The Web of the Sun (Adventure Magazine, 1922)/Chapter 14
XIV
THE chronic suppression of society prevents a man from bewailing his griefs openly and sanitarily. Probably ages of fighting and military training has taught the mind the wisdom of the generalissimo who stands off cool and collected, thinking what best may be done in the emergency, even while his army breaks and perishes.
Charles Lassiter deliberately ceased thinking of the mestizo girl almost as soon as he left the paddlewood. He avoided things that would remind him of her. He made a quarter of a mile circuit through the steamy jungle around the baobab where Prymoxl still toiled at the wedding feast. He struck in toward the lake at an angle that would miss the cow-tree forest. His bags were heavy; the afternoon painfully bright and hot. The glare hurt his eyes, and he felt weary and old.
He kept his mind on the surface of things, so thinly on the surface of things that it was a sort of vacancy. When he looked at the palm fronds, at the reach of the lake toward the teocalla, these things simply were. With an effort he banished all mental association or aura of beauty. A cow must look at a landscape in some such fashion.
From the lake shore he saw some white rolling clouds drift up out of the Amazon valley above the eastern rim of Motobatl. Their whiteness turned the sky above them to an indigo and the palisades to a cardinal. His mind did not combine these three brilliancies into a harmony.
The hillock which hid the Web of the Sun lifted its mystery between him and the temple. His eyes rested on it with a stunned man's quietism. Only when he passed it and waded through the hot sand around the swing of the lake did the memory of Tilita assail him. In this blistering place he had kissed and embraced her. An ache struck through his mind, like the start of a broken tooth. The promoter made a harried movement. He swung his bags to his other shoulder and scrambled back to the surface of things.
He looked behind him. The sun was an hour and a half high. A fisherman rowed his boat toward a reedy island. Far up the beach Lassiter could see the black dots of two human figures coming toward him. No doubt it was some of Birdsong's men bringing a sacrifice to atone for their impiety.
So he walked on, considering Birdsong's murder very quietly, without the faintest condemnation or approval. It was war, a move in a chess game. The pawns of life took first this position and that. Birdsong was dead; he was stepping into the archiepiscopal chair; Gogoma would paint—it was a hot day.
Quiz-Quiz, the hunchback, stood at Nunes' bolsa with its queer top where it lay at the edge of the piazza. Whether the acolyte were waiting for him or not, Lassiter did not know. The crooked little man took one of the bags and the two proceeded across the vast piazza that quivered in the heat.
The columns of the façade seemed to tremble. The hexagonal tufa blocks stung Lassiter's feet. The sun stuck a hot brand to the back of his neck. The piazza seemed endless. The hunchback piloted him to ward the southern side entrance.
Half-way across the piazza the Stendill agent peered back through the flame of sunshine. The distant figures had enlarged. They were almost to the net, and were running.
With vast relief, Lassiter stepped out of the heat into the chill hypogeum. Its gloom and chill fell like a lotion on his eyes. As he moved inside he thought he heard a distant shouting, or, more likely, it was some variation in the coughing and sucking of the whirlpool far to the north.
The southern entrance let into a mere tunnel that penetrated inward twenty or thirty steps, then led into another tunnel that ran north and south at right angles. This passageway gave on an endless row of cenobitic cells parallel with the cliff out side.[1]
The hunchback led the way to one of these cells, put Lassiter's bag inside, glanced about for a moment to see that everything was in order, then explained that this would be the novitiate's room and retired.
The promoter stood looking about him. A hole through ten feet of stone admitted a ray of light into the chamber. The only furnishing was a sort of stone couch or table. The walls of the cell were roughly hewn, but the surface of the couch was not only polished, but into it was worn the impression of a human form. How many anchorites for how many centuries had stretched themselves on it to hard repose!
LASSITER put his bags in a corner and stood looking around the expressionless hole. The floor, also, was worn into distinct grooves by the tramping of feet. The thought of such a stream of life eddying out of the warmth and sunlight of the crater to stagnate in this chill hole oppressed Lassiter. To what dull end they had gravitated.
The promoter sat down on his couch and looked at his bags. He did not open them, nor make any of those little arrangements of housekeeping which a man performs even to camp for a night. It seemed not worth while. Indeed, the mental basis of every home-keeping gesture in man are a mate and children. By his desertion of Tilita, this had been torn from Lassiter's brain.
