The Dark Labyrinth

by Lawrence Durrell

  In the taxi behind them Campion and Fearmax sat deep in conversation, while all around them were packed the trunks, suitcases and packs of those who were to stay the night at Cefalû. “But of course,” Campion was saying emphatically, “the artist’s job is to present concrete findings about the unknown inside himself and other people. How else can you justify art? The paintings of a man like Picasso are just as much discovery as the atom bomb. That is why one gets filled with such a hideous sense of uselessness in realizing that the next war is inevitable, inevitable.” He banged his hand on his knee. Fearmax buried his jowls deeper in his coat. “Most likely,” he said.

  “Inevitable,” said Campion vehemently. “You don’t even have to read the texts of the peace-pacts to see that, or read about the new bomb they call ‘Fragmentation X’ to see that the whole silly farce is going to begin over again. The nation will be led automatically to victory this time with all the flags out. No sacrifice too great. Buy to save to spend to lend to end to buy to slave to rend. Eliot will be banished to Iceland: mystics have green dossiers now: they are known as PCS—‘possibly controversial subjects’. Industry will be geared to war-pitch in a matter of hours. The Pope won’t know whether to intervene and offer the peace which passeth all misunderstanding or not … we should really get Graecen to set it to music:

  ’Tis the voice of the idealist

  I hear him declare

  Though you hide at the North Pole

  They’ ll follow you there

  With honour and unction

  Debentures and bonds!

  Till they close the green dossier

  And drag all the ponds.”

  Fearmax smiled dryly. “I have so much to do,” he said. “So much to do.”

  Campion lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old. “And I”, he said, “am just on the edge of becoming a real artist, a suffering member of the world: just able to contribute what is positive in me after a lifetime of revolt and wasted energy. It is not important. If there were no alternative to the present state of things I could accept it. But there is. The equipment is lying like an unpressed switch in the heart of every man. Damn, bugger, blast the world.”

  Even as he said it he thought that it was not true—it was rather a dramatic approximation of truth which he wished to become. Actually what was he. He saw Fearmax’s eyes on him, measured the glance of those experienced eyes and turned his own head away. And now suddenly he thought of Francesca with a pang; Francesca, so beautiful a companion and friend. He had left her as one leaves a bundle of laundry. Did the interests of the search justify, on the ordinary scale of loyalties and decencies, so sudden and pointless a betrayal? He heard himself once more saying: “My mother is dead,” with that flat unemotional tone of voice.

  “It seems to me”, said Fearmax, “that you affirm far too much. You are right, of course, that we all work through the various states of being, our negatives, our husks, which we discard. But can we, at any given point, know that we’ve arrived at the end of the quest? Surely the self-consciousness of the illumination you talk about does not tell us we have reached the—what shall I say?—’The Absolute,’ ‘God,’ ‘Tao’. It is, on the contrary, that growing awareness which disposes of the act of searching. I think the man you want to be would have a humbler attitude, a non-affirming attitude, a passivity towards the whole process—even if he were sitting on an atom-bomb. The sage has nothing to tell us, you know. It is by his silence alone that we deduce the fact of his existence.”

  The cars had blundered over the dusty part of the road, and now their tyres crunched on the pot-holed surfaces of the mountain roads. They had mounted the first three gradients which led slowly along the first escarpments of the White Mountains. The road wound in and out of several frowning ravines, where white torrents broke from the parapets of rock, and the air was full of the cries of swifts. It had become purer and more limpid, and the atmosphere colder. They were glad of their coats. Behind them the ancient Cretan sea had petrified into an unearthly blueness.

  “Soon we’ll be reaching Namia,” said Baird, stirring from his silence to examine the time. “I’ll drop off there and take the short cut across the range. You wouldn’t think you were so near to Cefalû—it’s just beyond the crag there, only lower down almost on the sea. You can just see the tip of the crag from here.”

  Two hours had gone by before the little convoy rumbled up on to the cypress-edged plateau where the village of Namia turned its whitewashed box-like houses to the sunlight. Cefalû lay about a quarter of an hour’s drive due west along the road. It was at Namia, however, that the guide insisted on having a drink to brace himself for the trip round the labyrinth. Baird took the opportunity to dismount, as did the others. They stood for a while watching the eagles turning slowly below them, and the chequer-board of plain stretching away to the sea with the damp black patches of shadow from clouds racing across it.

  “Well,” said Baird, whose heart was beating uncomfortably at the prospect of returning to the cave-mouth where Böcklin lay buried, “this is where I say good-bye to some of you. I shall see you again, Campion, tonight. Good-bye, Fearmax, Miss Dombey …,” he made the round of the company, shaking hands, having hoisted his rucksack on his back. They were almost embarrassed, for somehow up here in this country of cloud-swept peaks, this panorama of stage-mountains, the quality of parting seemed to have taken on a new meaning. An unexpected regret stirred in them as they said good-bye. As for Virginia, he was surprised at the warmth of her handclasp, the tenderness of her glance; and then his native intuition told him that she had transferred to him her feelings about Graecen, and that in her imagination it was to Graecen that she was saying good-bye. “Why the knapsack?” said Campion suddenly. “Leave it and we’ll bring it along to Cefalû.” Baird muttered something about having to take his lunch with him. In point of fact his knapsack housed the old army entrenching-tool which he had (to Hogarth’s mused interest) carried about with him for so long, unwilling to throw it away.

