Doris Lessing - The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

All the wells and pits – and this was true anywhere in the Centre – held water. The northern edges of the Centre were sinking into wet. The truth was, and there was no evading it, the whole enormous expanse of the Centre was undermined with water, and it was not far down, either.

And then something else happened, and its importance was brought to Griot by some of his soldiers, who had been scribes and teachers in their native lands.

There were, and there were bound to be, tales of ghosts: so many peoples had lived here, builders in wood from long, long ago, builders in stone, generations upon generations, and of course ghosts walked the Centre, and people inclined that way had seen them. And there were tales, that Griot took as little notice of as he did of the ghosts, of a secret place in the Centre so well hidden no one could find it without a guide. It was people from far away in the east who took this kind of thing seriously: they had heard it all as part of their tales of the Centre, which had been known everywhere, because of its fame and its influence. Griot listened to soldiers whom he had to respect, for their education, talking about sand libraries, and sand records. He had heard Mara use these words, not knowing what they meant. Well, then, so there was this hidden place, but it was hidden, wasn’t it? And then, one of the refugees, newly arrived, said that he had been told as part of the stories he was brought up with, that the secrets of the Centre were known by its servants.

The old princess, Felissa, was alive, but demented, and when Griot took a Mahondi speaker to visit her she screeched at both of them, not to tell lies. If there were secrets in the Centre she would have known them.

Two servants had looked after Felissa. One, the old man, had died, but the old woman was sharp and alert and suspicious.

Griot and his Mahondi interpreter said that they knew there was a secret place and that she, as an hereditary servitor of the old couple, must know about it.

She said it was all lies.

Griot cut this by saying that Dann had instructed him to get the secret, and emphasised his command by standing over her with a long deadly knife – he had found it rusting in one of the museums and had had it sharpened.

The old servant might have been as near death as made no difference, but she was afraid for her life, and agreed to show Griot the way. At first she wriggled and evaded and said she had forgotten, and that anyway she believed the place had fallen in, and there was a curse on anyone who told the secret, but at last the fact that she was going to tell the truth showed in her terror: she believed in this curse, and wept and whined as she led the way.

The Centre could be viewed perhaps as a pot being shaped on a wheel, its shape changing, then changing again. Long ago – but the phrase meant a stretch of time shorter than the great age of the Centre – someone – who? – had ordered builders – who? – to make a place hard to find. Walls curved and evaded, disappeared as other walls intervened, and no wall was made of the same substance as its neighbour. Inside formidable weights of stone were long slim bricks made of clay and reed, that became stone again, and a wall had patterns on it you could memorise, but in a moment the patterns had changed, and slid into other messages, and, it seemed, other languages. The walls were like a magician’s tricks: designed to hold your attention while they did something else. No matter how carefully the invader approached a place, which he had been inveigled into thinking must be the right one, somehow he was deflected and found himself where he had started.

Griot had taken just one soldier with him, a man from the east, and both followed the weeping and sniffling old woman, never taking their eyes off her, so easy was it to believe she shared the deceiving properties of the walls, that slid, and slipped away, and misled. That clever old builder, or school of builders, knew how to make fools of intruders. Though Griot was holding plans of where he had been in his mind, there was a moment when he knew he and his soldier were lost: if the old woman chose to leave them here, they might not be found again. They were deep under masses of stone. Griot stopped, stopped the old woman, made her retreat with him until he recognised a mark he had made on a stone, then advanced again, with her in front, the interpreter sweating and afraid. And now, this time, there was a place where walls slid past each other so cunningly you could hardly see a gap, because it was concealed by an outjut of old brick, but Griot and his companion did slide in, watching how the old woman had to bend and slide, and then at last he began to see what was hidden. But he did not understand anything.

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