So he sat on the couch in silence. The air shaft gave a yellowish circle of light on the opposite wall. It showed the grain of the volcanic stone. Presently the promoter became aware of a faint odor of the cow-tree milk in the close air. Lassiter straightened and savored the air almost in surprize. It was the odor of milk. Then he realized that the scent of Tilita's body had clung to his clothes.
It annoyed Lassiter sharply. A vision of the girl asleep in the hammock passed before his eyes. He shook his shoulders sharply, got up, walked over to the air shaft and looked out. The shaft gave on a circle of saffron western sky. The promoter stood breathing at the intake, thinking he should have changed his clothing.
His hardly suppressed thoughts began breaking in on his brain. He could see her asleep in the hammock. On his fingers he could feel the warmth where her hands had clung. It seemed that he had, at that moment, stepped away from her side.
He let his curbed imagination go. He wondered wistfully if she were still asleep; and what would she do when she awoke? Go back to the baobab? Back to old Prymoxl and the empty wedding feast? What a raw, lonely vigil the night would bring her! And had Birdsong lived, what rapture they would have known! This very sunset that sent a splotch of crimson light down the air-shaft would have drawn curtains about their wedding couch!
A pulse began throbbing in his neck. He could feel a faint warm line along the closure of his lips. Blood murmured in his ear. In the vast stillness of the cliff, he could hear the functioning of his heart. Its systole and diastole formed a gurgling that sounded almost like an external voice. He imagined it said his own name over and over—
“Señor Lassiter! Señor Lassiter! Señor Lassiter!”
It might have been Tilita's voice repeating the watery syllables interminably.
As the man sat listening, the faint calling seemed to detach itself from the murmur in his ears. It seemed to come from the corridor. It was distinctly from the corridor, far down toward the south, in the opposite direction from the entrance.
That any person should be whispering his name in this distant wing of the hypogeum amazed Lassiter. He went out into the passageway. He could not see beyond fifteen or twenty doors owing to the curve of the passage. But the whispering of his name came closer and closer.
It sounded as if some spectral voice were moving through solid stone from cell to cell calling him. It was impossible to say whether it was man's or woman's. Now it was only a few doors above him. The corridor remained empty. The voice passed into an adjoining cell. Suddenly it was in his own cell.
The promoter wheeled back inside.
“What is it?” he asked of emptiness. Then he saw that his air-shaft was darkened.
He stepped to his shaft, looked through and saw the Colombian's face at the other end. The man's eyes were staring.
“By the Holy Virgin!” gasped the fellow. “I thought I'd never find you—the girl, Tilita—you're a priest—perhaps you can—”
Balthasar's excitement communicated itself to the neophyte:
“What is it?” he asked sharply. “What's happened to her? Answer me, man!”
A sudden premonition roughened his skin.
The Colombian suddenly lifted his voice to a whispered wail:
“Oh, Mother of God! She's in the net! Jumped in! Run! Mio Dios, señor, run!”
Lassiter whirled. As he rushed out of his cell, he still heard that wailing whisper pursuing him:
“Run! Run! Oh, Holy Mary!”
Quiz-Quiz was at the door. Two or three priests were flying northward down the corridor that led toward the main temple. Lassiter shouted at the hunchback to open the door. The crooked little man began pointing and screaming for Lassiter to run with the other priests—to grease his feet. The promoter stormed the door through which he had entered. He flung his weight against the bolts. They clashed back. The portal inched open. Quiz-Quiz clamored a warning as Lassiter shot through the opening.
Furnace heat and a blare of golden light, smote the troglodyte as he leaped out of the cavern. Nunes was waiting in a quiver at the entrance. At sight of Lassiter he whirled and bolted across the wide pavement. He began explaining in staccato:
“Mother of God! Quiz-Quiz wouldn't let me in! I had to shout in a thousand windows! She must be swallowed up—gone”
He tore along through the heat. The promoter panted after him. A hot breeze beat against the American's face; his heart pounded. The piazza was so huge his feet seemed to patter up and down in one place. Nunes gradually crept up on him.
By the time they reached the bolsa at the edge of the piazza, the muleteer was abreast. He drew out his automatic and stuck it butt foremost to the flying New Yorker. Lassiter got it without breaking his stride.
Beyond the pavement, the sand slowed him up. His feet slipped, his shoes filled. Both men were reduced to a miserable trot. Lassiter stared ahead through his dripping sweat. The sun was just sinking behind the western palisade. It was the hour of sacrifice, when things flung into the net vanished. With a last effort the promoter plowed up the mound, gasping for breath.
