that point of deep relaxation, he could communicate with them because he was sharing the slow, casual movement of their consciousness.

There was another interesting consequence of being on the same wavelength as the chameleon men. Niall could now see in the dark, so that the cave was as clearly visible as if illuminated by daylight. But somehow, everything around him had become more vivid and rich. It was not just that colors were brighter, but that everything seemed more real. He inferred that he was now seeing the world through the eyes of the chameleon men, and that they naturally perceived everything as more intense and interesting than Niall’s human senses revealed.