Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

He chose the most familiar and set off down it memorizing every detail as he did so. A phrase of Hogarth’s came unexpectedly into his mind and comforted him. “After all, Dickie,” Hogarth had said, “if you think of death as a continuation of a process that has been going on for a considerable time it is not so serious a business as it really seems.”

Was it not? Dying in bed was one thing; dying while your mother stood by you to smooth the pillows and hold your hand. But to die, slowly suffocating in this dense black pit — that was quite another. And what of the others? He stopped suddenly. He should have shouted, should have tried to reach them. Yet this had been so obviously an impossibility. He raised his head and shouted their names, scared at the sound of the echo that he raised. Then he listened dully to the icy silence that descended over the network of chambers and tunnels. His own footsteps sounded tiny and remote, like the scratching of a mole a thousand miles under the world. Once indeed he thought he heard the thin wailing of a voice which might have belonged to Miss Dombey, but when he stopped to listen only silence seeped coldly out of the labyrinth.

It was like a nightmare — one of those nightmares in which one feels trapped: but it ended suddenly when he happened upon a narrow strip of daylight, and found that he had blundered out on to the back of Cefalû, in full sight of the house he had come to die in. Graecen was trembling all over at the narrowness of his escape. He sat on a rock drinking in mouthfuls of the blue air, tasting the scent of the thyme, watching the blue race of the sea beneath the house. Never had the world seemed so desirable a thing. Rising at last on unsteady legs he made his way towards the house.

Axelos was sitting in the middle of the lawn, in the shadow of a plane tree, counting out money on to the green baize top of a folding card-table. Before him stood his servants waiting to receive their wages. He looked up as Graecen lurched across the gravel to the lawn, his sense of urgency giving him a drunkard’s stagger.

“Dickie,” said Axelos, recognizing him and getting up. “How very nice.”

Graecen stood foolishly agape, one hand pressed to his racing heart, trying to speak. His friend advanced slowly across the lawn, with his familiar waddle. He was wearing pyjamas with a green and blue striping and an old straw hat. A cigar smouldered slowly away under his nose.

“An accident,” Graecen said at last, sinking into a chair. “They’re all trapped in the labyrinth.”

He gave as accurate an account of the accident as was possible under the circumstances. Axelos set out with two of the servants for the mouth of the labyrinth, leaving him there, seated in the low deck-chair, his head tilted back, his eyes closed. He was waiting for his heart to slow down — or stop altogether. The palpitations had made him feel cold and sick. As soon as his suitcase came down he would give himself an injection. Now he emptied his mind, drew his breath deeply and regularly, and watched the dappled shadow of the sunlight, playing through the plane tree, flicker upon his eyelids. Kestrels were skimming and alighting upon the great limestone cone of Cefalû. He could hear their thin cries suddenly cut off — as if by scissors — when they dived. From the direction of the house came voices arguing — a familiar sound; they were spreading the news of the accident. Graecen sighed and stirred. He had forgotten to tell them that Baird was safe. The only one besides himself. His thoughts turned once more to the little party smothered in rock and earth in that burst antrum of stone; stuck like air-bubbles in glass beyond hope of rescue. He got up slowly and walked up the steps into the house.

His farewells completed Baird squared his shoulders under the old service pack and walked down the rocky road; he felt that they were standing silently watching him as he skirted the cherry grove, crossed the little circle of cultivation, and disappeared up the familiar cliff-path. He did not turn round and wave good-bye — the preoccupation with his mission was complete, creating a solitude around himself. His heart, however, was beating rather fast and he felt a trifle out of breath as he progressed along the ridge of the mountain with a taciturn and dogged persistence. Oddly enough it was not the familiar associations of danger and sudden death that came back to him as he entered the familiar scene of so many actions; rather was it the cumulative memories of days dedicated to boredom, to apathy, to waiting. Here, by this very myrtle bush, they had waited, the Abbot and he, for the mules to catch up; they had been arranging an ambush, and were doubtful of its success. He remembered with utter clarity the face of the Abbot as he shredded up the packet of cigarettes and moistened the tobacco into a chewable quid — for smoking had been forbidden during an operation. He remembered every word of that last conversation. They had discussed the illness of Koax and his possible death. A little higher up where the hill-side jutted he would smell the familiar scent of almonds and oranges from the little grove at the crown of Penthali.

He crossed a rock-torrent by the much-worn stone bridge, over which all their supplies had come; the water still gnashed as it leaped through the sluice and into the stony bed it had carved for itself the other side. At the last corner before he turned west he repeated the familiar action which had become a habit-pattern with them all — stopping for ten minutes under the oak tree to see if anyone followed him along the path, and then lighting a cigarette. He could hear the thin beat of his heart in the crisp mountain air — a small tedious noise as of knitting needles at work in his breast.

From here on it was along the level crown of Nanolithos; the road turned and twisted under frowning limestone cliffs. He walked it with an emphatic certainty, imitating in his own mind the thousand and one journeys he had made along it in the past. Yes, here was the tiny pink shrine to St. Nicholas with its battered ikon and broken lamp; and near it on the tor the rubble left from the ruined Venetian tower.

He skirted them both and passed steadily on until the massive front of dark rock divided itself into a ravine, with a solitary pathway running down the centre. He had reached the entrance to their operation-headquarters, and for a moment he stopped to watch the shadows playing on the surfaces of rock. He felt stirring within him, deeper than his disease of mind, something like alarm — as if somewhere among those balconies of rock a watcher was sitting and observing him with invisible eyes. Wherever he turned his gaze, however, his eyes met nothing. A bush waved in the wind for a second and frightened him with its resemblance to the camouflage of a sharpshooter. He slung the pack on to one shoulder and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. In the khaki pack he carried his lunch and the old bent entrenching-tool which, for some reason or other, he had been carrying about for so many years. He remembered now Hogarth’s explanation of the reason, and smiled. Had he really been reserving it for this moment, this time and place, on a mountain-range in Crete?

He walked steadily down the causeway and through the archway. It was with a kind of numb incomprehension that he saw once more the exact site upon which Böcklin had been killed; somehow he had expected to find it disappeared, transformed, perhaps removed altogether by a landslide. Yet here it was completely unchanged: the familiar orange seams of rock, the knot they had used as a target for their pistols, even the waterlogged shreds of the old ammunition box upon which Böcklin had been sitting when he died. The sweat had started out upon his head; he could feel its coldness in the breath of the wind that played around the ravine. He stood staring stupidly at the rock, which at this point was full of caves and foxholes. In them the wind whistled shrilly. Familiar debris still lay about, broken matchboxes, bandages, a torn sock, some exhausted revolver bullets. He stopped and picked up an empty case, turning it over and over in his cold fingers. Then once more he had the feeling that perhaps he was being watched, and looked up at the frowning sills of rock above, but all was still as death. The wind moaned in the central cavern which was set like a sinus under the cliff. The marks of their fires still dirtied the walls. Outside there was nothing. High in the cloudless blue an eagle sat its chariot of Greek air; the grass rustled quietly around his boots. This was the exact spot, in the shadow of the cliff, where Böcklin’s grave had been; the winter rains had washed out any depression in the ground.