Seeing him standing there, and imagining perhaps that the sight of whatever lay behind the rock had been so hideous as to unman him, his wife picked up a boulder and rushed to his side; she too found herself staring into the blood-red eyes of a cow. The stone fell from her hands. She could feel his body trembling with laughter now, and as she opened her mouth to speak, the cow turned tail and, letting fall an alarmed pat of excrement, bolted down the tunnel. “Quick,” they both shouted incoherently, and ran, screaming with laughter, in pursuit. They blundered down a series of arches, composed apparently of the roots of trees and then suddenly, absurdly, into the light of day.
Between laughter and tears they sat down and covered their eyes from the blazing radiance of the light, sitting thus for at least two minutes, during which through their parted fingers they caught glimpses of the world of familiar shapes; a sloping hill-side studded with swart green grey olives. They had emerged from between the roots of a huge plane tree. Somewhere water gushed. Lifting their hands from their eyes by small degrees they stared into the blue Aegean sky, and let it stare back at them, uncompromisingly, utterly blue. Trees were stirring faintly, as if in an awakened interest. Bees hung, slowly frying, in the flowers. The Roof of the World had revealed itself to them, in all its pristine novelty, as if by a razor-stroke. No extravagance of gesture or exclamation could do justice to its beauty. Elsie Truman kicked off her shoes and stretched her toes, lying back slowly in the grass. “It’s like being reborn,” she told herself as she lay, unspeaking and felt tears fill her eyes, and run slowly over her cheeks. Her husband, too, lay down and let his head rest upon his forearm; the coarse inhalations of his cigarette seemed delicious beyond expression. Life, which had seemed to offer them so little beyond a death by hunger in the labyrinth, suddenly crowded upon them both, not only with the blessings of movement and feeling, but also with those hundreds of memories and plans which they had not allowed to occupy their minds while their realization had seem remote. His lips moved silently from time to time, but he was not praying. He was talking to himself.
“And now,” she said, “let’s eat.”
“Eat away,” he said, lying motionless, feeling the unshaven flesh of his cheek between finger and thumb. She rose slowly, still weighed down by that marvellous convalescent sense of weariness and unpacked the by-now-battered sandwiches, peeling the damp paper from them with distaste. “Here,” she said, “eat something.” Her husband sat up and stretched, taking the bread from her fingers as he did so. “All the best,” he said, taking his first bite, and looking round him to trace the sound of running water which had been running like a musical accompaniment to his thoughts, along a parallel track. “It’s cold, you know,” she said, feeling the air upon her lips and throat as she sat down beside him. “I wonder where we are?”
The landscape in which they found themselves was startlingly wild and craggy, thought Truman, as he looked about him between mouthfuls of food. At each of the four points of the compass he could see the necks and shoulders of tree-denuded mountains butting up into the afternoon light. Their summits, topped with snow, caught the glittering rays of lights and flashed them back at one another—a thousand diamond-flashes against the grey bony twilight which was reaching up towards them from the lower slopes. Yet despite the gauntness of the further prospect they found themselves upon the declining edge of a bowl—perhaps a quarter of a mile round—in which fruit, trees, flowers, everything seemed to flourish. Faintly in their nostrils they smelt the cool rotten smell of vegetation which hangs about a snowline; yet the little bowl could only boast of one clump of firs upon its farthest edge. It was clear too that the backdrop of mountains was in some way divided from this small formalized territory, which fell away so steeply into space.
“Those mountains are a long way off,” muttered Truman in a puzzled voice. “And we don’t seem to be very high. I wonder where the sea is?”
They continued to eat with deliberation and enjoyment, hardly speaking, and when they had done Truman buried their scraps methodically in the ground under the plane tree.
“I wouldn’t,” said Truman slowly, still looking round him. “I wouldn’t be too optimistic, Elsie. We. can just as easily starve on a mountain as in a cave, you know. There’s no road I can see and no houses.”
She dusted the crumbs from her dress and said: “There’s bound to be a farm about somewhere. Besides, look,” her eyes had lighted upon a rock whose surface looked smooth and polished—as if with resin. “What?” said her husband. She got up and went over to it. “It’s a ‘greaser’,” she said, recovering the old Derbyshire word, with its memories of holidays spent on farms during her childhood. “That means some sheep or goats.”
