The Sign Of The Spider

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Laurence Stanninghame walks out of his unhappy marriage in England to pursue adventure in Johannesburg. Things seem to be looking up for Stanninghame, though: on the cruise to South Africa he meets the beautiful Lilith Ormskirk, and when he arrives in Johannesburg he quickly makes his fortune. But things just as quickly take a turn for the worse when Stanninghame's luck deserts him and he loses everything. Left with seemingly no choice but to put a gun to his head, Stanninghame sets out with a slave trader, Hazon, into the country of the mysterious tribe of the Ba-gcatya, the People of the Spider. Stanninghame is a hardened adventurer, undaunted by danger or death. But even he is unprepared for the horror he encounters when he is marked out as a sacrifice to the monstrous spider-god of the Ba-gcatya! A thrilling mixture of adventure, romance, and horror, The Sign of the Spider (1896) is nonetheless pervaded throughout by a sense of Mitford's profound pessimism and disillusionment. Although he has long been largely forgotten or dismissed as an imitator of H. Rider Haggard, Mitford is a masterful storyteller, and The Sign of the Spider is one of his finest. This edition includes an introduction and notes by Gerald Monsman, the foremost Mitford scholar.

Illustrated signs complement this simplified version of an Ananse tale from the Ashanti people of West Africa, explaining why spiders are found on ceilings.

Excerpt from The Sign of the Spider He was accustomed to being thus talked at. He ought to be, seeing he had known about thirteen years of it, on and off. But he did not like it any the better from force of habit. We doubt if anybody ever does. However, he had long ceased to take any notice, in the way of retort, no matter how acrid the tone, how biting the innuendo. Now, pushing back his chair from the breakfast-table, he got up, and, turning to the mantelpiece, proceeded to fill a pipe. His spouse. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.