A. Merritt

“ She stood a dozen paces away, hand on the white llama’s neck and gazing intently over the plain. There was anxiety in her gaze—but there was none in the attitude of those two strange servitors of hers. As silent, as unconcerned, as detached as ever, they seemed to await the girl’s next move.
And now Graydon noted that they were on a wide ledge that bordered this vast oval bowl. This shelf was a full hundred feet higher than the bottom of the valley whose sides sloped up to it like the sides of a saucer. And, again carrying out that suggestion of huge dish, the ledge jutted out like a rim. ”

“ Graydon’s glasses dropped from a nerveless hand. What manner of people were these who hunted with dinosaurs for dogs and a dinosaur for steed!
His eyes fell to the base of the monolith where had crouched the scarlet thing. It was no longer there. He caught a gleam of Crimson in the high grass not a thousand feet from him where he watched. Cautiously the thing was creeping on and on toward the rim. He wondered whether those spider legs could climb it, carry it over the outjutting of the ledge? He shuddered. A deeper dread grew. ”

“ If Roux had done all this—and he had done it, Graydon knew—then was it not possible for greater scientists to take men and women and by similar means breed—such creatures as the scarlet thing? A man-spider?
Nature herself had given the French scientist the hint upon which his experiments had been based. Nature herself produced from time to time such abnormalities—human monsters marked outwardly and inwardly with the stigmata of the beast, the fish—even of the insect. ”

“ The beast sank to the path, twitched and lay still. Suarra leaped from the llama’s side and faced the giant, eyes blazing wrath and behind that anger, or so it seemed to Graydon, fear.
“Fool!” she cried, and stamped her foot. “You fool! Get back to the cleft. Quick! All of you.”
She ran to the llama; caught it by the bridle; drove it, the burros and the four men back to the shelter of the ravine mouth.
“You—” she spoke to Soames, “if you desire to reach that gold for which you thirst, see that this man uses no more that death weapon of his while we are on this path. Nor any of you. ”

“ Dwarfed to the size of a Great Dane dog, still there was no mistaking its breed—one of those leaping, upright walking monstrous lizards that millions of years ago had ruled earth and without whose extinction, so science taught, man never have arisen ages later to take possession of this planet. Graydon could see its blunt and spade shaped tail which, with its powerful, pillarlike hind legs, made the tripod upon which it squatted. ”

“ A weaver? A spider-man whose arms and legs were slender and long and spider like—whose hands were like horn-covered needles of bone—whose body was like the round ball of a spider!
And she had said that the scarlet thing might have offended Lantlu by its weaving. Lantlu? The rider of the jetty dinosaur, of course. ”

“ A loom is but a dead machine on which fingers work more or less clumsily. The spider is both machine and living artisan, spinning, weaving, more surely, more exquisitely than could any dead mechanism worked by man. Who had approached the delicacy, the beauty, of the spider’s web?
Suddenly Graydon seemed to look into a whole new world of appalling grotesquerie—soulless spider men and spider women spread out over great webs and weaving with needled fingers wondrous fabrics ”

“ In man’s long ascent from the speck of primeval jelly on the shallow shores of the first seas, he had worn myriad shapes. And as he moved higher from one shape to another his cousins kept them, becoming during the ages the fish he caught to-day, the horses he rode, the apes he brought from the jungles to amuse him in his cages. ”

“ Even the spiders that spun in his gardens, the scorpion that scuttled from the tread of his feet, were abysmally distant blood brothers of his, sprung from the ancient Trilobite that in its turn had sprung from forms through which what was to be at last man himself had come. ”

“ Dancre motioned him in between himself and Sterrett, grinning wickedly.
“Soames has changed his plan,” he whispered. “If there is trouble he shoot the old devils—quick. He keep the girl to make trade wit’ her people. He keep you to make trade wit’ the girl. Eh?”
Graydon did not answer. He had already realized what the maneuver meant. But a wave of jubilation swept over him. When the Frenchman had pressed close to him he had felt an automatic in his side pocket. If an attack did come, he thought, he would leap upon Dancre, snatch the pistol and gain for himself at least a fighting chance. ”

“ Nature had produced such monstrosities, and unless these shapes had lain dormant and been capable of awakening, even Nature could not have accomplished it. For even Nature cannot build something out of nothing. ”