We soon discover high silk buildings, the threads beaded with dew and glittering in the sun. The children are wonderstruck at those glorious chandeliers, so that they even forget their oranges for a moment. I am not indifferent to them, either. Our Spider’s labyrinth is a splendid spectacle. That and the concert of the Thrushes are worth getting up for.
Half an hour’s heat, and the magic jewels disappear with the dew. Now is the time to look at the webs. Here is one spreading its sheet over a large cluster of rock-roses; it is the size of a handkerchief. Many guy-ropes moor it to the brushwood. It covers the bush like a piece of white muslin.
The web is flat at the edges and gradually hollows into a crater, not unlike the bell of a hunting-horn. At the center is a funnel whose neck, narrowing by degrees, is eight or nine inches deep and leads back into the leafy thicket.
At the entrance to the tube sits the Spider, who looks at us and shows no great excitement at our presence. She is gray, modestly adorned on the thorax with two black ribbons and on the abdomen with two stripes in which white specks alternate with brown. She has a sort of double tail at the end of her body, a rather curious feature in a Spider.
I expected to find, at the bottom of the Spider’s funnel, a wadded cell where she might rest in her hours of leisure. On the contrary, there is only a sort of door, which stands always ajar so that the Spider may escape at any time through the grass and gain the open.
Above, in the Spider’s web, there is a forest of ropes. It might be the rigging of a ship disabled by a storm. They run from every twig of the supporting boughs, they are fastened to the tip of every branch. There are long ropes and short ropes, upright and slanting, straight and bent, taut and slack, all criss-cross and a-tangle, to the height of three feet or so. The whole makes a chaos of netting, a real labyrinth which none but the very strongest insects can break through.
There is nothing like the sticky snare of the Garden Spiders here. The threads are not sticky, but they are very bewildering. See this small Locust who has lighted on the rigging. He is unable to get a steady foothold on that shaky support; he flounders about; and the more he struggles, the more he is entangled. The Spider, looking at him from her funnel, lets him have his way. She does not run up the ropes; she waits until the desperate prisoner in his struggles falls on the main part of the web.
Then she comes, flings herself upon her prey, and slowly drains his blood. The Locust is lifeless at the first bite; the Spider’s poison has settled him.
When laying-time is at hand, the Spider changes her residence; she leaves her web, which is still in excellent condition; she does not come back to it. The time has come to make the nest. But where? The Spider knows well; I am in the dark. I spend whole mornings ransacking the bushes, until at last I learn the secret. The nest is some distance away from the web, in a low, thick cluster of bushes; it is a clumsy bundle of dead leaves, roughly drawn together with silk threads. Under this rude covering is a pouch of fine texture containing the egg-casket.
