Rest in this exquisite retreat demands perfect stability, especially on gusty days, when sharp draughts penetrate beneath the stone.  This condition is admirably fulfilled.  Take a careful look at the habitation.  The arches that gird the roof with a balustrade and bear the weight of the edifice are fixed to the slab by their extremities.  Moreover, from each point of contact, there issues a cluster of diverging threads that creep along the stone and cling to it throughout their length, which spreads afar.  I have measured some fully nine inches long.  These are so many cables; they represent the ropes and pegs that hold the Arab’s tent in position.  With such supports as these, so numerous and so methodically arranged, the hammock cannot be torn from its bearings save by the intervention of brutal methods with which the Spider need not concern herself, so seldom do they occur.

Another detail attracts our attention:  whereas the interior of the house is exquisitely clean, the outside is covered with dirt, bits of earth, chips of rotten wood, little pieces of gravel.  Often there are worse things still:  the exterior of the tent becomes a charnel-house.  Here, hung up or embedded, are the dry carcasses of Opatra, Asidae and other Tenebrionidae {39} that favour underrock shelters; segments of Iuli, {40} bleached by the sun; shells of Pupae, {41} common among the stones; and, lastly, Snail-shells, selected from among the smallest.

These relics are obviously, for the most part, table-leavings, broken victuals.  Unversed in the trapper’s art, the Clotho courses her game and lives upon the vagrants who wander from one stone to another.  Whoso ventures under the slab at night is strangled by the hostess; and the dried-up carcass, instead of being flung to a distance, is hung to the silken wall, as though the Spider wished to make a bogey-house of her home.  But this cannot be her aim.  To act like the ogre who hangs his victims from the castle battlements is the worst way to disarm suspicion in the passers-by whom you are lying in wait to capture.

There are other reasons which increase our doubts.  The shells hung up are most often empty; but there are also some occupied by the Snail, alive and untouched.  What can the Clotho do with a Pupa cinerea, a Pupa quadridens and other narrow spirals wherein the animal retreats to an inaccessible depth?  The Spider is incapable of breaking the calcareous shell or of getting at the hermit through the opening.  Then why should she collect those prizes, whose slimy flesh is probably not to her taste?  We begin to suspect a simple question of ballast and balance.  The House Spider, or Tegenaria domestica, prevents her web, spun in a corner of the wall, from losing its shape at the least breath of air, by loading it with crumbling plaster and allowing tiny fragments of mortar to accumulate.  Are we face to face with a similar process?  Let us try experiment, which is preferable to any amount of conjecture.