"Colin Wilson - Spider World 01 - The Desert" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Colin)

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.
The others were now awake -- his mother, Siris, and his two younger sisters, Runa and Mara.
Ulf said little within the hearing of the girls; yet they could sense that something was wrong, and their fear
was like an unpleasant vibration, or a sweet-sickly smell.
From the entrance stone, Veig beckoned his father. Niall also crept to the mouth of the burrow,
and before the two heads blocked the daylight he glimpsed the white balloon, moving fast over the tops
of the organ cactus, more than a mile away.
Ulf said softly: "The little ones must be put to sleep."
Veig nodded and disappeared into the depths of the burrow where the ants were stabled. Ten
minutes later, he returned with a gourd full of the sweet, porridge-like substance that the ants secreted in
their craws. Siris scraped portions of this on wooden platters and the girls ate hungrily, unaccustomed to
such generous helpings. When Niall accepted his platter, he smelt the heavy, flowery scent of the ortis
plant that came from the forest of the Great Delta. But he had no desire to sleep; he was confident now
that he could control his fear reaction. To satisfy his father, he swallowed a mouthful but as soon as no
one was looking, pushed the plate under a pile of alfa grass used for bedding. Five minutes later, the little
girls were fast asleep again. Niall also felt a pleasant heaviness from the narcotic, a warm glow that
soothed the feeling of hunger; but his mind remained alert.
Siris had waited until the girls were asleep before she ate sparingly of the honeydew porridge.
Like Niall, she wanted to remain awake. But this was not so that she could help defend the burrow. It
was so she could kill the children, then herself, if the death spiders detected their presence.
She was swallowing the first mouthful when the fear-probe invaded the burrow. It was literally an
invasion, as if one of the enormous spiders had leapt into the midst of their underground home. For a
moment, Niall almost lost control; but his mind instantly grasped that this invisible terror was bodiless and
impersonal. Siris was not so lucky. Niall felt as well as saw the fear that poured out of her like a shriek.
Ulf and Veig felt it too -- the searching will of the death spider seemed to have some quality that
amplified their feelings and also released involuntary bursts of fear. Niall alone remained perfectly
controlled and calm. He had contracted his mind to a point, so the light seemed to glow inside his head,
and he felt strangely detached from his surroundings and from his own personality.
The fear-probe seemed to hesitate, as if it had stopped to listen. But now all the humans had their
fear under control, and the inside of the burrow seemed full of a throbbing silence. The two girls breathed
peacefully. As the fear-probe faded, like a sound dying away in the distance, Niall experienced a brief
glow of satisfaction. If the children had been awake, their terror would have announced their presence in
waves of hysteria, betraying them to the spiders as hundreds of other human children had involuntarily
betrayed their families. The juice of the ortis plant was a great blessing, even though it had cost the lives
of his uncle Thorg and his cousin Hrolf. Both had been overcome by the plant and eaten. Five times more
that day, the fear-probes invaded the burrow; but the minds of the human beings were still as their
bodies; no echo of fear betrayed their presence. Propped against the smooth wall of the burrow, a wall
made of sand grains cemented by the saliva of the tiger beetle, Niall felt as if he had been turned to stone.
As the day advanced, the temperature in the burrow rose steadily. Under normal circumstances,
they would have sealed the entrance with branches and stones, and the wind would have completed the
work by filling the cracks with sand. But Ulf wanted to be able to see the approach of the spider
balloons; it was easier to resist the fear-probes when they were expected. So the aperture under the flat
stone was left open, and the hot desert wind blew into the burrow, carrying sand that was allowed to