Was it waiting for night--to steal upon him in the darkness, to wreath
around him those terrible tentacles, and to drain his life-blood?

Now, indeed, all stood clear. "The Spider" was no allegorical term, but
literal fact. That frightful monster with which he had just come face to
face was indeed the demon-god of the Ba-gcatya! It was actually fed with
living men, in accordance with some dark and mysterious superstition
held by that otherwise fine race. Now the fate of those whose skeletons
lay around stood accounted for. They had been devoured by this
unimaginable horror. Alive? It was almost certain--possibly when
weakened by starvation. Yet a gruesome thought entered his mind. Why had
an abundance of food been lowered with him into this hell-pit? Did not
the circumstance make as though it was in their full vigour that the
monster was designed to seize its victims--and in that event, with what
an extent of strength and fell ferocity must it not be endowed?

But what _was_ this thing? Laurence had seen spiders of every variety,
huge and venomous, and of grisly size, yet nothing like this. Why, the
creature was as large as a bear nearly! It must be some beast hitherto
unknown to natural history; yet those awful tentacles--joints, hair,
everything--could not but belong to an insect--were, in fact, precisely
as the legs of a huge tarantula, magnified five hundred-fold. What
ghastly and blood-curdling freak of nature could have produced such a
monstrosity as this? Why, the very sight of the awful thing huddled up,
black, within the gloom of the cranny, the horrid tentacles--a
hundred-fold more repulsive, more blood-curdling than though they
actually were so many serpents--moving and writhing in a great
quivering, hairy, intertwined mass--was in itself a sight to haunt his
dreams until his dying day, did he live another fifty years. What must
it mean, then, to realize that he was actually shut in--escape
impossible--with the deliberate purpose of being devoured by this
vampire, this demon, even as all these others had been devoured before
him?

At this juncture of his meditations his mind became alive to two
discoveries--one, that he had gained the farther end of the ridge than
that by which he had crossed; the other, that immediately before and
beneath him, just over the slope of the ridge, lay the body of a man.

Yes--the body of a man, not the skeleton of one. That it was that of a
dead man he could see at a glance