Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

A tree knelt above the rocky pool into which the mountain water spun and curdled — a tree white to the lips with cherries. Small birds frisked in the branches. “Did you say we’d starve?” she asked mockingly, reaching up and pulling the ripe cherries from the stalk. “Come,” he said, and locking his arms about her thighs, lifted her towards the ripest clusters. He stood, his head against her thighs, and absently heard the words of an old song running in the back of his mind: “If you were the only girl in the world.” It stretched so far back into the past that he could no longer identify the incidents and localities connected with it. His wife wriggled as she tried to reach higher and higher. “Steady on,” he said, and as she leaned down to stop his lips with the cold fruit, “Where do you think you are? The Garden of Eden?”

They sat side by side on the bank and bathed their feet in the icy water, eating cherries and smoking one of his last cigarettes in alternate puffs. The shadows of the pine trees were growing longer. “You know”, he said, “we shouldn’t hang about much longer. It’s just as well to find out where we are before taking it easy.” She stood up and dusted her dress. Her feet were still cold from the icy water of the torrent, and she skippered up and down to stretch them and start the circulation. “Well?” she said, “after the minotaur I can stand anything.” He was wrapping up his raincoat once more and the thought seemed to strike him with some force. “You don’t think that was it?” he said incredulously. “What else?” she asked. Truman shook his head and puzzled over the problem for a moment; it was as if he were unwilling to admit that they had domesticated, so to speak, the minotaur; domesticated their terrors in the shape of a brown cow whose mooing could be picked up and amplified in the bowels of the earth. “I don’t know,” he said at last, and rising, joined her.

“I think we should get up those trees,” he said, “and look down the slope. Maybe we are on the hill above that village — what’s it called? Cefalû? Yes, Cefalû.”

They crossed several small dry river-beds where winter torrents would run, and plunged into a dense grove of myrtles. As they mounted, behind a neighbouring hill, they caught sight of some sheep grazing. “You see,” she said, “I told you. There must be a farm hereabouts.” But the terrain offered no signs of paths or other cultivation beyond the well-kept appearance of its trees and woodland. It was as they took the final gradient and mounted the hillock towards the clump of pines, that they saw, below them, a stranger. He was sitting at the edge of the bank, where the stream suddenly grew deep and turbid, carving for itself small pools and marshes in the limestone. In his hand was a fishing-rod. His back rested against the bole of an olive tree. His head was covered by a bright handkerchief, and he appeared to be asleep. “At last,” said Truman with relief. “Our troubles are over,” and cupping his hands he shouted: “Hullo there!” as they started to descend towards the solitary figure. “Better try repeating that in Greek,” said his wife ironically. “He doesn’t seem to hear.” Indeed, the stranger still sat with his back to them, unheeding. It was only when Truman shouted a second time that he turned, and they saw that it was a woman. She stood up, dropping the fishing-rod, and stood, as if uncertain whether to fly or to await their approach. Truman and his wife marched happily down the slope, arm in arm, and, noting her attitude, felt called upon to justify their presence in the valley by shouting: “We’re lost.” But the woman gave no sign beyond the half-suppressed temptation to fly which was obvious in her attitude. She was dressed in brown trousers, and an old patched woollen sweater. A scarf was tied under her chin. As they approached her, Elsie said in an undertone: “Doesn’t seem much good. She doesn’t understand. Doesn’t look Greek though somehow, does she?”

It was when they got much closer that they saw she was an old woman, with a slight boyish figure, and a short-cropped head of silver hair. Two brown eyes, set in her puckered face, and surrounded by a network of fine crowsfoot wrinkles, regarded them with distrust and a certain alarm. She stood and faced them across the stream, one hand reaching nervously behind her to touch the olive-bole, as if to take confidence from the feel of it. Elsie was reminded of a child shyly holding the edge of its mother’s skirt. She nudged her husband. “Go on. Talk,” she said. A look of comical indecision came over Mr. Truman’s face. He concluded from the silence of the old woman that she had not understood their remarks in English. Of Greek he had none. However, squaring himself and opening his mouth he said haltingly: “English. We English. Ingleses,” pointing first to himself and then to his wife.

The woman smiled now for the first time — a smile of relief mingled with enlightenment. “Thank God,” she said in a voice which was harsh, but which carried in it some quality of distinction and self-possession that reminded Truman at once of Graecen. “Thank God. I thought you were from Evan — you’d come to take me back.” She relaxed all of a sudden, and bending forward the better to accommodate her body to the laughter, laughed aloud, patting her thighs with her hands. “You speak English, then?” said Truman, rather nettled at having been forced to debase his tongue with pidgin. “Well,” she said, taking up the fishing-rod, and drawing the handle of a wicker pannier over her arm, “I am American actually. My name is Adams, Ruth Adams.” She walked downstream for twenty paces in order to ford it upon a series of stepping-stones, talking as she did so. “I haven’t seen a stranger in years,” she said, with the small harshness of tone, but with the same note of authoritative self-possession that made her voice pleasing and musical to listen to. “You must forgive me. When you don’t see strangers you forget how to be polite to them.” She crossed the stream and walked down the bank towards them. Elsie Truman saw that in place of shoes she was wearing a number of pairs of khaki stockings, with the soles padded in some way. At close range she looked even older; and yet in some curious way the proportions of her face retained an almost childish smoothness of contour. Yet it was deeply wrinkled. She stood before them now in her brown corduroy trousers much patched, and stretched out a shy hand as they introduced themselves. Her wrists were small and finely formed, but her finger-nails were unkept and broken, and her palm was as hard to the touch as that of a ploughman. “Ruth Adams,” she murmured to each in turn. “You must”, she said, “have come up through the labyrinth.” The word restored to Truman the sense of urgency and danger which the last few minutes in this landscape had all but dispelled. “Yes,” he said quickly, “and there are several others down there. We want to get help to them as quickly as possible.” The stranger turned and walked slowly beside them, saying: “You must be tired out. Come along with me and we’ll see if I can’t fix you something to eat.” Elsie Truman walked beside with a feeling that something was wrong; she had shown no trace of hearing her husband’s words about the others. “There are,” she said carefully, with an almost academic correctness (she felt that perhaps the difference in American and English idiom might have led to a misunderstanding), “there are no less than four or five people lost in those caves.” The stranger looked quickly up at her for a second, smiling, and then said: “I’m sorry. I did hear your husband. But there’s nothing we can do, you see. There’s no other way up here except through the labyrinth.”

“No other way!” Truman tripped himself — by the very force of his own exclamation it seemed — recovered and halted to confront her. “What did you say?”