'Lovely ladies and sporting gentlemen! The tenth and final bout of the day! The mighty Goliath meets the dancing lady Salome!'
Goliath crabbed into the glass-topped arena. Her four pairs of legs undulated sinuously so that her progress was stately and deliberate.
She was a huge beast, newly moulted, for her chintyl armoured covering was a lustrous coppery colour and the long hairs that covered her abdomen and legs were burnished like newly spun gold wire. She left a double necklace of tiny stippled footprints in the swept sand of the arena floor, and the crowd cheered her. Their inhibitions had long been lost in the primeval conflicts in the little arena, and most of them had been drinking since noon: there was a peculiar ring of ferocity and cruelty in their voices.
'Kill her!' screamed a pretty blond girl with gold ringlets and flowers in her hat. 'Rip her to pieces!' Her face flushed feverishly and her eyes were glittering.
'All right, mister Ballantyne. Put your fancy in,' Chaim Cohen commanded, raising his voice to be heard above the uproar. But Ralph delayed a few seconds longer, letting the other spider complete its circuit and face away from his side of the cage. Then he lifted the sliding door and tapped the basket to rouse Inkosikazi.
She crawled forward cautiously, lifting her abdomen clear of the sand, stepping on the spiked toes of her ranked legs, and then freezing as she saw her adversary across the cage. Her multiple jewelled eyes were sparkling like chips of black diamond.
Goliath sensed her presence and leaped high, turned in the air and landed facing her. The two spiders confronted each other across the smoothly swept floor of white river sand, and only now was the difference in their sizes apparent. Goliath was enormous, swelling in rage, the long silken mane of burnished hair rising like the quills of a porcupine to enhance her size as she began to dance her challenge to her smaller adversary.
Immediately Inkosikazi replied to the challenge, raising and lowering her abdomen in time to the rhythmic swaying of her carapace, lifting her legs in pairs and weaving them with an awful grace, like the many-armed Hindu god, Shiva.
An utter silence had fallen on the watchers as they strained to catch every nuance of this stylized dance of death, and then a lust-choked roar burst from them as Goliath sprang.
She exploded into flight, soaring with her talons fully extended, clearing the length of the arena without effort and landing precisely where Inkosikazi had stood a thousandth part of a second before. Inkosikazi had evaded that flashing leap with a bouncing side jump of her own, and now she faced the huge enraged creature and danced her defiance.
The dazzling agility of these great spiders was, the essential attraction that drew such a following of eager spectators. There was no preliminary bracing or crouchigo ing to herald one of those swallowlight bounds. The spiders fired themselves like bullets, suddenly and unerringly at their rival, and reacted as swiftly to the counterattack. Then between each onslaught that mesmeric and chilling dance resumed.
Jee! Jee!' The tightly drawn silence was interrupted by the chilling, killing cry of a Matabele warrior.
'Jee! Jee!'The deep hissing chorus that had carried a black wave of naked bodies across a continent, a wave crested by the plumes of the war bonnets and lit by the glitter of the bright silver assegais.
Bazo had not been able to skulk in the alley beyond the square. He had edged forward into the crowd until he reached the wagons, but as the conflict mounted, so had his warrior passions. He thrust forward through the packed ranks and now he was in the forefront, and he could not contain himself further.
Jee! Jee!'He hissed his battle cry, and Ralph found himself echoing it.
Inkosikazi was fighting instinctively, reacting mindlessly to the presence of another female in deadly sexual rivalry. It was the waving arms of the gigantic female across the cage which infuriated her, and it was mere coincidence that her first attacking leap was synchronized with the war chant.
Twice she launched herself, and twice Goliath gave her ground. and then on her third leap Inkosikazi vaulted too high and touched the glass roof of the arena. The impact broke the perfect parabola of her flight, and she fell short and out of balance, scrabbling frantically in the fine white sand as Goliath saw her chance and flew in for the kill.
The men howled with cruel glee, the women trilled with delicious horror as the two huge furry bodies came together chest to chest and entangled each other's limbs in a hideous octopus embrace.
The impetus of Goliath's leap sent them rolling across Igi the arena like an india-rubber ball, until they struck the far wall and wrestled in a flurry of serpentine limbs. Both their long hooked fangs were fully erect, and they slashed at each other with their hairy wolf mouths, the needle points of the fangs striking the impenetrable shiny armour of carapace and jointed legs, glancing off the polished surface and leaving minute dribbles of colourless honey-thick venom on each other's chests.
Instinctively they were holding their vulnerable abdomens clear, while straining to tear from the embrace for a chance to strike into the soft skin of the other. They came up on their hind legs and wrestled together, and immediately Goliath's weight began to take effect.
With a sharp crackling sound, like a walnut in the jaw of a silver nutcracker, one of Inkosikazi's legs was torn bodily from the joint of her carapace, and she jerked convulsively, contracting her soft belly in a dreadful spasm.
'Kill her! Rip her to pieces!' screamed the pretty blond girl, and tore at her perfumed silk handkerchief, shredding it between her fingers. Her face was swollen and inflamed and her eyes wild.
Goliath shifted the grip of her many legs, groping for a soft spot into which to plunge the jerking red fang.
'Jee! Jee!'sang Bazo, his eyes bloodshot with passion, and Inkosikazi strained with all her remaining legs to break the grip that was slowly smothering her under the huge hairy body. Again there was that grisly crackling, one of her front legs broke off in a little spurt of body juices, and instinctively Goliath lifted the severed limb to her mouth.
The distraction was sufficient, and Inkosikazi tore herself free and bounded halfway across the arena, landing in an unbalanced sprawl, her body fluids oozing from the leg stumps, but gathering herself swiftly. Goliath was still worrying the severed legs, the smell of her opponent's blood enrapturing her so that she mouthed the twitching limbs, striking at them with her fang, her full attention upon them, and Inkosikazi rebounded like a rubber ball thrown against a brick wall.