They walked down into the little valley, hand in hand, looking about them curiously. The prospect looked, with all its cultivation, like the park of some great house—the result of deliberate labour and intention rather than the casual handiwork of Nature. A stream blundered over gravel. Birds sang. A walnut tree nodded its pronged branches in the wind. Farther down beyond the last bluff of rock, puffs of colour stood out against the grey, hills—peach-blossom. Warm, verdant, and unself-conscious the meadows seemed to have been tended and mown, lying in the shadow of the sun-burnt mountains. They were filled with a gradually growing sense of incredulity and amazement, comparing the richness of the amphitheatre in which they stood with the brooding hulks of stone which raised themselves in the air at every point. Their feet trod grass. Yet everywhere they turned their eyes picked up the formidable crests of mountains plunged in snow. “I can’t make it out,” he said slowly, “it seems queer somehow. It’s so warm.” His wife walked silently beside him tasting the purity of the air as it entered her lungs and was expelled from them. The mountains looked grandiose and beautiful rather than menacing. She was full of that light-headedness which comes upon all who walk upon the mountains of Greece, and feel the scent of thyme mingling with the pure cold air. Immense pearl-covered clouds hung in one corner of the sky, like canopies of silk. The gestures and manoeuvres they had set out to rehearse had degenerated into this immobile stillness. Occasionally one of them would throw a damp splash of shadow on the mountain-side. “It’s wonderful,” she said, unpreoccupied by the problems which he was turning over in his mind. “Simply wonderful.”
A tree knelt above the rocky pool into which the mountain water spun and curdled—a tree white to the lips with cherries. Small birds frisked in the branches. “Did you say we’d starve?” she asked mockingly, reaching up and pulling the ripe cherries from the stalk. “Come,” he said, and locking his arms about her thighs, lifted her towards the ripest clusters. He stood, his head against her thighs, and absently heard the words of an old song running in the back of his mind: “If you were the only girl in the world.” It stretched so far back into the past that he could no longer identify the incidents and localities connected with it. His wife wriggled as she tried to reach higher and higher. “Steady on,” he said, and as she leaned down to stop his lips with the cold fruit, “Where do you think you are? The Garden of Eden?”
They sat side by side on the bank and bathed their feet in the icy water, eating cherries and smoking one of his last cigarettes in alternate puffs. The shadows of the pine trees were growing longer. “You know”, he said, “we shouldn’t hang about much longer. It’s just as well to find out where we are before taking it easy.” She stood up and dusted her dress. Her feet were still cold from the icy water of the torrent, and she skippered up and down to stretch them and start the circulation. “Well?” she said, “after the minotaur I can stand anything.” He was wrapping up his raincoat once more and the thought seemed to strike him with some force. “You don’t think that was it?” he said incredulously. “What else?” she asked. Truman shook his head and puzzled over the problem for a moment; it was as if he were unwilling to admit that they had domesticated, so to speak, the minotaur; domesticated their terrors in the shape of a brown cow whose mooing could be picked up and am
plified in the bowels of the earth. “I don’t know,” he said at last, and rising, joined her.
“I think we should get up those trees,” he said, “and look down the slope. Maybe we are on the hill above that village—what’s it called? Cefalû? Yes, Cefalû.”
