“Oh! why did you not heed my warnings? Did I not sign to you to depart in the courtyard, and again under your window and still once more, as I was dancing? Now we are lost, both of us. Look up there!”
Far above, an octagon of lustrous woof and warp was oscillating slowly. In it, something vast and dark was cradled.
“My God! It’s Hosein’s spider!” gasped the young man.
And now across her web the tigress of the air shot her curved and toothed claws and buff-colored grappling-hooks and dull-red jaws and six of her eight powerful black legs, covered with down and splotched with stiff tufts. Up-rearing her round head and thorax and baring thus the rich and flexible dark-green fur, as soft as velvet, which clothed her abdomen, she bent at her wasp-like waist and, balancing on the verge, fastened her eight eyes—great immovable trance-producing lenses of terrible crystal—with a gloating stare, full on Hosein’s captives, huddled together there below her. And now she swung out. Swaying just beneath her hammock, she whetted one of her scythes against the other. But, as with horror-stricken gaze, fixed on this monstrous thing, he and she waited for that to come from which there was no escape, a sudden inspiration possessed the damsel.
“Steal along the wall,” she cried to Page Lomax, “And leap from behind her upon her back at the same instant when I spring thither from in front.”
“No buts about it, Fool! Do you want to be eaten alive? Go!”
As he obeyed, the maid plucked from her bodice the pipe of charm and began breathing from it the melody with which she had quelled the wrath of the cobra de capello. At its first tremulous notes, the grim executioner of the ninety and nine hesitated—stopped reeling out her cord—no longer was opening and closing her grappling-hooks—sheathed her dull-red jaws. One awful minute she hovered near, wriggling her eight great curving legs. Then, half asleep under the spell of those drowsily sweet sounds, she lowered herself to earth and spread herself out for slumber. Without ceasing to play, Zaidee inched forward. Close enough now, she sprang upon the immense spider. That same instant, Page Lomax was by her side.
“Lie down!” she screamed, suiting her own action to her advice to him. “Press your toes against the ridge of horn, back of her head! Seize that other, yonder, stretching across, just this side her spinneret, and hold on—do you hear?—hold on with all your might? She’s going to rise and she’ll toss us off, if she can!”