ontradict all fairness that the way which led to meaning, if it
did, lay through a world of savage (of this he was also quite sure),
sniveling insects, who had in no way raised themselves above the
animal. They were mindless and ugly, and his distaste for them would
not be abated. Fatigue, too, was becoming unbearable, as the invisible
force that beat back on him, assaulting both mind and body, continued
to grow with the light which was its sister sun.

On the fourth day, though time meant little in that place, passing only
in the world outside, he discovered the reason for his revulsion. The
dull, scraping sounds of armor against stone, of multitudes locked in
battle, had caught first at the edge of hearing, seeming unreal, then
steadied, held, and increased as he went on. Till coming to the
fissure-like opening of yet another vast cavern, he looked down on a
sight that twisted his spirit like rope and squeezed hard at the knots.
Some twenty meters below him, as it were through a glassless window,
he saw and understood at last the riddle of these pathetic creatures.

Newly hatched---the broken, swollen webs of multiple cocoons lay many
layers deep all around them---they were locked into countless battling
pairs. Each separate fight was to the death, the victor sometimes
stopping to eat a part of the vanquished, gaining strength, then moved
on to grapple with others who had yet survived. By such attrition
their numbers had already been reduced from thousands to hundreds, to
what end he could not imagine.

Then he saw the females. Huge and bloated, they sat complacently on
raised vantage points at the margins of the battlefield, awaiting the
final conquerors. These victors he knew, from the signs he had already
seen, would mate with them and then be cast out, possibly eaten, left
to die as they would, the reason for their brief, wretched lives
extinguished.

He watched them in dull horror, growing to intense pity and disgust.
For he knew that what he sought lay beyond them, and that its power,
for good or ill, had nothing to do with them, and no influence
whatever, either to elevate or corrupt. They were only here, and
through some flaw of intelligence, or heart, or having no choice, they
lived and died in a meaningless haste of reproduction.

He must past through them. He waited as long as his patience would
hold, away from the window, not watching. When he looked in again many
hours later, the number o