  “Until later, then,” he said, and started off down the muletrack which led across the ravine. They stood silently in a semicircle and watched him go before getting back into the cars.

  “Well,” said Campion, “what about the labyrinth?” The guide was run to earth in the cellar of a tavern, discoursing amiably over his third cognac. He managed to get the drivers together and start the procession going. Their dispositions had altered slightly after the halt and Campion now found himself with the Trumans instead of with Fearmax. A coolness had sprung up between himself and Mrs. Truman over the painting which he had tossed overboard in a fit of temper. She had been in a rather capricious mood that day, and had been addressing remarks to her husband through the open porthole of the saloon. For some reason this had irritated Campion.

  “All right,” he’d said suddenly, with a savagery that had frightened her, “talk your bloody head off and move about. I’m a painter, you know, not a camera with a high-speed lens.” And with a sudden gesture he had flicked the painting overboard. It lay for a moment on the creamy wrack of the Europa, Mrs. Truman’s face floating steadily away from them. She gave a cry and ran to the rail. “What a shame, Campion,” she said. “What a shame,” and to her surprise he was smiling, his rage all consumed at her genuine anger and dismay. Without a word he gathered up his materials and went down to his cabin, where he sat for a while in a chair, smoking. Then, taking up his notebook, he started to copy the head once more in charcoal. The painting had been a rotten one anyhow; he had been glad of the excuse to destroy it, and at the same time to make her uncomfortable. She had not forgiven him, however, and repulsed all his efforts, at badinage with a cool civility. Campion was interesting, she told herself, but he was not going to run roughshod over her. She had hoped to take the painting back home with her; she had suddenly seen, in a sudden moment of revelation, what he had meant by calling her beautiful; it was herself, her real self that he was trying to capture, and nobody had ever paid any attention to
Elsie Truman’s true self, save this eccentric and violent little man in the soiled beret. It was as if there had been something valuable to be learned from the painting: as if the act of destruction were a wanton and wasteful refusal to let her learn about herself.

  The cars rumbled down the hill towards the village of Cefalû and the labyrinth.

  The City in the Rock

  They had at last arrived at the foot of the fantastic cone of conglomerate, to the sides of which clung the small group of brightly-coloured buildings which composed the village of Cefalû. The road ran out upon a causeway, and turned abruptly up a tree-lined gradient which brought them at last to the village itself, lying up against the mountain, one house overlooking the roof of the next, like the habitation of trolls or dolls. The cone sloped away downward with vertiginous directness into the blue sea, its sides dappled with coverts of green scrub, and broken by seams of red and grey rock. From above they could look down upon the bright roof of Cefalû, the house, in its quiet garden, and upon the little yellow rowing boats tethered to the moat beyond the garden.

  All was still in the village as the convoy rattled through and took the stony path which led for another fifty yards to where the three dwarf cypresses marked the entrance to the labyrinth. The church bell chimed brokenly. A workman in blue trousers sat before a small glass of ouzo outside the door of the tavern. To him were confided the possessions of those who were to stay with Axelos.

  “Well,” said Graecen, “now for the big adventure.” He was loading his box-lunch into the pockets of his overcoat and testing the battery of his torch. Firbank’s little bottle of chemicals lay snugly in his waistcoat pocket. The new process, he had explained, was smelly but infallible; Graecen had only to paint a rock-cutting with it to be able to tell whether the tools used in the cutting were of iron or not. Then there was the tiny blue lens through which he should see whether the grain showed its fine shades of black.… He hoped Axelos was not up in the Cefalû this morning.

  The others had bundled out of the cars and were busy putting on coats at the suggestion by Fearmax that the corridors of the labyrinth might be extremely chilly. The guide himself had put on a tattered overcoat, and had produced a hurricane lantern which he now proceeded to light.

  “I haven’t any light,” said Campion, and a chorus of voices answered him saying that their combined torches would be light enough to see by; the guide smiled amiably as he got to his feet. “Now,” he said, with the air of one about to conduct a delicate experiment, “forward please to follow.”

  At first they hesitated, so narrow and uninviting was the entrance—a single corridor of orange-red rock which took a steep turn after five paces and passed out of sight. “It is little bigger than an Egyptian rock-tomb,” said Graecen fretfully, as he turned up the collar of his coat and felt for his torch. The guide turned back and beckoned. “Plenty light inside,” he shouted encouragingly and disappeared. They followed him one by one. “Not too fast,” said Campion, as they entered the stone cave and heard the church bell of Cefalû become suddenly very distant, and then at last smother out in the subterranean roar and splash of a spring hammering on rock.

  They were standing in another corridor, but longer than the first, and ending in a narrow causeway over a spring. “Dear me,” said Graecen. It was impossible that so small a spring should produce this thunderous echo; his own voice as he spoke sounded distorted and magnified out of all recognition Campion was pushing the others from behind. “Forward,” said the guide, swinging his lantern and advancing, while Virginia Dale timidly held on to the corner of his overcoat. They shuffled in single file along the stony path, ducked through another corridor, and crossed the middle-sized antechamber.

