Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

Something of her irritation must have been communicated to the guide, who sat in front beside the driver. He removed his arm from its position round the neck of the latter and leaned back to ask a question. His conversation was rendered unintelligible by the wind, however, and he was forced to shout until Miss Dombey winced with pain. Was she ill, he asked? No? He gave an imitation of Miss Dombey in a veil, which the Trumans found delightfully comic. When they smiled at him he roared with laughter. If she was not ill, then why? — and he made the gesture of wrapping himself in a veil once more. Miss Dombey was so revolted by his performance that she told him to shut up and turn round. The guide’s hurt feelings were only partly assuaged by Mrs Truman’s offer of an acid-drop. He sucked it for a moment with a sad and pouting air of wounded amour-propre . Then, to return the courtesy, he removed his hat, and taking a cigarette-end from inside it, solemnly pressed it upon Mr. Truman who found himself forced to accept the object with thanks. Miss Dombey’s lips were compressed into a thimble-top of disapproval. Truman muttered angrily to his wife: “There you go again. Can’t let people be.” And she laughed until she nearly swallowed her sweet, then coughed until he had to thump her on the back.

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.