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 any sound at all, at
the moment that he heard the greater number of rats. He waited then to
see what the rope would do; and at first it hung as still as the great
festoons dead spiders had made in the corners; then as he watched it it
began to sway. He looked up into the dimness then to see who was
swaying the rope; and for a long time, as it seemed to him lying
gripping his Castilian sword on the floor he saw nothing clearly. And
then he saw mine host coming down the rope, hand over hand quite
nimbly, as though he lived by this business. In his right hand he held
a poniard of exceptional length, yet he managed to clutch the rope and
hold the poniard all the time with the same hand.

If there had been something hideous about the shadow of the spider that
came down from that height the shadow of mine host was indeed