  Mrs. Truman had taken her husband’s arm. She gave it excited little tugs, not to signal anything in particular, but simply to register her pleasure and excitement. “What a place,” said Truman, turning his torch-beam this way and that. Fearmax was peering about him with his eyes screwed up, and with an uneasy expression upon his face.

  “Sounds like a river somewhere,” said Virginia Dale, and the guide who had been lacing up his shoes gave her a glance of approbation and repeated his cry of “Forward”. He started to walk into the darkness beyond the dazzle of torch-light, swinging before him the little yellow puddle of light cast by the hurricane lamp. They followed him slowly, picking their way through the dimness over mounds of rubble and huge boulders which seemed, in the gloom, to bear the trace of human working. The fragile beam of Truman’s torch seemed quite inadequate to pierce the almost solid blackness of the place; it showed merely a number of ledges covered thickly with the droppings of bats, while, when he turned it upward towards the roof, it simply thinned away and evaporated, rendering nothing. “This way to the two and sixes,” said his wife behind him in the shadow and gave a little tug at the tail of his coat.

  Fearmax was busily examining a heap of stone and rubble from some ancient landslide. Campion stood by him striking matches and peering. Between them they lifted one or two of the stones and turned them over. “No, I don’t think they are worked,” Campion was saying when the other interrupted him with a cry: “Look out!” A large scorpion stared unwinking into the beam of torchlight, its tail set as if by a spring, to strike. Fearmax laughed ruefully and they made their way farther along in pursuit of the others. “Lucky I didn’t sit on it,” said Campion.

  After negotiating the two small chambers, the whole party passed in single file down a rock-gallery which opened off from between them. “I think we’ve gone far enough,” said Virginia Dale. “Don’t you? It’s so eerie.” Despite the coldness of the air Graecen was sweating. He turned off his torch and mopped his forehead. The poor girl was afraid. He didn’t blame her. Truman, however, whistled a few bars of “The Merry Widow Waltz”, and in the darkness—the cold eddy-less air of the cavern—it had a consoling human ring.

  The gallery led them down at an ever-steepening angle until they stood before another natural door in the rock. The ladies found their feet beginning to hurt in their high-heeled shoes; all except for Mrs. Truman, whose rope soles were ideal for these harsh variations of surface and direction. Once assembled, the guide counted them as if they had been chickens. “Now please together,” he said earnestly, “and careful too.” Elsie Truman gave an excited tug at her husband’s arm and he replied by pinching her arm reassuringly; in the little booth of light from the torches he saw her face with its young, friendly lines turned towards the short tunnel which was to lead them yet farther into the labyrinth.

  “Another cave,” said Graecen.

  “Underground river,” said the guide with a ridiculously proprietary air. It was obvious from his manner that the Jannadis Brothers were responsible for all these wonders. He placed the tail of his coat once more in Virginia’s reluctant hand, and ordered them all to follow suit. Lantern in hand, he led his shuffling crocodile through the tunnel and into a cavern with a discernible flue in which filtered the vague semblance of light from the outside world; the reflections were strong enough for them to mark the track of the stream which passed through the farther end of the cavern with the noise of a miniature electric train. It flowed, greenish black, without a ripple except where it once more disappeared by vaulting clear through a piece of natural fan-vaulting. Truman knelt down beside it but his torch could not pierce the dark water. This time the interest and excitement of the party was not quite so loudly expressed. A silence had fallen on them; a sense of fatigue and suffocation at being so long out of the air. Yet when Graecen looked at his watch he found that they had spent barely half an hour in the labyrinth. And the air they breathed was cold and pure.

  “Can we cross it?” said Mrs. Truman.

  “Yes, please,” said the guide with alacrity, leading them to an overhanging bluff from which they could see a line of stepping-stones dotting the shining surface of the water. Despite its speed Fearmax noticed that the water did not break upon these stones but flowed round them, black and e
ven as silk. He dabbled his fingers in the stream and withdrew them almost at once, exclaiming against the coolness of it. “What is odd,” he said to Campion, “is the rubbing noise; because the bed is scooped clean out of rock, and yet one seems to hear gravel being churned down it or something.” They stared down for a moment on to that placid surface, while the guide demonstrated how easy a crossing was for the benefit of Mr. Truman, whose native caution had suggested that the stepping-stones might sink. The guide, however, walked with an exaggerated sure-footedness, and appeared to satisfy the rest of them that the journey involved no great hazard. Virginia Dale, after a number of false starts and hesitations, obeyed Graecen’s promptings and crossed, holding tight to his hand. They followed, one by one.

  It was when Fearmax was mid-way across that they heard it for the first time: a long-drawn muffled roar which rose above the noise of the stream and echoed through the wilderness of galleries which surrounded them. The guide waved his lantern excitedly and laughed. “Good heavens,” said Fearmax, standing on the last stone, “what on earth was that?” They stood still, listening to the sound as it slowly died away in the distance.