Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

Some way along, the corridors suddenly became damp and clammy. They noticed that their floors had become of stone no longer, but of earth and rubble. The air exuded damp which mingled with the cold sweat on their foreheads. The last march had been upwards, along corridors leaning up at an angle, cutting diagonally through the honeycomb of caves and galleries. Hope mounted in them as they saw, here and there, the roots of trees struggling through the walls, their white frilly roots showing like clusters of worms. Truman felt his own breathing become thinner, easier, as if fresh air were already coming down to meet them, to buoy up their failing lungs.

They stumbled at last into a small natural amphitheatre in the rock and were about to cross it and enter the corridor beyond when they were startled by the blundering crashing sound of some heavy body in the darkness before them. A gust of sweetish breath seemed to swirl into the little cabin of rock and earth. Truman recoiled and switched off his torch. They stood hand in hand, trembling and waiting for the minotaur to reveal itself; and as they stood, their uneasy silence in that half-light was broken by a coarse grunting and slavering noise which reminded them irresistibly of a horse in its stall. Their eyes had already become accustomed to the dark monotonous light, and fixing them upon the tunnel ahead, they saw something move in the shadows behind a coign of stone — a parapet shaped not unlike a byre. Truman took ten paces forward very swiftly and silently, and pressed himself to the rock. Then, turning on his torch, he craned his head round the corner to stare speechless into the terrified eyes of a cow. For an age he continued to stand thus, his body pressed to the wall and his heart contracted into an icy lump in his breast. As he stood, letting the breath come slowly back into his body, his mind ranged over every available expletive in the English language which might express some of his relief — a small part of that overwhelming, overmastering relief that had bereft him of word or action.

Seeing him standing there, and imagining perhaps that the sight of whatever lay behind the rock had been so hideous as to unman him, his wife picked up a boulder and rushed to his side; she too found herself staring into the blood-red eyes of a cow. The stone fell from her hands. She could feel his body trembling with laughter now, and as she opened her mouth to speak, the cow turned tail and, letting fall an alarmed pat of excrement, bolted down the tunnel. “Quick,” they both shouted incoherently, and ran, screaming with laughter, in pursuit. They blundered down a series of arches, composed apparently of the roots of trees and then suddenly, absurdly, into the light of day.

Between laughter and tears they sat down and covered their eyes from the blazing radiance of the light, sitting thus for at least two minutes, during which through their parted fingers they caught glimpses of the world of familiar shapes; a sloping hill-side studded with swart green grey olives. They had emerged from between the roots of a huge plane tree. Somewhere water gushed. Lifting their hands from their eyes by small degrees they stared into the blue Aegean sky, and let it stare back at them, uncompromisingly, utterly blue. Trees were stirring faintly, as if in an awakened interest. Bees hung, slowly frying, in the flowers. The Roof of the World had revealed itself to them, in all its pristine novelty, as if by a razor-stroke. No extravagance of gesture or exclamation could do justice to its beauty. Elsie Truman kicked off her shoes and stretched her toes, lying back slowly in the grass. “It’s like being reborn,” she told herself as she lay, unspeaking and felt tears fill her eyes, and run slowly over her cheeks. Her husband, too, lay down and let his head rest upon his forearm; the coarse inhalations of his cigarette seemed delicious beyond expression. Life, which had seemed to offer them so little beyond a death by hunger in the labyrinth, suddenly crowded upon them both, not only with the blessings of movement and feeling, but also with those hundreds of memories and plans which they had not allowed to occupy their minds while their realization had seem remote. His lips moved silently from time to time, but he was not praying. He was talking to himself.

“And now,” she said, “let’s eat.”

“Eat away,” he said, lying motionless, feeling the unshaven flesh of his cheek between finger and thumb. She rose slowly, still weighed down by that marvellous convalescent sense of weariness and unpacked the by-now-battered sandwiches, peeling the damp paper from them with distaste. “Here,” she said, “eat something.” Her husband sat up and stretched, taking the bread from her fingers as he did so. “All the best,” he said, taking his first bite, and looking round him to trace the sound of running water which had been running like a musical accompaniment to his thoughts, along a parallel track. “It’s cold, you know,” she said, feeling the air upon her lips and throat as she sat down beside him. “I wonder where we are?”

The landscape in which they found themselves was startlingly wild and craggy, thought Truman, as he looked about him between mouthfuls of food. At each of the four points of the compass he could see the necks and shoulders of tree-denuded mountains butting up into the afternoon light. Their summits, topped with snow, caught the glittering rays of lights and flashed them back at one another — a thousand diamond-flashes against the grey bony twilight which was reaching up towards them from the lower slopes. Yet despite the gauntness of the further prospect they found themselves upon the declining edge of a bowl — perhaps a quarter of a mile round — in which fruit, trees, flowers, everything seemed to flourish. Faintly in their nostrils they smelt the cool rotten smell of vegetation which hangs about a snowline; yet the little bowl could only boast of one clump of firs upon its farthest edge. It was clear too that the backdrop of mountains was in some way divided from this small formalized territory, which fell away so steeply into space.

“Those mountains are a long way off,” muttered Truman in a puzzled voice. “And we don’t seem to be very high. I wonder where the sea is?”

They continued to eat with deliberation and enjoyment, hardly speaking, and when they had done Truman buried their scraps methodically in the ground under the plane tree.

“I wouldn’t,” said Truman slowly, still looking round him. “I wouldn’t be too optimistic, Elsie. We. can just as easily starve on a mountain as in a cave, you know. There’s no road I can see and no houses.”

She dusted the crumbs from her dress and said: “There’s bound to be a farm about somewhere. Besides, look,” her eyes had lighted upon a rock whose surface looked smooth and polished — as if with resin. “What?” said her husband. She got up and went over to it. “It’s a ‘greaser’,” she said, recovering the old Derbyshire word, with its memories of holidays spent on farms during her childhood. “That means some sheep or goats.”

They walked down into the little valley, hand in hand, looking about them curiously. The prospect looked, with all its cultivation, like the park of some great house — the result of deliberate labour and intention rather than the casual handiwork of Nature. A stream blundered over gravel. Birds sang. A walnut tree nodded its pronged branches in the wind. Farther down beyond the last bluff of rock, puffs of colour stood out against the grey, hills — peach-blossom. Warm, verdant, and unself-conscious the meadows seemed to have been tended and mown, lying in the shadow of the sun-burnt mountains. They were filled with a gradually growing sense of incredulity and amazement, comparing the richness of the amphitheatre in which they stood with the brooding hulks of stone which raised themselves in the air at every point. Their feet trod grass. Yet everywhere they turned their eyes picked up the formidable crests of mountains plunged in snow. “I can’t make it out,” he said slowly, “it seems queer somehow. It’s so warm.” His wife walked silently beside him tasting the purity of the air as it entered her lungs and was expelled from them. The mountains looked grandiose and beautiful rather than menacing. She was full of that light-headedness which comes upon all who walk upon the mountains of Greece, and feel the scent of thyme mingling with the pure cold air. Immense pearl-covered clouds hung in one corner of the sky, like canopies of silk. The gestures and manoeuvres they had set out to rehearse had degenerated into this immobile stillness. Occasionally one of them would throw a damp splash of shadow on the mountain-side. “It’s wonderful,” she said, unpreoccupied by the problems which he was turning over in his mind. “Simply wonderful.”