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I read this in middle school approx. 35 years ago. Looking for a short story about a scientist from a museum who falls into a hole and gets trapped while looking for rare giant spiders. It was in a jungle setting possibly So. america. The spiders returned to the hole (their home base? and crawled all over him especially when it started to rain and the hole filled up with water. He eventually is able to burrow or tunnel out of the hole. .

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    Welcome to the site! Could you take a look at this guide to help jog your memory and edit in any more details that you remember? Every little bit helps us.
    – amflare
    Nov 21, 2017 at 16:16
  • this is a longshot - Death Traps of FX-31, Astounding Stories, 1933.
    – JohnP
    Nov 22, 2017 at 19:13

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"The Bamboo Trap" by Robert Lemmon in 1923, just hit up my old english teacher. It's available in O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1923

"The Bamboo Trap" illustrates the struggle of the American scientist far afield. John Mather's adventure in the Andes, wherein his problem is to escape from a hole in the mountain side is enlivened by spiders. He escapes through a gallant physical fight. It is impossible to resist reference to a suggestion made by a reader of this story, a reader who is avowedly of the camp preferring Russian to American fiction. This tale would be more life-like, he said, if it ended on the unfinished struggle. "Why have that flood tear down the remaining barrier? Accident, wasn't it?" But if Mather had not very nearly destroyed the barrier, accident would have availed him nothing. An Oriental in that trap doubtless would have concluded, "If I am fated to die I shall die." Therein is exemplified the difference between the philosophy in literature of the negative and philosophy in literature of the positive.

A quote from the story:

Then it rained. The heavens opened and crashed down. A torrent of mud and water poured through the cave roof, ripping the opening to twice its former size. Like a huge bucket the cave caught and held the flood. Momentarily the water rose — to Mather's ankles, his knees, his waist. The spiders struggled in it, dropping from walls and roof by dozens. They swarmed over him horribly as they fought with each other for safety on his body and head. He tried to brush them off, to drown them by sousing himself under the cascade that spilled down from above, but they clung to him like leeches.

The water was up to his chest, now. Presently he was swimming, his head a mass of spiders that thickened by the minute and nearly suffocated him. For an age he struggled, growing weaker and weaker, knowing that in the end he must sink under that chaotic mass. The thought of it nerved him to a few more feeble strokes, a final effort to rid his head of the clammy bodies. Then, miraculously, a clatter and splash of falling rocks and earth, a sucking sound as from a giant sluice pipe suddenly cleared, and his feet touched bottom.

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