Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

Miss Dombey sat up for a moment and opened her eyes. She knew now, for the first time, with complete accuracy, that she was going to die. The familiar sluggish throb of her heart, its strange drugged rhythm had conveyed the information to her. In a sense she was no longer afraid of the labyrinth, since it was no longer the labyrinth that was killing her. Ah, but this was not the martyr’s death she had dreamed about; it was something small and irremediable, lacking even the small logic of her faith and beliefs.

She did not wish to think of God, yet she supposed that someone in her position ought to be praying. “Oh God,” she began accordingly, repeating the formulae that stretched away on all sides of her like well-trodden paths, “Why have I never really believed in You?”

Even through her drowsiness she recognized this as a very remarkable beginning to a prayer; yet the sense of something lacking, even in this confession, persisted. Father, Son and Holy Ghost — what did they mean? They rattled about inside her mind like nutmegs in a tin. Yet over and above it all she felt the emanations of her father; her father reading from the big black book; her father preaching; climbing on to his knee to let him cherish her and rub his warm palms upon the back of her small neck. In some vague way the Second Coming had been designed as a plot to bring him back. It was in the shadow of this immense Imago that Miss Dombey fell asleep at last.…

Fearmax, for his part, awoke with a large lump on the top of his head, and the feeling of having been involved in an earthquake. For a long time he lay quite still, moving his arms and feet gently to see if they were intact. Apart from the contusion upon his head, and the feeling of sickness he could trace no other infirmity due to the adventure. He had fallen sideways, so that his body rested upon his mackintosh, in whose pockets he felt the hard edges of the carton containing his lunch. He lay for a long time staring into the blackness, every nerve relaxed, wondering what he should do next. His last coherent memory was of the guide planing through space towards him astride an enormous boulder. What had happened? The debris, perhaps, had pushed him to one side, down this stone chute. Slowly he sat up, groaning more in anticipation of broken limbs than in any real discomfort. His head, however, throbbed from the blow; but did not appear to be bleeding. His feet were chilled to the bone from the large pool of water in which he had been lying. He picked up the sodden mackintosh and groped for the box of matches he knew he had been carrying. In the little yellow spurt of flame his eye caught the glimmer of something on the ground not three paces away. It was his torch, and picking it up with trembling fingers, he pressed the button, relieved to see once more the powerful yellow beam without whose aid he would have been as helpless as a blind man.

He turned it first upon the blocked passage-way behind, examining the great mound of stones and mud which had been forced like a cork into the neck of a bottle; before him, however, the corridor stretched away into infinity. What was he to do? Fearmax felt a strange calm descend upon him, a sense of well-being and relaxation. It was as if there were nothing more to wish for, and nothing to fear — a resolution had been made in terms of destiny. He must walk as fast and as far as he could, in the hope of finding an issue. But first he sat down and ate, balancing his torch on his knee to do so. It was a welcome pause, too, for he had not fully collected his wits. He noticed the wet footmarks leading from the puddle with a sudden start; he had not been alone, then. But who had left him like that, without a word, and walked off down the corridor? The footprint was small enough to be that of a woman.

Fearmax bolted the rest of his food in his excitement and set off down the corridor, stopping at intervals to shout “Hullo!” Hope sprang up in his breast at the thought that he was not alone in the labyrinth. But as the corridors multiplied and ramified, stretching away into infinity, he became despondent. How could one find anyone in this maze? It was possible, too, that he was only going in a circle.

He passed through a cavern into which the blinding blue sky peered and threw up startling images of volcanic rock, blue, gold and green, which covered the walls like dried sealing-wax. Fearmax looked longingly at the sky, raising his thin arms and shouting until the echoes wheeled down over him like a flock of exhausted birds. Ten feet of rope was all he needed to gain his liberty. Yet it would be fatal to linger.

He started off once more at a great pace. At least if he could reach the river they had crossed it would be something, but cavern led to dry cavern, tunnel to tunnel, until he felt completely dazed and bewildered. Several times, too, he stumbled and bruised his ankles, for the going was rough and the surfaces uneven.

Now gradually his pace slackened and he became more composed. He had found a battered cigar in his coat-pocket and the rich smoke soothed his nerves. In his mind he found himself composing sentences which, if he were to escape from the labyrinth, would find a place in the book he planned to write. The theme was a simple one and owed a good deal to Hogarth; he was writing a treatise upon the psychic mind — its predisposition to epilepsy and schizophrenia. It was to be a guide to the mediums of the future. “To deal with evidence that cannot be reconciled to the body and canons of everyday science has been the task of all independent minds since the beginning of history. It is no less the task of the individual in whose experience must inevitably arise emotions or thoughts which are neither rational nor commonplace. The body of work left us by men like Blake or Nostradamus.…” He bumped his head on a ledge and stopped to swear. “Madness, therefore, must be a conditional term in our judgment of them.” His torch picked up arch after arch, corridor after corridor. The labyrinth seemed to have no end.

Suddenly Fearmax thought of “French Marie”. He thought of her with a sudden pang of anguish, and halted in his tracks. Could it be that the footsteps he had seen near where he lay …? Or was he losing his mind — that it should entertain so fantastic an idea. Yet try as he might he could not rid himself of its seduction. Perhaps among these corridors he would come upon the real “French Marie”, the partner and wife he had been searching for for so long. He was sitting upon a stone idly watching the smoke from his cigar trail off down the corridor. A sudden idea struck him? Where was the smoke going? Surely it must be naturally drawn off down a current of air? And a current of air pointed the direction of an issue? He laughed hoarsely. Was the smoke leading him, then, to the surface; or perhaps somewhere ahead “French Marie” was waiting for him, waiting to be sought out and recognized.

Fearmax started off once more, following the smoke from his long cigar, pausing every few paces to blow another puff into the sterile air of the tunnel; it moved sluggishly but perceptibly away, leading along tunnels which seemed to descend, across galleries of rock with vaulted arches, for all the world as if they had been designed by human architects. Fearmax followed, one half of his mind still grappling with the problems of composition. “Their work constitutes, therefore, as does that of the medium, deliberate evidence of states of being not communicable in linguistic terms.”

Could she really be there, waiting for him? The idea both delighted and terrified him. What would they speak of when they met? The smoke led remorselessly onward; once it led him through a cavern where stalactites dribbled noisily, and he thought he had found the river. But he was disappointed again. Had it been the river, he thought, he might have floated down it to the sea, and yet it would be horrible to be lodged in some cranny too small to admit the passage of his body — lodged like a tea-leaf in a tooth and suffocated. He tried to reconstruct a long quotation from Mysers with which he had intended to end his book. It was about materializations; it reminded him suddenly of the bubbles of paraffin drying — inside them the invisible plump and shapely hands of “French Marie”. Why had she suddenly deserted him? And why had he come all the way to Crete to get lost in this hideous labyrinth? Was there a pattern, a design about it all?