"Colin Wilson - Spiderworld 05 - The Magician" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Colin)

unpleasantness. It had often struck him as curious that, in spite of their telepathic powers,
spiders seemed oddly lacking in intuition. Perhaps it was because they had so little to
fear.
Niall walked on slowly, his head averted as if listening. Because his eyes were on
the ground, he noticed the footprints close to the left-hand wall. There were half a dozen
of them, and they were pointing in the opposite direction; whoever made them had
wandered to one side of the path for a few steps, then returned to the center. Because the
breeze had been blowing from the north, the footprints had been protected by the wall,
and were covered with only a light powdering of the snow that had fallen later. Now
Niall paused and examined them closely, kneeling down in the snow. The first thing that
struck him was that they had been made by sandals -- or shoes -- of excellent
workmanship. Most of the sandals worn by the workmen of this city were poorly made;
thick leather soles held on to the foot by leather thongs or strips of reinforced cloth,
which were threaded through holes in the leather. In order to prevent these thongs from
becoming worn where they made contact with the ground, holes were countersunk in the
sole to minimize the friction. So a footprint made by a workman or a slave was quite
distinctive, with its three pairs of holes. On the other hand, the human beings captured
from Kazak's underground city wore more elaborate footwear. Having far more time at
their disposal, the shoemakers of Dira took pride in their craft, and sewed broad leather
straps to the sole with waxed thread. The soles themselves were shaped to correspond
exactly to the outline of the human foot. It seemed likely, then, that these footprints in the
snow had been made by a man of Dira.
Dravig asked: "These are the footprints of one of the assassins?"
"Yes."
"They seem to interest you."
"I am puzzled. If you look at my own footprints, you will see that they have been
made with an even pressure -- the heel and the sole are of equal depth. In these, the heel
is far deeper than the sole."
"I see that." Dravig's tone was polite, but Niall sensed that the spider found his
interest incomprehensible. The spider mentality seemed averse to mathematical logic.
"And what do you infer?"
Niall straightened up, shaking his head. "That he was carrying something heavy."
But he was far from convinced by his own reasoning.
Fifty paces further on, the path was partly blocked with rubble where the left-hand
wall had collapsed. On the other side of it there was an overgrown garden; the house to
which it belonged had once been large, but had now fallen into ruin. Niall paused and
stood looking at the house. Once again he had the sense that something was hovering on
the edge of his perceptions, like a movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye.
Stepping carefully, he made his way over the fallen stones and into the garden. Instinct
told him to turn left and make his way toward a gap in the shrubbery. It was only when he
was there that he noticed that there was less snow on these bushes than on the
surrounding ones, and that somebody had probably brushed past them, shaking the snow
onto the ground.
A dozen yards from the house, he found his path blocked by an empty swimming
pool. Its plastic material had long ago become cracked and coated with black mildew;
only in places were there glimpses of its original blue color. The bottom was covered
with rubbish: dead leaves, fallen slates, and broken glass. But what immediately attracted
Niall's attention was the pile of more recent rubbish on the side nearest the house. In the
corner of the pool, at the foot of an aluminum ladder that was still firmly attached to the
side, there were dead branches, pieces of rotten timber, and a quantity of fallen leaves