Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

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 even 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.

“It was not a roar,” said Graecen, “was it?” Mrs Truman was reminded of the upstairs’ lodgers moving furniture about during a spring clean. Sound became so mangled and magnified in those corridors that it might be anything, thought Fearmax, with a superstitious dread.

“The minotaur,” said Campion to no one in particular.

“A very queer sound though,” said Fearmax, “very queer.” The sound had tailed away into a series of dim tremulous reverberations which knocked and banged their way into the distance. It was like the banging noise of an engine, knocking one truck against another, into infinity. In each new cavern the echo was further distorted and further magnified as it was passed on. What could it be?

They stood still for a moment to listen, forming a clear tableau in the light, and reflected upside down in the black waters of the stream, Fearmax and Campion sharing the last two stepping-stones; Virginia’s hand clasped in Graecen’s; the Truman couple sitting idly on a rock, side by side.

“I bet if you rolled a cannon-ball down these corridors you’d get exactly the same sound effect,” said Fearmax at last. Campion made an irritable gesture to silence him. “Listen,” he said. They listened fervently until Mrs. Truman felt a desire to giggle — the same desire she always had during the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day. Fearmax looked so comical with his jowl stuck out, and Campion standing on one leg.… Graecen pressed Virginia’s arm softly, comfortingly, and cursed himself as he felt her own warm answering pressure. Under his breath he whispered every opprobrious epithet he could lay his mind to. It was becoming a conspiracy — his own weakness allied with circumstances — to entrap him. He was sliding invisibly downhill in ever-increasing speeds of idiotic quixotry until … until …

They stood listening to rubbing of water at their feet, the noise of a concrete-mixer, and the harsh spotted sound of water leaking into a cistern somewhere.

The guide, for some reason best known to himself, was silent. His face looked grave and preoccupied. He was picking his teeth with a match-stick. He did not venture to comment on the sound or try to explain it. When at last he caught Mrs. Truman’s eye he merely raised his eyebrows, threw up his hands and crossed himself. Campion began to wonder whether they should go on. “Let’s go back,” he said, “I’ve had enough of this place. And when do we get to the antiquities anyway?” When indeed.

At last they felt able to relax the torment of listening for the sound. It had not repeated itself, that anguished and reverberating trump. Fearmax shook himself. “It might have been anything,” he said. “Rocks dropping into a cavern full of water. I’ve heard the same sort of noise in the workings of a disused mine.” As a matter of fact he had never been any where near a disused mine, but he felt a vague desire to raise morale by producing a mundane explanation of the sound.

They gathered themselves together and were about to debate whether they should proceed or not when the guide, who had been sitting apart resting, rose and clapped his hands for silence. “Forward,” he called again and set off towards yet another tunnel. Virginia showed some disinclination to follow, but Fearmax called out: “Oh, come along there. It can’t be much farther.” It was not.

Ducking at last through a sort of postern, they followed the guide into what at first seemed to them to be a Gothic cathedral. It was very nearly as large — a tremendous and grandiose cavern, through the roof of which shone the pure rays of the sun, falling like a spotlight through the dense atmosphere and the dust. Peering up, they saw once more a piece of the sky, a sight which banished their depression instantly.

“Now for the sights,” said Graecen, glad that the publicity of light made any further advances to Virginia impossible. “What is that? I think I see the cella.”

As they advanced through the white circle of light blazing upon the stone floor they heard once more the roar of the minotaur — but this time more remote, less unearthly. They stopped to listen to it as it banged its way into silence, however. “Seems farther away,” said Fearmax with evident relief. The guide took absolutely no notice of the sound but led the way across the great nave, his footsteps echoing like those of a verger in the crypt of St. Paul’s. High above, in the indistinguishable blue of buttress shapes, they heard the flap and chitter of bats.