assumed a frightening size, but Rodriguez gave little thought to
it; it was of murder he was thinking, not of shadows; still, in
its way it was ominous, and reminded Rodriguez horribly of his
host; but what of an omen, again, in a chamber full of omens. The
place itself was ominous; spiders could scarce make it more so.
The spider itself was big enough, he thought, to be impaled on his
Castilian blade; indeed, he would have done it but that he thought
it wiser to stay where he was and watch. And then the spider found
the candle too hot and climbed in a hurry all the way to the
ceiling, and his horrible shadow grew less and dwindled away.

It was not that the rats were frightened: whatever it was that
happened happened too quietly for that, but the volume of the
sound of their running had suddenly increased: it was not like
fear among them, for the running was no swifter, and it did not
fade away; it was as though the sound of rats running, which had
not been heard before, was suddenly heard now. Rodriguez looked at
the door, the door was shut. A young Englishman would long ago
have been afraid that he was making a fuss over nothing and would
have gone to sleep in the bed, and not seen what Rodriguez saw. He
might have thought that hearing more rats all at once was merely a
fancy, and that everything was all right. Rodriguez saw a rope
coming slowly down from the ceiling, he quickly determined whether
it was a rope or only the shadow of some huge spider's thread, and
then he watched it and saw it come down right over his bed and
stop within a few feet of it. Rodriguez looked up cautiously to
see who had sent him that strange addition to the portents that
troubled the chamber, but the ceiling was too high and dim for him
to perceive anything but the rope coming down out of the darkness.
Yet he surmised that the ceiling must have softly opened, without