Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

“No other way,” repeated the woman, pushing her hands into her pockets, having first placed the pannier on the ground carefully so as not to displace the three small fish which they could see, peeping through a screen of fig leaves. She made a vague gesture at the horizon and carried it round until it all but circumscribed the whole visible landscape. “It’s all enclosed,” she said vaguely, her voice a little off-key; and then, seeing the incredulity on their faces mixed with the consternation, she added: “Please listen to me.” She said it with earnestness, but with the faint note of self-assurance that made it almost a command. “Listen to me.”

“No other way,” repeated Truman angrily, as if the words had been an insult to him, to all the energy and determination he had put into their escape from the labyrinth.

“It’s true,” she said stubbornly.

“Well, what happens over there?” He pointed vaguely ahead of them to where the mountains rose, turned rose-red and bitumen-coloured in the waning sunlight.

“Cliffs,” she said. “All round. I know you can’t believe it easily. I couldn’t when I first came here. We tried so often to find a way down.”

She walked on a few paces, having picked up her basket, and then called over her shoulder: “Follow me and I’ll show you the house.”

The Truman couple exchanged glances. Once more that feeling of unreality, of having become entangled in a web, took possession of them. “Do you think she’s all right?” asked his wife, making the vague gesture of screwing a nut into her temple with her forefinger. He did not answer. “At any rate there’s a house,” he said. “Come on.” They walked on, like characters in a dream, and caught her up as she reached the corner of a meadow.

Beyond the brow of the hill they saw for the first time the signs of conscious cultivation — a small vineyard in a bowl, sheltered from the north by a low wall of rocks. “Yes,” said the woman catching Elsie Truman’s eye, “our tenderest care is that little vineyard. The wine is indifferent, but that’s because we are not experts in making it.” Truman came up beside her and said: “Who is ‘we’, Mrs. Adams?” She turned up her grotesquely lined yet so childish face and smiled apologetically at him. “‘We’ was my brother and me. But I’m alone now. I haven’t talked English since …” She turned suddenly and walked on, without saying any more.

Several promiscuous hedges of cactus now came into view lining a rough track. To their surprise as they passed into a grove of dwarf-olive and holm-oak they caught sight of a small house, crudely made of stone, standing in a paddock from which, faintly, came the lazy slurring of bees. “There it is,” said Mrs. Truman, whose relief at this evident example of domestic architecture was manifest in her smile. “And you have bees,” she added.

“Yes. For honey. I’m afraid the bread hasn’t been very good since Godfrey went. It’s hard work grinding the grain up fine enough, you know, and I’m getting an old woman.” She nodded and smiled as she spoke.

Truman’s face still wore an expression of troubled incredulity. He simply was not convinced. They approached the house, walking abreast, and he examined its workmanship with a careful professional eye; it was built of roughly-pruned rock laid together in blocks. Its corners were unpointed and the joints of the stone empty of any mortar that he could see. The porch was held upon saplings, and roughly boarded over with the grey wood of old ammunition-boxes. He could read the serial numbers and specifications in some places. The woman led the way in. “It took us six years to build this house. And, of course, Godfrey did a lot of work on it putting in improvements. He was a marvel of inventiveness. It was frightfully hard work. We were living in a cave up the hill before. But it’s quite solid, and look how nicely he has finished the interior.” She threw open a heavy door and showed them a long low room, floored with crude staves of pine and cypress. The walls had been washed with some kind of crude earth-pigment to an uneven grey upon which somebody had drawn several large cartoons of human faces in charcoal. “Isn’t it nice?” She crossed to the stone hearth in which a log fire was smoking and stirred it, placing some more logs upon it. On the hob stood a tarnished petrol tin half full of warm water. “Come in, do,” she said, turning to them with such pleasure on her face that they felt their constraint to be something churlish. “I never thought I should have the fun of showing strangers Godfrey’s work. Godfrey is my brother.” She pointed to one of the faces sketched on the wall, a turbulent, good-looking face topped by a head of wavy hair, and smiled again.

Truman’s eyes widened in admiration. There were no chairs in the room, but several simple cushions stood about, stuffed with some coarse grass. They were covered in what he recognized, after a moment, as fine parachute-silk. Two tables of smooth wood stood nearby, whose feet were contrived from roughly-pruned logs of wood. Warm in the mounting firelight gleamed three Red Indian blankets. The whole interior looked bare and clean — and yet, at the same time, essentially complete and inhabited.

“Before you wash”, said the woman softly, “I think I’ll make you some tea — not real tea but almost as good. Cretan tea— salepi —you’ve probably heard of it. I won’t be a moment.” She left them standing irresolutely in the middle of the floor, and they heard her busy in the next room. Elsie Truman sat down on one of the cushions and stretched out her feet to the fire. “Well,” she said, “what do you make of it?”

Truman did not know what to make of it. He reserved judgment. Presently the woman returned again with a look of anxious expectancy on her face. “Excellent,” she said, seeing Elsie Truman sitting before the fire, “I’m so glad.” It was as if she had been afraid that they were only figments of her imagination, waiting until her back was turned to disappear. She pressed upon them enamel mugs and poured the boiling water in a metalled pot. “Swamp orchis,” she explained. “Another piece of Godfrey’s cleverness. I think you’ll enjoy it.” Handing them their cups she apologized for not having any sugar to offer them. “Neither sugar nor salt can I get on this mountain,” she said, sitting down and peeling off her several pairs of socks before turning a pair of finely shaped feet to the fire. “There is a sugar-beet patch up the hill; but I don’t know how to extract it, and it’s tiresome just to chew it. But perhaps you can help me?”

Truman disclaimed any professional knowledge of the sort, with a preoccupied air. He was still convinced that it was possible to find their way back to Cefalû, and consequently resented the faintly proprietary air with which the stranger seemed to include him in her own activities. “Tell us more about Godfrey,” he said, feeling suddenly hopeful, for surely she had said that Godfrey was no longer with her?

“Godfrey,” she said, and sipped her tea. “After the other two had left, Evan and John, Godfrey stayed on with me. He was my only brother. He was nearest to me in resignation, at least, so I thought. He was happy when he was constructing things to make life here more tolerable. His house, his porch, his kitchen sink — you haven’t seen it yet. Almost every good thing was Godfrey’s. But somehow he began to get upset when year succeeded year and there seemed less and less to do. He was a victim of activity. At first he used to call this place a heaven; but he was the kind of man who would get discontented with heaven itself. He was in love with mountains — and well known as a climber in his day. To be marooned here and surrounded by unclimbable mountains was too much for him. He tried to climb out, back into the world, but lost his foothold. He fell a clear seven hundred feet. I’ll show you the little pennant on the end of his pick. You can see it from above — we call it Ibex Point because John, my husband, once saw an ibex there. It waves when there’s a wind — the pennant. Gives the oddest illusion of him being alive still — as if he were calling for help. He fell between two great slabs of granite. It was his own fault. There was a high wind. I was sitting watching him when it happened. It must be several years ago. I’ve been awfully lonely since he left, and sort of helpless too. Godfrey was never at a loss. But now you’re here it’s different. Perhaps your friends will find their way up too and join you. It’s so much more fun with several people. That reminds me, I shall have to get you some blankets from the hollow. The nights are cold now.” She stopped all of a sudden, seeing the expression of discomfort and disbelief upon Truman’s face. “I see you don’t believe me.”