Daylight became dusk; dusk turned swiftly into darkness. Quite suddenly, they were surrounded by a blackness that was like the blackness in the depth of the burrow, without even a gleam of light; it was as if they had been blinded. But in this velvet blackness, Veig suddenly became aware that his mother was listening, as if she were sitting a few feet away. Then, from the depths of his own inner silence, he conveyed to her a picture of the place they were in, and of the den in which they intended to spend the night. The pictures had to be conveyed quickly, for communicating like this was exhausting, requiring a concentration that was difficult to maintain. He also showed her a picture of the rocky wilderness they had crossed, and then of the stream and the scurrying red ants. Their communion lasted, in all, perhaps ten seconds; then, before he could say goodbye, it faded. He could have renewed it with a further effort, but it would have been pointless. Now she knew they were safe and could sleep without anxiety. Veig made his way round the rock, feeling its surface with his hands, groped his way past the barrier of spiky twigs, and stumbled into the shelter, pulling the bush by its roots into the narrow gap. There was no need to ask him if he had established contact; his silence told them the answer.
They were hungry, but too tired to eat. Within minutes, all were fast asleep. Outside, the moon rose, and nocturnal creatures came out to seek their prey.
Niall awoke to the sound of birdsong and the chirping of insects. He yawned and stretched, then gasped with pain. His body felt stiff and bruised all over, and when he tried to sit up, a sharp pain in his elbow forced him to lie down again. But the pleasure of being in these new and strange surroundings made the discomfort seem trifling.
Veig proved to be in the same state. The skin of his back was a mass of bruises where the crater insect had bombarded him with rocks, and he had a lump on the back of his head like a small egg. Hrolf had escaped cuts and bruises, but admitted that it was difficult to bend his knees. They decided there would be no point in trying to return home today; in their present state, they might die in the wilderness.
Niall started to push aside the barrier, then shrank back. Drifting across the morning sky, about fifty feet above the ground, was a spider balloon. A trail of gossamer floated in the breeze behind it. He had never seen one so close. Veig and Hrolf were sitting with their backs to him, and had not noticed his sudden movement. He closed his mind and watched the balloon as it drifted out of his line of vision. If he had alerted the other two, they might have experienced a momentary panic which could have betrayed them to the spider. As it was, Niall was somehow aware that this was a routine patrol, and that the spider inside the balloon was sleepy and inattentive.
Five minutes later, he poked his head out of the den and scanned the sky. The balloon was now a speck in the distance, and there were no others in sight. He waited until it was invisible, then told Veig and Hrolf what he had seen. They were shaken, and he knew he had been right not to alert them.
Veig said: “As close as that?” He was afraid the spiders might know of their presence.
“Just above those trees.”
Veig’s breath exploded in a sigh of relief. “We were lucky. . .”
But in his mood of relaxed optimism, Niall knew that it was more than luck.
An hour later, when they were convinced there were no more balloons, they made their way back to the stream. Once again, they soaked themselves in the cool water, lying full length and splashing one another. To Niall, it seemed incredible that Nature could be so wasteful of such a precious commodity. In the desert, a few drops of water could mean the difference between life and death; so could a single cactus fruit or a sand rodent. This superabundance was intoxicating, but also somehow alarming.
They followed the stream for more than a mile. It came down from distant hills; on the other side of those hills, according to Jomar, lay the great delta, where there was even more abundance and even more danger. And somewhere on the far side of the delta, on the other side of the sea, lay the city of the death spiders. He wanted to ask Veig and Hrolf about the spiders, but he knew they would be reluctant to talk about them; they were hunters, and believed that to speak of what one feared most was to invite bad luck.
Here, in this multicoloured paradise, they all experienced a continuous sensation of delight mixed with fear. Everything that moved alarmed them, for they were too inexperienced to know what might be dangerous. There were giant dragon-flies, as large as a man, whose gauzy, net-veined wings formed a roof over the body when they were at rest, and which turned into vast, buzzing apparitions when they suddenly took to the air. (Niall did not even suspect that these glittering creatures were fully-grown versions of the crater insect that had almost killed them.) There were bright green fungus flies that seemed to take a pleasure in buzzing past their ears so that the high-pitched noise made their heads ring. As they passed close to some immense trees, they saw webs of the grey spiders stretching like enormous nets; in one of these, a big living creature about the size of a man, was still struggling, so encased in spider silk that it was impossible to guess its identity. They kept well clear of the trees. Huge butterflies flapped lazily past them, their great wings creating a pleasant draught. Niall found one of these wings lying on the ground and was amazed at its lightness and strength; he discovered he could lie on it on the surface of the stream, and float along as if on a boat.
They were now ravenously hungry; they had left their food behind in the shelter. The problem was that they were unaware which of these various fruits was edible. Niall took a tentative bite at a purple fruit like an oversized grape, and spat it out immediately; it had a strange, bitter flavour, and the taste stayed in his mouth for the next ten minutes. An experiment with a yellow, fleshy fruit was equally unsuccessful; it tasted like rotten meat. A bright red globular fruit had a pungent, oily flavour.
Then, marching across the sand ahead of them, they saw a number of big black ants, about twice the size of the red ants, each carrying a large, light green fruit. Cautiously, in case the ants were aggressive, they followed the trail backwards until they arrived at a grove covered with a tangle of green plants, among which were the green fruits, in various stages of ripeness. Many kinds of insect were already there, feeding on the ripe fruit, and the air was full of a pleasantly sweet smell. Niall found a large fruit concealed by a tangle of leaves and vines, slashed it open with his flint knife, and scooped out a handful of the ripe flesh. It was deliciously cool and sweet, although the yellow seeds were too hard to eat. It was Niall’s first taste of a melon, and he went on scraping and eating until only the skin and the seeds remained.
Their hunger appeased, they sat and watched the black ants collecting fruit. The ants would slice through the vine with their big, dangerous-looking mandibles, then pick up the melon in their two forelegs and march away on the remaining four. They seemed to ignore completely any other living creature that crossed their paths. One of them marched up to a large, overripe melon on which a butterfly was already feeding, snipped through the vine, and proceeded to pick up the melon in its forelegs with the butterfly still eating. The butterfly, apparently indifferent to the ant, went on eating until the fruit suddenly vanished, then flew away past their heads, its wings creating currents of air.
They found all this activity endlessly fascinating. They were accustomed to the desert, where there was little to engage the attention, and to sitting passively for hours in the depths of the burrow. This new world of endless variety was like some marvellous picture show; whenever the attention became fatigued, some new wonder excited it again.
Veig and Hrolf engaged in a discussion about whether ants were vegetarians; Hrolf was convinced that they were, while Veig argued that the serrated mandibles looked as if intended for tearing flesh. This argument was settled when Niall caught a movement in the distance and saw a black ant dragging the corpse of a grasshopper more than twice its own size. The ant was forced to walk backwards; yet it unerringly followed the trail of the other ants without once looking round to check its direction. Niall solved this problem when he observed tiny sticky blobs on the trail, and noticed one of the ants dropping a similar blob from the end of its body; it was clearly laying a trail which the other ants followed by smell.