Lawrence Durrell: The Dark Labyrinth

“Well,” said Truman, “you must admit it’s a queer story.”

She put her cup down and rose, saying: “We still have an hour of light. Walk round the whole plateau with me and see for yourself that there is no way back. I’m sorry. I know how you feel. But it’s useless.”

Elsie Truman settled herself like a cat before the blaze of the fire and drained her mug of salepi . “I can’t believe it,” she said, in a voice so innocent and friendly as to be empty of any suggestion of insult. “I simply can’t.”

“I have been here since 1926,” said the woman quietly. “It’s written on that wall there; when we built the house we put up our calendar. It is now …”

“Nineteen-forty-seven,” said Truman.

“Twenty-one years.”

“A long time.”

“We came first,” she said, sitting down afresh beside his wife, “we came first to Crete because there was a dig my husband wanted to try — at Castro. He is, was, an archaeologist, and Evan was a student who was then his assistant. Godfrey came out for a holiday from England and joined us. We were staying at the village — Cefalû—you must know it. And for a joke Godfrey thought we should try and chart the labyrinth. He was so confident that it was safe. We went quite far in when one of the small tunnels fell in and so we couldn’t turn back and follow the line we had laid. Fortunately we had food with us. It took us a week until we came out here.”

The Truman couple sat quite still listening. “But where’s your husband,” said Truman at last, “and the other man?”

The woman put her hands up to her face and slowly rubbed her cheeks with her palms. “They went back,” she said absently, her voice now flat and without colour. She began to pull on her coarse stocking and thrust the padding which served her for soles into its proper place.

“Went back where?” said Truman sharply.

“Down the labyrinth?” he repeated in a voice of mingled perplexity and amusement.

“Yes,” she said. “You see, my husband got very upset at being locked up here. He hated it. He and Evan began to quarrel frightfully. It was only Godfrey that kept the peace. I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t been with us. I think Evan — no, that’s a lie: I know Evan was in love with me. One day they decided to take a chance, to enter the labyrinth again and try to find their way through to the other side. I have never heard if they did. That was years ago.” She stood up and pointed to a date on the wall, and, with the other hand, opened the door. “Come”, she said, “and see it for yourselves.”

Half an hour’s walking was all that was necessary to prove to them conclusively that they were marooned. It was still hardly credible, yet it was true. At every point of the compass the hill was dropped away sheer, and fell hundreds of feet towards the verdant but unpeopled valleys. It was no longer even possible to tell in which direction Cefalû lay. Dimly in the distance Truman made out the forms of orange trees. The sun was ebbing fast now, and the mountain peaks around them gleamed with melting jewellery. Nowhere was there an outlet to this girdle of hills; nowhere was so much as a hamlet visible; nowhere shone the sea. The landscape might have been part of a crater on the moon’s surface.

The old woman walked beside them, silent for the most part, and thoughtful. She no longer seemed so pathetically anxious to prove to them the truth of her story. She led the way to the trout stream, and across the meadows to where the five sheep and the cow stood passively contemplating them. At different times, she explained, they had found their way up through the labyrinth. “So far”, she said, “they are the only ones who have shown no anxiety to get back.” Between the beauty of it all and the weariness Elsie Truman felt her eyes fill with tears. “Do let’s go back,” she said at last, “I am so tired.”

Already they felt as they entered the little house a sense of familiarity and pleasure — almost as if they themselves had been its owners. All their preoccupation as to the fate of the rest of the party vanished too, now that it was so clearly impossible to do anything for them. Together they helped the old woman brew some more tea, and build up the fire until its flames threw their dark shapes upon the farther wall where the three faces of the men who had grown tired of this Eden looked at them, incurious, thoughtful — each wrapped, it seemed, in the impenetrability of a vanished pose. “Past tense, present tense — what does it mean?” said the old woman at last, drawing up a cushion to the blaze. “And yet I would like you to give me an account of the world outside. Tell me what has been happening.”

With many hesitations the Trumans began to answer her eager questions. Yes, there had been a war. “I thought so,” she exclaimed. “I thought they’d had another.” She rose and leaned against the wall, adding: “You know one day a series of parcels began coming down out of the sky, attached to parachutes. Massive bundles of equipment — medical supplies, clothes: things I’d never seen before. You must tell me about them. There are about fifty rifles in the clearing: Godfrey stacked them all there. He wondered whether we could use the barrels for a system of piping. Godfrey made a nice little stone bath, but he didn’t suggest any way of heating water.”

“Now, if you had an old Primus”, said Truman, “and some piping, I’d fix you a bath-heater.”

The conversation became animated. At some time during the Cretan campaign a mass of German equipment had fallen, by some misdirection, on to the plateau. They agreed to go out together in the early morning and inspect it in the light of Truman’s specialized knowledge. “And clothes,” she said, “you shall have lots of clothes — warm ones. Trousers and tunics of wool. Lovely things. Some of them look English.”

Their conversation prolonged itself throughout dinner, which consisted of soup, trout, cream cheese done after the Greek style, and a glass of hot goat’s milk swimming with yellow beads of fat. The cooking was excellent despite the lack of salt. As they ate they saw the great candent peaks of the mountains slowly lighted up by the moon, like massive pieces of theatre machinery. A tremendous stillness reigned between their sentences. Elsie Truman could feel it seeping in, dissolving the words she uttered, reducing them to unimportant noises in the face of its huge ponderous tranquillity. She was possessed by something like fear; yet something less defined, less immediately comprehensible, for what was there to fear save the anticipation of being cut off from the known world?

“Godfrey, Evan, John and I,” said the old woman. “We fetched up here in a state of complete exhaustion.” She was looking into the fire as she spoke, summoning up the forgotten scene. “Yet we made a tolerable life for ourselves out of the few elements which fate had left us. A burning-glass, some blankets, a small saw, a hatchet, and shotgun and so on. For months you know it was only fires that kept us alive. We put down the first northern wall of the house during a winter of exceptional bitterness. We worked like mules under Godfrey. He took charge of everything so naturally. There are still a lot of essentials lacking, as you see; glass for the windows is one of them. Those grey silk screens are pretty, but very rough; I dare say you feel the draught coming through them. They give a sort of Chinese feeling to the room, don’t they, ‘specially when you see the mountains slowly develop on them like” photographs? It was so quiet after they left, and yet everything changed for the better. Something inside me seemed to change, too, though I don’t know how to express it properly. Perhaps living alone did it. Or perhaps I only imagined it; but Godfrey said that in some way we had become allied to the forces of Nature instead of against them. He had studied philosophy and used to say that the whole of the western civilization we knew was based on the Will: and that led always to action and to destruction. Whereas he claimed there was some thing inside us, an element of repose he called it, which you could develop, and alter your life completely. Sounds rubbish, doesn’t it?”