The Desert
Spider World, Book 01
by Colin Wilson
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My chief debt of gratitude is to my friend Donald Seaman, with whom this book was originally planned as a collaboration. The idea was abandoned at a fairly early stage, but I had the benefit of his suggestions and advice throughout. I am also deeply grateful to Professor John Cloudsley-Thompson, England’s leading expert on deserts, for his invaluable advice on the first section of this book. It also owes a great deal to the warm encouragement of my editor John Boothe.
CW
Cornwall, 1986
As the first cold whisper of the dawn wind blew under the flat stone that covered the burrow, Niall placed his ear against the crack and listened with total concentration. Whenever he did that, it was as if a tiny point of light glowed inside his head, and there was a sudden silence in which every noise was amplified. Now, suddenly, he could hear the faint sound of a large insect moving across the sand. The lightness and speed of its movements told him that this was a solifugid, or camel spider. A moment later, it crossed his field of vision — the barrel-like, hairy body glistening in the sunlight, the immense jaws carrying the remains of a lizard. In a moment it was past, and there was no sound but the wind in the branches of the euphorbia cactus. But it had told him what he wanted to know: that there was no scorpion or tiger beetle in the area. The camel spider is the greediest of creatures; it will eat until its stomach is so distended that it can hardly move. This one had looked only half-fed. If there had been any other sign of life in the area, it would have abandoned its half-eaten prey to attack.
Cautiously, he brushed aside the sand with a double movement of his hands like a swimmer; then he slid his underfed body through the gap. The sun was just beginning to show above the horizon; the sand was still cold from the frost of the night. His objective lay fifty yards away, at the edge of the cactus grove: the waru plant whose green flesh, as thick and almost as yielding as an earlobe, formed a cup to capture the dew. For the past hour he had lain awake, his throat burning, and conjured up the joy of dipping his lips into the icy liquid. There was water in the burrow, water gathered by the slave ants fifty feet below the surface of the desert; but it was red in colour, and tasted of mineral salts. By comparison, the cold dew of the waru plant was like champagne.
Its cup, formed of two curling leaves, was half full, and there were crystals of ice at the edges. Niall knelt on all fours, lowered his face into the cup and took a long, deep draught. The pleasure made his muscles tingle and relax. For the desert dweller, icy water is one of the greatest of all luxuries. He was tempted to drink every drop; but his training forbade it. The shallow roots of the waru needed this water to live; if he drank it all, the plant would die, and one more source of water would be gone. So Niall stopped drinking while the cup was still half full. But he continued to kneel there, staring into the cold liquid as if drinking its essence, while a chilly wave of delight ran from his shoulders down to his feet. In the depths of his being, strange racial memories stirred: memories of a golden age, when water was plentiful, and men were not forced to live under the floor of the desert like insects.
That mood of deep quiescence saved his life. As he raised his eyes, he saw the balloon against the pale eastern sky. It was about half a mile away, and moving swiftly towards him. Instantly and instinctively, he controlled the reflex of terror. The inner-calm of a few moments ago made it easier. At the same moment, he realised that he was kneeling in the shade of the immense organ-pipe cactus, whose fluted trunk stretched up seventy feet above his head. Against the dark western landscape, with its pools of shadow, his brown body must have been totally invisible. Only the reflex of terror could betray him. And this was difficult to control as the balloon swept towards him, as if the creature inside had marked him for its prey. He thought of the others, lying below in the burrow, and prayed that they were fast asleep. Then the balloon was bearing down on him, and for the first time in his life, he experienced that enormous sense of menace transmitted by hunting spiders. It was as though a hostile willpower was sweeping the desert like a searchlight beam, probing every area of shadow with an almost tangible force, trying to provoke a reflex of terror that would rise towards it like a scream. Niall deliberately averted his eyes to the cup of the waru, and tried to make his mind as still as the clear water. It was then that he experienced the odd sensation of being aware of the soul of the waru, the passive vegetable soul whose only purpose was to drink, absorb sunlight, and stay alive. In that same moment, he was also aware of the prouder soul of the giant cactuses, soaring above him like a challenge to the sky. The ground itself seemed to become transparent so that he could sense the presence of his family, his parents and his brother and two sisters, all lying fast asleep, although his father stirred as the beam of malevolent will swept across him.
A few seconds later, it was gone; the balloon was already a quarter of a mile away across the desert, moving towards the great inland plateau on the horizon. The will-force was sweeping the desert ahead of it, and he could feel its presence as clearly as if it were a beam of light. He sat perfectly still, watching the balloon dwindle into the distance and observing with interest that it swerved aside to avoid a needle-like pinnacle of rock.
When it was gone he hurried back to the burrow, moving swiftly and silently as he had been taught since childhood. His entrance awakened his father, who leapt instantly into a crouching position, his right hand closing on a bone dagger. As he recognised Niall, he also sensed there was something wrong.
“What is it?”
Niall whispered: “A spider balloon.”
“Where?”
“It’s gone now.”
“Did it see you?”
“I don’t think so.”
Ulf allowed his tension to escape in a long breath. He climbed up to the entrance, listened for a moment, and peered out. The sun was now above the horizon, and the sky was a cloudless blue still tinged with white.
His elder brother, Veig, spoke out of the darkness. “What is it?”
“They’re hunting,” Ulf said.
There was no need for Veig to ask what he meant. “They”, used in that tone of voice, could only mean the death spiders. And when the death spiders were hunting, it was the most serious thing that could happen to this small band of human beings who spent most of their lives underground. For as far back as they could remember, men had been hunted: by scorpions, by tiger beetles, by striped scarabs and saga insects — but most of all, by the death spiders. The beetles and the mosquitoes were natural enemies; sometimes, they could be killed. But the spiders, who were the lords of the earth, were unconquerable. To kill a spider was to invite appalling revenge. When Niall’s great-grandfather, Jomar, had been a slave of the spiders, he had seen what happened to a small colony of humans who killed a spider. An army of thousands was mobilised to hunt them. A line of spiders more than ten miles long marched across the desert, with hundreds of balloon spiders overhead. When the human beings were finally captured — about thirty of them, including children — they were brought back to the city of the Death Lord, paraded before the whole populace, and then ritually injected with a nerve poison that brought paralysis. The victims remained fully conscious, yet were unable to move anything but their eyes and eyelids. After that they were slowly eaten, the whole process taking a matter of days; the leader continued to live for almost two weeks, until he was only an armless and legless trunk.
No one knew why the spiders hated men so much: not even Jomar, who had spent his whole life among them until he escaped on a spider balloon. All Jomar knew was that there were thousands of hunting spiders who spent their lives searching for human beings. Perhaps it was because they regarded human flesh as the supreme delicacy. Yet this explanation seemed illogical, since the spiders bred their own human beings for food. Apparently they liked them fat — so fat that they could scarcely walk. So why should a spider prize the flesh of the underfed humans of the desert? There must be some other reason why the spiders regarded humans with such single-minded hatred.