IN THE limed circle lay the Incan girl. At the sound of Lassiter's sobbing breath she turned her head, saw him and screamed—
“Primo!”
She struggled violently to loose herself. The man plunged down the stones toward her.
At that moment a section of the landward stones opened. Something huge, leggy and bristly flashed out. Its spindling legs covered a twenty foot circle. Its body was a globular bag mottled with spots the size of a man's head. In a sort of spiked plate on its front were set six staring black eyes. The plate and bag were borne on the huge spiky legs at about the height of a man's head.
The thing flashed on the girl with a sort of rubbery snap. It caught her on the movable spikes of its frontal plate, and next moment flashed back. It was so swift, so silent, so horrible, Lassiter had neither time nor mind to raise his firearm. A mere stab, a flash—and the net hung empty save for the girl's clothes still sticking to the limed cords.
The Stendill agent climbed down to the net shakily, like an old man. He set his feet on the cords and moved carefully around the limed center toward the unstable stones. He heard Nunes shouting at him from the hillock.
What he pushed was not a stone but a sort of silken flap that swung back easily. Inside it was dark. He could see only the white blur of the girl, and the glint of eyes, such as he had seen on the rim of the crater. He drew out his flashlight with queer deliberation and switched it on.
Under its spurt, the cavern glowed all over with a pale sheen. It was lined with silk. The place stunk of insects and rotting flesh.
Under the hard light of the electric torch, the creature gave the girl's body a delicate kiss, a mere touch with a hair-like lancet that slipped into the lower margin of her right breast over her heart. At the touch, the girl curved up her body, her right arm dropped among the spikes on the frontal plate, her left swung limply down.
Lassiter risked a shot at the eyes above her body. During the very flash of the shot, the monster vanished and reappeared sticking to the silken roof over the promoter's head. Its great bag hung downward from a spread of legs. The white body of the girl was still in its mandibles. The promoter lifted his automatic to shoot again.
Suddenly down through the electric glare fell coils of shining viscid cables. They fell in a sort of horrible shimmering beauty around his neck, arms, legs. He could see the stuff spewing out of eight spinnarets at the end of the abdomen. Fortunately the man had his pistol trained on it. He fired deliberately, three times, into this downpour of limed silk. At the third shot Tilita's body fell from the roof to the silken floor. The thing itself vanished. Amid the gummy silk Lassiter contrived to twist his light this way and that. The cavern was empty. The thing had escaped with such suddenness his eyes did not register the motion.
The sound of voices and the flare of torches came from the further end of the cavern and presently Gogoma and four other priests of the sun appeared crawling out of the end of a tunnel which evidently connected with the temple.
The naked behemoth glanced about, then waddled over the silken carpet to the woman's limp form. In the flare of the torches he balanced his bulk carefully, stooped and lifted the flexuous figure. He straightened and laid it across the sweating expanse of his chest and shoulder. He stroked her curves with puffy fingers in profound satisfaction. After a moment he thought to ask—
“I hope you are not injured, Señor Lassiter?”
The Stendill agent made some answer amid his smother of limed tubes. Two of the priests ran over and began stripping the viscous stuff from his body with their greased hands.
“In your zeal to save the girl from being consumed, Señor Lassiter,” purred the high priest, “I hope you have not caused her to be imperfectly anesthetized and preserved.”
The promoter made no answer. The words Gogoma used seemed to mean nothing.
“This body,” proceeded the high priest, “will be a rare addition to my gallery.” Again he stroked her rondures with swollen fingers. “After all, Señor Lassiter, we have preserved the immortal part of this girl—her beauty—this sweet modeling of flesh. That is what all men love in a woman, Señor Lassiter, beauty. The lover clasps beauty in his arms and it vanishes even while it lies upon his heart. But the artist, Señor Lassiter—ah, the artist really enjoys his love.
“With his eye, that subtle sense of touch, infinitely refined, he embraces the whole woman in a sort of kissing gaze. How gross the passion of a lover, Señor Lassiter, how cool and sublimated the rapture of an artist. Beauty is the thought of God. In the temple we will return thanks reverently for this little sleepy flower”
The priests were picking their way back through the tunnel to the temple of the sun. They came out in a great chamber into which the last of the sunset fell through a huge rose window. Opposite the window was a rayed plate of burnished gold. The yellow light falling on this mirror filled the chamber with an intense fulgor.
The apartment was lined on all sides with a brilliant tapestry of featherwork. The vivid green of parrots vibrated against the lory's yellow, the crimson of a hummingbird's throat flared against the cream of a pelican. Such an irisated palet no paint ever produced.
