Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

They stumbled and crawled through a network of caves and galleries filled with this delusive half-light which reminded her, as she said, of the Aquarium of Brighton; in which she half expected to see the vast and gloomy forms of fishes dawdling through the crannies and corridors around them. In the centre of one of them, scooped clear in the cold stone, lay what at first seemed to be a miniature lake — its black surface untouched by reflections or movements. She gave a little cry of interest and pleasure and advanced towards it with the intention of washing her face in it: but as she stopped, taking off her hat, her husband caught her arm. He was staring keenly down at the polished surface. They were aware of a faint sour smell, like that of slightly burnt milk. “Wash your face in that, would you?” said Truman softly, more to himself than to her, and, reaching down, picked up a twig off the floor. “Look.” He dipped the twig into the liquid and drew it out, letting the bitumen run sluggishly from its end, smoking like black sealing-wax. “Well I never,” she said, “it’s tar. How did it get down here?” It provided her husband with an excuse for a homily upon feminine irresponsibility and the evils thereof. He did not spare her, and she listened to him, outwardly very meek, but inwardly smiling in fond amusement at this oftrepeated performance. His concern was flattering, even if his opinion of her intelligence was not.

They took a turning now, and followed a slowly-descending gallery to a network of caves in which, as in a sea-shell, they could hear the distorted sighing of the sea. “It sounds so near,” she kept repeating painfully, “so very near”; but the rock offered no egress except in one place where they could stare down through a narrow trapdoor of stone, upon a patch of darkness broken from time to time by a small iridescence, a trembling as of sequins in a dark ballroom. “The sea,” he said, with longing suddenly breaking through his reserve. “If we could only reach it.” They sat for a time and smoked there. From time to time he stared down through that narrow shaft at the water coiling and uncoiling, and seemed to be trying to work out some way of climbing down to it. His wife watched him, blowing the cigarette-smoke through her nostrils. “I bet”, she said, “the others found a way down.” Truman looked at her in silence. “Into the sea?” he said at last with polite irony. “Why not?” she said. She had not been thinking of the sea at all, but since he chose to offer her a ground for argument, she saw no reason why she should not take the opportunity to talk a little. “I can just see Campion nipping into a tunnel like that and out into the sea in a moment.” Campion had become associated in both their minds with the qualities of deftness and cunning. Her husband put out his cigarette and said: “Lot of use that would be if he can’t swim a stroke.” He recalled a conversation with Campion about the length of time a man could stay afloat if he fell overboard. Campion confessed then that he was unable to swim. Mrs. Truman looked crushed, though the same affectionate amusement stirred in her as she heard the broad unconcern, the male superiority of his tones. She was getting really hungry now, but he would not let her eat, saying that it was not time.

The tunnels led them upward now, through crumbling arches and over pits and crannies, away from the soft walled-off sound of the sea bursting against the cliffs. They hated to leave the sound, so closely did it match those other sounds of the everyday world from which they seemed now to have been parted for centuries. A vague sense of gloom and unreality had descended upon them. They came at last to yet another nexus of corridors — a “terminus”, as she called it. While she sat upon a stone and rubbed her ankles her husband set off methodically to examine the various tunnels for clues by which they might guide themselves back towards the world. Three of them became, after a few yards, narrow and impassable. The fourth looked more interesting. It mounted steeply, and in the yellow beam of his torch, revealed a floor of limestone. There seemed to be traces of brown earth about, and this itself absorbed him, since so far they had passed through solid rock for the greatest part of the way. He walked on a few paces when his eyes fell upon some twigs lying near his feet. He picked them up. They were dry and brown. It was as if they had fallen from a head of a birch broom. Truman blew his nose carefully and methodically, switching off his torch as he did so. A vague excitement possessed him. Ten paces farther on the corridor narrowed considerably; here he stopped and examined the wall-face with intentness and concentration. His patience was rewarded at last. He gave a grunt of interest and picked from the wall a few small tufts of hair, measuring their height from the ground by spanning the distance, like a builder, finger to thumb. His wife was sitting waiting for him. She had found a pencil in her handbag and was scribbling on the rock. Truman sat down beside her and fell to studying the tuft of hair in the light which filtered in through the roof of the cavern. Absorbed in her game she did not look up. She was busy drawing hearts with arrows transfixing them, over each of which she wrote, laboriously and carefully, her own name and that of her husband. “I shall do this all the way along,” she said. “In case other people come this way.” He was sitting quite still, whistling softly through his teeth, abstractedly examining the clue from the tunnel, his mind working on possible solutions. “Well,” he said at last, “it can’t be a bear. Unless bears have browny-white hair. It’s pretty big though.”

His wife turned round to see what he was doing, and as she did so the cavernous voice of the minotaur sounded, this time close at hand. Its resonance in that narrow place was deafening. It was accompanied by a rushing noise, as of dead leaves stirring in the empty caverns before a whirlwind. Dust began to trickle down from the balconies of stone. They jumped to their feet in alarm, turning their heads this way and that, responding to the tremendous echoes which multiplied the sound and flung it back at them from different corners of the place. “Christ,” said Truman. “There it is.” His eyes were wide and shining now, and she could see that he was having difficulty in cóntinuing to convert his fear into resolution. The echoes passed them, banging away down the tunnels. He leaned forward and said quickly: “Give me the knife, will you?” He was glad to feel the smooth handle of his old bowieknife in his hand. Taking off his coat, he draped it over his forearm in the manner of a bullfighter, explaining as he did so: “Its burrow can’t be far from the top, Elsie. Maybe if we find it, it will show us the way out.” Too fearful to answer him she stood with her back to the cold stone and waited as he made his preparations. “Now,” he said at last, pausing to listen to the vague explosions of sound sinking away behind them into the stone network. “Now then. Quietly, see? Follow me.” She heard the small sound of the blade as it clicked out of its case. He took up his torch and moved towards the tunnel quickly but with circumspection.

Their feet seemed to make a prodigious noise among the stones. They traversed a dozen low-roofed corridors without mishap. Nothing stirred around them in that damp air save the sound of their own progression, small, perfunctory, meaningless as the scratching of moles under the earth. Truman was nursing his failing torch, using it only in small spells, in order to see the way ahead. They would form a picture, so to speak, of every stage, snap off the light and accomplish it in darkness. His hand contracted lovingly about the blade of his knife, as he thanked God for its long sharp blade. Pen-knives had always been a mania with him, and he never travelled without one. The present bowie had been a present from a G.I. in the late war, a marvellous strong piece of workmanship, which he had re-ground himself before they left England. Now as he went forward to meet whatever reality chose to offer him in the way of chimeras — or obstructions more substantial — he felt the warm currents of his own life flowing through his bull-neck and powerful shoulders.