The Spider's House Read Free Page B

He took out his little dynamo flashlight and began to squeeze it, turning the dim ray downward to the ground at the man’s feet. The insect-like whirring it made caused him to turn around, a look of surprise on his face.
    “Light,” said Stenham.
    The man grunted. “Too much noise,” he objected.
    He smiled and let the light die down. How these people love games, he thought. This one’s playing cops and robbers now; they’re always either stalking or being stalked. “The Oriental passion for complications, the involved line, Arabesques,” Moss had assured him, but he was not sure it was that. It could just as easily be a deep sense of guilt. He had suggested this, but Moss had scoffed.
    The muddy streets led down, down. There was not a foot of level ground. He had to move forward stiff-ankled, with the weight all on the balls of his feet. The city was asleep. There was profound silence, broken only by the scuffing sound he made as he walked. The man, barefooted, advanced noiselessly. From time to time, when the way led not through inner passagesbut into the open, a solitary drop of rain fell heavily out of the sky, as if a great invisible piece of wet cloth were hanging only a few feet above the earth. Everything was invisible, the mud of the street, the walls, the sky. Stenham squeezed the flashlight suddenly, and had a rapidly fading view of the man moving ahead of him in his brown djellaba, and of his giant shadow thrown against the beams that formed the ceiling of the street. The man grunted again in protest.
    Stenham smiled: unaccountable behavior on the part of Moslems amused him, and he always forgave it, because, as he said, no non-Moslem knows enough about the Moslem mind to dare find fault with it. “They’re far, far away from us,” he would say. “We haven’t an inkling of the things that motivate them.” There was a certain amount of hypocrisy in this attitude of his; the truth was that he hoped principally to convince others of the existence of this almost unbridgeable gulf. The mere fact that he could then even begin to hint at the beliefs and purposes that lay on the far side made him feel more sure in his own attempts at analyzing them and gave him a small sense of superiority to which he felt he was entitled, in return for having withstood the rigors of Morocco for so many years. This pretending to know something that others could not know, it was a little indulgence he allowed himself, a bonus for seniority. Secretly he was convinced that the Moroccans were much like any other people, that the differences were largely those of ritual and gesture, that even the fine curtain of magic through which they observed life was not a complex thing, and did not give their perceptions any profundity. It delighted him that this anonymous, barefoot Berber should want to guide him through the darkest, least frequented tunnels of the city; the reason for the man’s desire for secrecy did not matter. These were a feline, nocturnal people. It was no accident that Fez was a city without dogs. “I wonder if Moss has noticed that,” he thought.
    Now and then he had the distinct impression that they were traversing a street or an open space that he knew perfectly well, but if that were so, the angle at which they had met it was unexpected, so that the familiar walls (if indeed they were familiarwalls) were dwarfed or distorted in the one swiftly fading beam of light that he played on them. He began to suspect that the power plant had suffered a major collapse: the electricity was almost certainly still cut off, because it would be practically impossible to go so far without coming upon at least one street light. However, he was used to moving around the city in the darkness. He knew a good many ways across it in each direction, and he could have found his way blindfolded along several of these routes. Indeed, wandering through the Medina at night was very much like being blindfolded; one let one’s ears and