They crossed several small dry river-beds where winter torrents would run, and plunged into a dense grove of myrtles. As they mounted, behind a neighbouring hill, they caught sight of some sheep grazing. “You see,” she said, “I told you. There must be a farm hereabouts.” But the terrain offered no signs of paths or other cultivation beyond the well-kept appearance of its trees and woodland. It was as they took the final gradient and mounted the hillock towards the clump of pines, that they saw, below them, a stranger. He was sitting at the edge of the bank, where the stream suddenly grew deep and turbid, carving for itself small pools and marshes in the limestone. In his hand was a fishing-rod. His back rested against the bole of an olive tree. His head was covered by a bright handkerchief, and he appeared to be asleep. “At last,” said Truman with relief. “Our troubles are over,” and cupping his hands he shouted: “Hullo there!” as they started to descend towards the solitary figure. “Better try repeating that in Greek,” said his wife ironically. “He doesn’t seem to hear.” Indeed, the stranger still sat with his back to them, unheeding. It was only when Truman shouted a second time that he turned, and they saw that it was a woman. She stood up, dropping the fishing-rod, and stood, as if uncertain whether to fly or to await their approach. Truman and his wife marched happily down the slope, arm in arm, and, noting her attitude, felt called upon to justify their presence in the valley by shouting: “We’re lost.” But the woman gave no sign beyond the half-suppressed temptation to fly which was obvious in her attitude. She was dressed in brown trousers, and an old patched woollen sweater. A scarf was tied under her chin. As they approached her, Elsie said in an undertone: “Doesn’t seem much good. She doesn’t understand. Doesn’t look Greek though somehow, does she?”
It was when they got much closer that they saw she was an old woman, with a slight boyish figure, and a short-cropped head of silver hair. Two brown eyes, set in her puckered face, and surrounded by a network of fine crowsfoot wrinkles, regarded them with distrust and a certain alarm. She stood and faced them across the stream, one hand reaching nervously behind her to touch the olive-bole, as if to take confidence from the feel of it. Elsie was reminded of a child shyly holding the edge of its mother’s skirt. She nudged her husband. “Go on. Talk,” she said. A look of comical indecision came over Mr. Truman’s face. He concluded from the silence of the old woman that she had not understood their remarks in English. Of Greek he had none. However, squaring himself and opening his mouth he said haltingly: “English. We English. Ingleses,” pointing first to himself and then to his wife.
The woman smiled now for the first time—a smile of relief mingled with enlightenment. “Thank God,” she said in a voice which was harsh, but which carried in it some quality of distinction and self-possession that reminded Truman at once of Graecen. “Thank God. I thought you were from Evan—you’d come to take me back.” She relaxed all of a sudden, and bending forward the better to accommodate her body to the laughter, laughed aloud, patting her thighs with her hands. “You speak English, then?” said Truman, rather nettled at having been forced to debase his tongue with pidgin. “Well,” she said, taking up the fishing-rod, and drawing the handle of a wicker pannier over her arm, “I am American actually. My name is Adams, Ruth Adams.” She walked downstream for twenty paces in order to ford it upon a series of stepping-stones, talking as she did so. “I haven’t seen a stranger in years,” she said, with the small harshness of tone, but with the same note of authoritative self-possession that made her voice pleasing and musical to listen to. “You must forgive me. When you don’t see strangers you forget how to be polite to them.” She crossed the stream and walked down the bank towards them. Elsie Truman saw that in place of shoes she was wearing a number of pairs of khaki stockings, with the soles padded in some way. At close range she looked even older; and yet in some curious way the proportions of her face retained an almost childish smoothness of contour. Yet it was deeply wrinkled. She stood before them now in her brown corduroy trousers much patched, and stretched out a shy hand as they introduced themselves. Her wrists were small and finely formed, but her finger-nails were unkept and broken, and her palm was as hard to the touch as that of a ploughman. “Ruth Adams,” she murmured to each in turn. “You must”, she said, “have come up through the labyrinth.” The word restored to Truman the sense of urgency and danger which the last few minutes in this landscape had all but dispelled. “Yes,” he said quickly, “and there are several others down there. We want to get help to them as quickly as possible.” The stranger turned and walked slowly beside them, saying: “You must be tired out. Come along with me and we’ll see if I can’t fix you something to eat.” Elsie Truman walked beside with a feeling that something was wrong; she had shown no trace of hearing her husband’s words about the others. “There are,” she said carefully, with an almost academic correctness (she felt that perhaps the difference in American and English idiom might have led to a misunderstanding), “there are no less than four or five people lost in those caves.” The stranger looked quickly up at her for a second, smiling, and then said: “I’m sorry. I did hear your husband. But there’s nothing we can do, you see. There’s no other way up here except through the labyrinth.”
