The mystery was solved many hours later, by which time the pile of sandy earth had almost reached the ceiling. The forelegs of the ants were covered with mud, and the earth was damp. They were digging down to the watershelf underneath the desert. An hour later, they were no longer muddy, and when Thorg held the oil lamp down the ant tunnel, they could see its flame reflected in water about thirty feet below the surface. And when Veig delicately scratched an ant’s thorax with his fingers, it placed its mouth against his and obediently regurgitated a mouthful of water. The water was a brown colour, and tasted of mineral salts, but it was cool and refreshing. Veig soon trained the ants to regurgitate into a gourd; after that, they had a permanent source of water in the burrow. It seemed an unimaginable luxury.
Quite suddenly, the ants were adults. They began to wander out of the burrow and forage for their own food. Sometimes they returned carrying fruit or sweet berries; sometimes the stickiness around their mouths revealed that they had been milking aphids of their “honeydew”. Their instinct for food semed to be extraordinary. When they left the burrow in the morning, they would set off into the desert with a certain air of purposefulness, as if they knew precisely where they were going. Sometimes, Niall or Veig followed them, but usually gave up after a few miles; the ants moved fast and seemed indefatigable. They were also totally unselfish. Returning hours later, often at nightfall, they would instantly regurgitate food on command. It became clear that the upper part of the body was basically a storage tank in which food was held in reserve. When the ant became hungry, it simply digested a little of its own reserve, allowing it to pass down into its stomach. In the meantime, anyone could gain access to the larder by simply tickling its thorax lightly and presenting the mouth, or a small gourd, to its face. Niall’s sister Runa — who was about a year old at the time — developed a passionate fondness for the sticky honeydew nectar, and for the light pink flesh of a fruit not unlike the melon. She soon learned to persuade the ants to regurgitate, and within a few weeks was transformed from a tiny, skinny child with arms like twiglets into a chubby little girl whose face was as round as the full moon.
Suddenly, life was more comfortable than they had ever known it. Under natural conditions, the life of most animals is a continuous search for food, and this had always applied to this small band of human creatures. It was nothing for them to walk twenty miles for the sake of a cactus fruit or a few prickly pears. Ever since he was a baby, Niall had become accustomed to a permanent feeling of hunger. Now, with the ants and the pepsis wasp to do their foraging and hunting, they had almost forgotten what hunger was like. From force of habit, they still spent part of each day in the search for food; but it no longer made any difference if they found nothing. In the wall of the burrow, Ulf had excavated a deep hole to serve as a larder and lined it with stones. In its cool depths, fruit could be kept for weeks at a time. And even when it became rotten, it was not wasted. Jomar recalled that if rotten fruit is left to soak in water, it ferments and produces a peculiarly sickly smell, and that after many weeks, the cloudy liquid would turn into a drink that was both sharp and thirst-quenching and would induce a pleasant sensation of light-headedness. When the men drank this liquid as they sat around in the burrow after dark, the tiny flame of the oil lamp casting huge shadows on the walls, they suddenly became talkative and reminisced about their hunting expeditions. In the past, such talk had been rare, for they came home exhausted and were usually too hungry to waste energy in conversation. Now they were neither tired nor hungry, and often talked until the oil lamp had burned itself dry. The ants, who seemed to respond to the mood of their masters, would come and lie at their feet, occupying most of the floor space, while the pepsis wasp dozed in its own fur-lined nest high on the wall.
And now, for the first time, Niall heard stories about earlier generations: about Ivar the Strong, who had fortified the ancient city of Korsh and resisted all the attempts of the spiders to drive him into the desert; about Skapta the Cunning, who had carried the war into the land of the spiders and had burnt their capital city; about Vaken the Wise, who had lived twice as long as other men, and trained grey desert spiders to act as spies in the land of the death spiders. Little by little, Niall began to understand why the spiders hated and feared human beings, and why they went to such lengths to destroy and enslave them. It had been a long and brutal war between the spiders and humankind, and the spiders had only won it because they had learned to understand the thoughts of human beings. This had come about, according to the legend recounted by Jomar, because a prince named Hallat had fallen in love with a beautiful girl called Turool; but Turool had preferred to marry a poor chieftain named Basat. Hallat became almost insane with jealousy; he dreamed of Turool day and night and made plans to kidnap her from the camp of Basat. Turool’s faithful dog Oykel was hunting rats outside the camp and recognised Hallat by his pungent smell; he roused the camp and Hallat was driven away. Hallat was so enraged that he swore revenge and made his way to the city of the spiders. There he allowed himself to be captured by the guards and demanded to see the Lord of the Spiders, a hundred-eyed monster tarantula called Cheb. Taken into the presence of the great tarantula, Hallat offered to betray his ally King Rogor as a sign of his good faith, and King Roger’s city was betrayed to the spiders, who ate two thousand human beings at a great feast. After that, Hallat promised Cheb that he would teach him how to read the thoughts of human beings if he would destroy Basat and capture Turool. Cheb agreed, but he demanded payment in advance, and Hallat spent a year teaching him all the secrets of the human soul. Until the Great Betrayal — as it became known in human legend — the spiders had been unable to understand the complexities of the human mind, for the souls of men were far more intricate and strange than those of the spiders. But little by little, Cheb came to understand the secrets of the human soul. It is said that he had prisoners brought in front of him and made them stand there for hours while he read their minds, until he knew every detail of their lives. Then he made them tell their life stories until he grasped the meaning of all the things he had failed to understand. After this, Cheb ate them, for he felt that he could only truly understand them when he had absorbed every atom of their bodies into his own.
When he understood the mysteries of the human soul, Cheb kept his promise. Thousands of spiders descended on the camp of Basat by night, and the attack was so sudden that all but a few were captured alive. Basat and Turool were brought in front of Hallat, who made Basat kneel down and struck off his head with his own hand. But his cruelty lost him the prize for which he had sacrificed his own kind; Turool became insane with grief and sacrificed her own life by attacking one of her guards with a knife; the spider injected her with its venom, and she died instantly.
There was still one great enigma that Cheb had been unable to solve: the mystery of the White Tower. This tower had been built by men of a bygone age and stood in the centre of the city of the death spiders (for this city had once been inhabited by men). The tower had no doors or windows and was made of a smooth substance that seemed impenetrable. The slaves of the bombardier beetles had once been ordered to blast their way into it with explosives, but the tower had remained not only undamaged but untouched. Now Cheb offered to make Hallat the king of all the men on earth if he would help him to penetrate the mystery of the White Tower. Hallat was tempted, for he longed for power. He had many old and wise men tortured in his attempt to learn the secret of the tower. And at last, an old woman — the wife of a tribal chieftain — offered to tell him the secret if he would spare her husband’s life. She told him that, according to an ancient family tradition, the secret of the tower was a “mind lock”. The mind of a man must interact with the atomic lattice of the walls, which would then yield as easily as if they were made of smoke. The key to the interaction was a magic rod, with which the man must touch the wall. The old chief possessed such a rod as a symbol of his kingship. Hallat took it from him by force and went to the tower the next day at dawn — for, according to tradition, the first rays of the sun would fall upon a hidden door in the wall of the tower. But when he tried to approach the tower with the magic rod, some force threw him to the ground. He tried a second time, and the same thing happened. The third time, he stretched out both his arms to the tower and shouted: “I command you to open!” But when he tried to touch it with the magic rod, there was a flash like lightning and Hallat was burned into a piece of black charcoal. Cheb, when he heard what had happened, had all the prisoners murdered, including the old chief and his wife. And the mystery of the White Tower remained unsolved.