The immediate necessity was shade, somewhere to rest. They crossed the courtyard and went in through one of the arched doorways. They found themselves in a hall so immense that the far walls and the ceiling were lost in the shadows. It was startlingly cool, being on the side of the building that was protected from the morning sun. Here they spread out their blankets, flung themselves down and lay panting, listening to the endless thunder of the wind. Within minutes, Niall was fast asleep.
He had a strange dream; the Spider Lord, Cheb, was looking down on him from some immense height and mocking him. As he began to struggle back to consciousness, he realised that he was cold. Outside, the sunlight was blinding on the white courtyard; next to him, his father and Ingeld were both fast asleep. He sat up, pulled some of his blanket out from underneath him and wrapped it round to form a sleeping bag. In one of the baskets, he had another lightweight blanket made of caterpillar skin but he was too sleepy to get it out. The memory of his dream disturbed him; the Spider Lord had been sitting on the topmost tower of the citadel, looking down at him. But with his father beside him, he felt safe; a few minutes later he was asleep.
He woke with the feeling that someone had touched his shoulder. Somewhere above him, a fly was buzzing. The blanket had slipped off his shoulder, and it was cold; he reached up to cover it and had difficulty raising his arm; it was as if his blanket had become tucked underneath him, restricting his freedom of movement. At the same time, the buzzing took on a note of frenzied alarm, the sound of a fly caught in a web. He raised his head and looked across the hall; something seemed to scurry into the darkness, and he thought he could see a hundred gleaming points. Suddenly, he was fully awake, trying to sit up. Then he saw what was preventing him. Bands of spider web had been stretched over him and somehow fastened to the floor. The web was lying all over him, like a soft blanket. He looked at his father and Ingeld; they were also covered with a loose-meshed web of spider silk that was still damp and sticky with the spider secretion. And now he saw that the gleaming points were the eyes of dozens of spiders, watching from the shadows.
His cry woke up the other two. As soon as they tried to sit up, they found themselves tangled in the sticky blankets that covered them. Before they tried to move, the web had been stretched over like a loosely flung sheet; as soon as they sat up, their bodies came into contact with the sticky silk, which clung to them, and as they tried to pull it free their hands and arms became entangled.
The spiders had now moved forward out of the shadow as if to get a closer view. To his relief, Niall saw that they were fairly small — with bodies about six inches long and a leg-span of about eighteen inches. He could also tell at a glance that they were related to the grey desert spider, and that they were non-poisonous.
It was now that Niall realised how fortunate he had been to wake and cover himself with the blanket. The spider net covered his blanket, and came into contact only with his shoulder, right hand and left foot. He was able to reach out with his left hand and pull his yoke, with its attached baskets, towards him. He found his flint knife and sawed away the web at his wrist; then freed his shoulder and left foot. He slipped out of the blanket and stood up, and the spiders retreated into the shadows. He picked up a large fragment of stone and flung it among them; he heard them scuttling away.
“Lie still!” he told Ingeld. She had given way to panic and was making unpleasant gasping noises as she tore at the web; he could see from her eyes that she believed this was the end. He sawed at the ends of the web where it was stuck to the floor, and a few minutes later she was able to stagger to her feet, although she was still covered with the sticky silk.
“Go outside,” Niall said. She needed no encouragement; trailing loose ends of web she rushed into the sunlight. Then Niall freed his father. As he did this, the spiders began to advance again, and he threw more stones at them. Once more they retreated. It was now clear that they were in no immediate danger; the spiders would not dare to attack now their prey was awake.
Outside, the sunlight was blinding; it was mid-afternoon. Niall helped them to peel off the web by hanging on to it as they pulled in the opposite direction; it left behind sticky filaments and lines of shiny stickiness on their skin. It took nearly an hour for Ulf and Ingeld to disentangle themselves from the fragments.
Their bags were still inside: when they went in to fetch them, they again found themselves watched from the darkness by hundreds of tiny eyes. The ends of the web still attached to the floor seemed quite solid and immovable, as if the spider-glue had hardened into a kind of resin. The spiders had exuded their light filaments, then thrown them over the sleeping human beings so that they settled as lightly as flakes of snow. It was the touch of one of them that had awakened Niall. If he had not been covered by his blanket, he would have been entangled as tightly as the others. And by now, the three of them would probably have been wrapped from head to foot in cocoons of spider silk.
At least the danger had removed the last vestiges of tiredness; they all felt capable of walking a hundred miles to escape this frightening place. Yet there would be no point in leaving until they were sure of their direction. Leaving their shoulder bags in the shade, they set out to look for a vantage point over the southern plain. They found what they were looking for in an adjoining courtyard — a flight of stone steps that went up the side of the outer wall. This was one of the few places where it was undamaged. More than a hundred regular steps brought them out on top of the wall, which was about six feet wide with a stone sentry box at the junction with the wall of the next courtyard. Niall went into the box and looked out of its window; he felt safer there than standing on top of the wall in the strong wind.
In the distance, he could see the gleam of the waters of the salt lake. Below, there was a sheer drop of fifteen hundred feet to the plains. Here the wall of the cliff was less precipitous, but it was still far too steep to climb down.
Ulf had reached the same conclusion. He said gloomily: “No way down for miles.”
Niall stood staring out over the plain. “But what did they do if they wanted to go over there?”
Ingeld said irritably: “Walked.”
“But which way? I can’t believe they went across to the other side of the plateau.”
Ulf was struck by this observation. “No, you must be right. There must be some other way down.”
They began walking along the top of the wall. At twenty-yard intervals, there was another “sentry box”, usually perched on an obtuse angle between two courtyards. Walking along the walls made them aware of the size of the place. It was far bigger than it seemed from below.
Niall asked: “Do you think giants built this place?”
Ulf shook his head. “No. Those stairs were made for men the same size as you and me.”
Niall found the idea staggering. So men like himself had built this vast citadel. But surely it must have taken many lifetimes? That depended, of course, on how many there were. . . For the first time, it dawned on Niall that perhaps there had been a time when men were lords of the earth. Before this moment, he had entertained it as an idea but never actually grasped it as a real possibility. Now the thought of thousands of men carving stone blocks, building these tremendous walls, brought a strange sense of exhilaration that was as delightful as cold water poured over his head.
It was at the next guard house that Niall saw what they were looking for: steps cut into the side of the cliff. They were only visible from directly above. At this point, the cliff was no longer a sheer rock face. The sand-laden wind had cut into it, carving away softer material so that the rock was a series of irregular columns and hummocks. Trees and bushes grew out of crevices. This was more like the point at which they had climbed up to the plateau. And immediately below them they could see steps leading down, and vanishing from sight around a great hump-backed rock which had been carved into wrinkles until it looked like the skin of a living creature.