“No other way!” Truman tripped himself—by the very force of his own exclamation it seemed—recovered and halted to confront her. “What did you say?”
“No other way,” repeated the woman, pushing her hands into her pockets, having first placed the pannier on the ground carefully so as not to displace the three small fish which they could see, peeping through a screen of fig leaves. She made a vague gesture at the horizon and carried it round until it all but circumscribed the whole visible landscape. “It’s all enclosed,” she said vaguely, her voice a little off-key; and then, seeing the incredulity on their faces mixed with the consternation, she added: “Please listen to me.” She said it with earnestness, but with the faint note of self-assurance that made it almost a command. “Listen to me.”
“No other way,” repeated Truman angrily, as if the words had been an insult to him, to all the energy and determination he had put into their escape from the labyrinth.
“It’s true,” she said stubbornly.
“Well, what happens over there?” He pointed vaguely ahead of them to where the mountains rose, turned rose-red and bitumen-coloured in the waning sunlight.
“Cliffs,” she said. “All round. I know you can’t believe it easily. I couldn’t when I first came here. We tried so often to find a way down.”
She walked on a few paces, having picked up her basket, and then called over her shoulder: “Follow me and I’ll show you the house.”
The Truman couple exchanged glances. Once more that feeling of unreality, of having become entangled in a web, took possession of them. “Do you think she’s all right?” asked his wife, making the vague gesture of screwing a nut into her temple with her forefinger. He did not answer. “At any rate there’s a house,” he said. “Come on.” They walked on, like characters in a dream, and caught her up as she reached the corner of a meadow.
Beyond the brow of the hill they saw for the first time the signs of conscious cultivation—a small vineyard in a bowl, sheltered from the north by a low wall of rocks. “Yes,” said the woman catching Elsie Truman’s eye, “our tenderest care is that little vineyard. The wine is indifferent, but that’s because we are not experts in making it.” Truman came up beside her and said: “Who is ‘we’, Mrs. Adams?” She turned up her grotesquely lined yet so childish face and smiled apologetically at him. “‘We’ was my brother and me. But I’m alone now. I haven’t talked English since …” She turned suddenly and walked on, without saying any more.
Several promiscuous hedges of ca
ctus now came into view lining a rough track. To their surprise as they passed into a grove of dwarf-olive and holm-oak they caught sight of a small house, crudely made of stone, standing in a paddock from which, faintly, came the lazy slurring of bees. “There it is,” said Mrs. Truman, whose relief at this evident example of domestic architecture was manifest in her smile. “And you have bees,” she added.
“Yes. For honey. I’m afraid the bread hasn’t been very good since Godfrey went. It’s hard work grinding the grain up fine enough, you know, and I’m getting an old woman.” She nodded and smiled as she spoke.
Truman’s face still wore an expression of troubled incredulity. He simply was not convinced. They approached the house, walking abreast, and he examined its workmanship with a careful professional eye; it was built of roughly-pruned rock laid together in blocks. Its corners were unpointed and the joints of the stone empty of any mortar that he could see. The porch was held upon saplings, and roughly boarded over with the grey wood of old ammunition-boxes. He could read the serial numbers and specifications in some places. The woman led the way in. “It took us six years to build this house. And, of course, Godfrey did a lot of work on it putting in improvements. He was a marvel of inventiveness. It was frightfully hard work. We were living in a cave up the hill before. But it’s quite solid, and look how nicely he has finished the interior.” She threw open a heavy door and showed them a long low room, floored with crude staves of pine and cypress. The walls had been washed with some kind of crude earth-pigment to an uneven grey upon which somebody had drawn several large cartoons of human faces in charcoal. “Isn’t it nice?” She crossed to the stone hearth in which a log fire was smoking and stirred it, placing some more logs upon it. On the hob stood a tarnished petrol tin half full of warm water. “Come in, do,” she said, turning to them with such pleasure on her face that they felt their constraint to be something churlish. “I never thought I should have the fun of showing strangers Godfrey’s work. Godfrey is my brother.” She pointed to one of the faces sketched on the wall, a turbulent, good-looking face topped by a head of wavy hair, and smiled again.
The Dark Labyrinth Page 22
