Spider to the rescue
It was a time of terror and confusion. Persia had been invaded and Zoroastrians were being put to the sword.
A few
important resistance fighters had eluded capture.
Weary and half-starved, they moved from one hiding place to another.
Finally they came to the base of a tall mountain.
They knew they could not scale it in their weakened state, and they prepared to
make their last stand there.
Suddenly one of them espied a cave a little way up the face of the mountain. Summoning the last reserves of their strength they made their way to it, and entering, fell exhausted to the floor. Hardly had they recovered their breadth when they heard the enemy soldiers riding up the mountain.
The men in the cave felt their end was near.
They were trapped.
All that they could do was pray, and that is what they began to do, silently but fervently.
And then an amazing thing happened.
A spider appeared at the mouth of the cave and began to spin a web.
Within seconds it has spun a
web so big that it covered the entire entrance.
The enemy soldiers saw the cave and were preparing to climb up to it when their leader saw the spider’s web strung across the entrance.
He said, “The spider’s web is intact. That means no one
has entered the cave. Let’s not waste time here!”
The soldiers rode away, to the great joy of fugitives.
They gave thanks to God convinced that it was He who had sent
the spider.
The story is part of Zoroastrian
folklore, and tied to it is the tradition of never harming spiders.
