Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

“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.

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.