THE picture was of the rising sun spreading its web of light. In its shining gossamer were woven animals, trees, insects, naked men and women, babies, spiders, loathly worms. On the right wall the shining beams raveled out embracing, law-makers judging, thieves stealing, murderers stabbing, and yet it was all sunlight. The whole vital realm, the artist was saying, is nothing but a rainbow froth of love, lust, rapine, pain, weariness, joy and ecstasy where sunlight impinges on matter. All of it is somehow bound up in sunlight, all of it somehow, is spun out of the web of the Sun.
In the center of the room knelt the naked forms of Tilita's grandmother and of the colporteur. The Spanish woman's sensuousness and the Arkansan's powerful physique and hard face formed a subtle harmony with the figures in the featherwork. Birdsong's scroll of polished black hair was still intact. On the other side of the revivalist, old Gogoma arranged Tilita's body in an attitude of adoration.
Lassiter stood looking at the three figures kneeling to the golden image of the sun. Their bodies were preserved, their hearts barely beat in the immortality of a spider's poison. They would never die; they would never live. Their bodies would persist on and on, exactly as if they were netted in the spider's web, waiting for a return of the monster to suck out their juices.
Lassiter wondered dully if any consciousness lay behind their slow-batting eyes. If they felt pain or discomfort or nothing.
The light died with the suddenness which the promoter had noted from the rim of the cliff. Then all the new ecclesiast could see were three dim figures kneeling in the gloom. As Lassiter marched out with the other priests, a curious fear assailed him. He was afraid that a rat might gnaw Tilita in the night.[2]
- ↑ The temple of the Sun in Motobatl was probably the most populous cenobite known to history. Twenty-two hundred and sixty-five cells honeycomb the cliff. The whole object of this vast institution was to reduce the birth rate of the imprisoned nation by celibacy.
- ↑ The discovery of the immense trap~door spiders (cteniza gigantea hindshawensis) in the Amazon valley by Sir Cecil Hindshaw in 1918 makes comment on the above passage in Charles_Lassiter's narrative unnecessary. However, the transcriber takes the liberty to refresh the reader's recollection of Sir Cecil's noteworthy contribution to entomological literature. On page ninety-two of his book [“A Naturalist on the Upper Amazon.” Hindshaw. Wier & Duffling] says:
“These large spiders imitate almost perfectly with their trap doors the stony environmens of their dens, reproducing even the coloration of the stone and its stratification. Among the Jivaros we found a fully developed 'spider worship, resembling the 'mantis worship' among the African Bushman, or a similar spider worship called 'ananzi' by the negroes of the West Coast of Africa.
“These enormous spiders are, no doubt, the most formidable creatures in existence today. They go on long forays and can kill and drag a bullock to the den. My guide declared he saw one capture a jaguar in its toils. These large spiders seem to equal, proportional1y, the ordinary spider in speed and agility. The common cteniza can move twenty times its own length in a second. The cteniza gigantea which I succeeded in killing had a spread of fifteen feet. This would give 1t a speed of three hundred feet per second. Certainly I made no measurements, but on the two occasions when I saw this cteniza before I obtained the killing shot, the creature simply disappeared from our vision. We had not the faintest idea of the direction of its flight until the trailers found its track. I need hardly say the slaughter of one cteniza gigantea furnished more thrills than a dozen tiger hunts in India; nevertheless, I do not predict that it will become a popular sport.”
When Motobatl was occupied by workmen in the employ of the Stendill lines in the construction of the hangar and tourist hotel now in the crater, the great teocalla. Much discussion arose what disposition should be made of the bodies. At last two were sent to scientific institutions for medical examination. London College of Physicians and Surgeons received a man, and Johns Hopkins of Baltimore received a woman. Under a microscopic examination, it was discovered by Dr. J. Edward Westmoreland of London, that the spider in paralyzing human victims inserts its poison lancet over the heart, into the viscera. The poison produces profound coma and seems also to act as preservative against cellular degeneration.
The third victim, a girl, which is thought to be the Tilita mentioned in Lassiter's narrative, fell into the hands of a Professor Waldrup, a tourist flying through Motobatl. When last heard from, oddly enough in Arkansas, Professor Waldrup was giving hypnotic performances with the body, allowing it to lie all night in the show-windows of village drug stores, sticking it full of hat pins and such like, catering to the scientific mind of America. It should be a matter of national pride how we Americans derive culture and refinement out of the most untoward circumstances.