But all kept on. To lag behind would be to be abandoned in this place where all known sensations were turned topsy-turvy. None of them could imagine turning back. Even old Tama, whimpering in a whisper as she struggled to keep up, merely complained bitterly of her fate. She did not even think of revolt. If Burl had stopped, all his followers would have squatted down miserably to wait for death. They had no thought of adventure or any hope of safety. The only goodnesses they could imagine were food and the nearness of other humans. They had food--nobody had abandoned any of the dangling ant-bodies Tet and Dik had distributed before the climb began. They would not be separated from their fellows. Burl's motivation was hardly more distinct. He had started uphill in a judicious mixture of fear and injured vanity and desperation. There was nothing to be gained by going back. The terrors at hand were no greater than those behind, so there was no reason not to go ahead. They came to a place where the mountain-flank sank inward. There was a flat space, and behind it a winding cañon of sorts like a vast crack in the mountain's substance. Burl breasted the curving edge and found flatness beyond it. He stopped short. The mouth of the cañon was perhaps fifty yards from the lip of the downward slope. So much space was practically level, and on it were toadstools and milkweed--two of them--and there was food. It was a small, isolated asylum for life such as they were used to. They could--it was possible that they could--have found a place of safety here. But the possibility was not the fact. They saw the spider-web at once. It was slung between the opposite cañon-walls by cables all of two hundred feet long. The radiating cables reached down to anchorages on stone. The snare-threads, winding out and out in that logarithmic spiral whose properties men were so astonished to discover, were fully a yard apart. The web was for giant game. It was empty now, but Burl saw the telegraph-cord which ran from the very center of the web to the web-maker's lurking-place. There was a rocky shelf on the cañon-wall. On it rested the spider, almost invisible against the stone, with one furry leg touching the cable. The slightest touch on any part of the web would warn it instantly. Burl's followers accumulated behind him. Old Jon's wheezing was audible. Tama ceased her complaints to survey this spot. It might be--it could be--a haven, and she would have to find new and different things to complain about in consequence. The spider-web itself, of course, was no reason for them to be alarmed. Web-spiders do not hunt. Their males do, but they are rarely in the neighborhood of a web save at mating-time. The web itself was no reason not to settle here. But there was a reason.