“It was not a roar,” said Graecen, “was it?” Mrs Truman was reminded of the upstairs’ lodgers moving furniture about during a spring clean. Sound became so mangled and magnified in those corridors that it might be anything, thought Fearmax, with a superstitious dread.
“The minotaur,” said Campion to no one in particular.
“A very queer sound though,” said Fearmax, “very queer.” The sound had tailed away into a series of dim tremulous reverberations which knocked and banged their way into the distance. It was like the banging noise of an engine, knocking one truck against another, into infinity. In each new cavern the echo was further distorted and further magnified as it was passed on. What could it be?
They stood still for a moment to listen, forming a clear tableau in the light, and reflected upside down in the black waters of the stream, Fearmax and Campion sharing the last two stepping-stones; Virginia’s hand clasped in Graecen’s; the Truman couple sitting idly on a rock, side by side.
“I bet if you rolled a cannon-ball down these corridors you’d get exactly the same sound effect,” said Fearmax at last. Campion made an irritable gesture to silence him. “Listen,” he said. They listened fervently until Mrs. Truman felt a desire to giggle—the same desire she always had during the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day. Fearmax looked so comical with his jowl stuck out, and Campion standing on one leg.… Graecen pressed Virginia’s arm softly, comfortingly, and cursed himself as he felt her own warm answering pressure. Under his breath he whispered every opprobrious epithet he could lay his mind to. It was becoming a conspiracy—his own weakness allied with circumstances—to entrap him. He was sliding invisibly downhill in ever-increasing speeds of idiotic quixotry until … until …
They stood listening to rubbing of water at their feet, the noise of a concrete-mixer, and the harsh spotted sound of water leaking into a cistern somewhere.
The guide, for some reason best known to himself, was silent. His face looked grave and preoccupied. He was picking his teeth with a match-stick. He did not venture to comment on the sound or try to explain it. When at last he caught Mrs. Truman’s eye he merely raised his eyebrows, threw up his hands and crossed himself. Campion began to wonder whether they should go on. “Let’s go back,” he said, “I’ve had enough of this place. And when do we get to the antiquities anyway?” When indeed.
At last they felt able to relax the torment of listening for the sound. It had not repeated itself, that anguished and reverberating trump. Fearmax shook himself. “It might have been anything,” he said. “Rocks dropping into a cavern full of water. I’ve heard the same sort of noise in the workings of a disused mine.” As a matter of fact he had never been any where near a disused mine, but he felt a vague desire to raise morale by producing a mundane explanation of the sound.
They gathered themselves together and were about to debate whether they should proceed or not when the guide, who had been sitting apart resting, rose and clapped his hands for silence. “Forward,” he called again and set off towards yet another tunnel. Virginia showed some disinclination to follow, but Fearmax called out: “Oh, come along there. It can’t be much farther.” It was not.
Ducking at last through a sort of postern, they followed the guide into what at first seemed to them to be a Gothic cathedral. It was very nearly as large—a tremendous and grandiose cavern, through the roof of which shone the pure rays of the sun, falling like a spotlight through the dense atmosphere and the dust. Peering up, they saw once more a piece of the sky, a sight which banished their depression instantly.
“Now for the sights,” said Graecen, glad that the publicity of light made any further advances to Virginia impossible. “What is that? I think I see the cella.”
As they advanced through the white circle of light blazing upon the stone floor they heard once more the roar of the minotaur—but this time more remote, less unearthly. They stopped to listen to it as it banged its way into silence, however. “Seems farther away,” said Fearmax with evident relief. The guide took absolutely no notice of the sound but led the way across the great nave, his footsteps echoing like those of a verger in the crypt of St. Paul’s. High above, in the indistinguishable blue of buttress shapes, they heard the flap and chitter of bats.
Sure enough in one corner Graecen traced out a cella, and there at last, undercut into the rock, lay the chambers Axelos had described. Each was about the size of a chapel, and had four or five tunnels leading off it into the labyrinth. The first two were empty; in the third was a massively-carved plinth, fallen on its side and much rubbed. The fourth, then, must contain the bas-relief and the statues. Graecen was so excited that he completely forgot Virginia. This latter chapel also admitted light through a chink in the roof.
The guide was demonstrating the phenomenon of the echo. He threw his head back and shouted. It was as if a hand had suddenly begun to smack down over a laughing mouth; the echo was tossed backwards and forwards from the coigns and nooks in the great curved roof until it died slowly into a whisper, almost a tone above its original. Silence fell. Beyond the swirling shaft of pollen-like light, down which (as in Bible illustrations) the Holy Ghost might be expected to descend, lay the serene unclouded blue eye of the sky. They all tested the echo to their hearts’ content. Graecen heard them as he was searching for his little chemical bottle. Their talk and laughter provided him with just the cover he needed for his experiment. He stepped forward into the little chapel and found his attention arrested by the perfect detachment and purity of the statues, by the coarse yet sensitive stone-cutting of the basrelief. No, his experience had not been at fault. These were certainly not fakes: they were too weathered and lichened by damp: too self-consciously primitive and innocent to deceive. Typology was satisfied no less than experience. He stood with his mouth open and let his eyes delight in the ponderous archaic forms, their grace as they stood, big with the weight of their material stone: and yet somehow aerial like boulders learning to fly. One was a winged man, his arms raised, his belly depressed in the effort of flight. One was a boy. Campion was standing beside him smoking furiously and walking from point to point to vary the view; or reaching down to see at close quarters how the cutting had been achieved. “What do you think?” said Graecen. It came upon him suddenly that it would be an insult to mess about with chemicals here, in such a place. After all, if one was not sure the onus was on oneself. He was an expert and he was prepared to stake his whole experience upon the issue. “What do I think?” said Campion absently. “It’s grand work, isn’t it?” Graecen’s fingers pressed the rubber stopper of the bottle that Firbank had given him. Damn old Firbank with his beastly chemical tests. He turned aside and walked out into the main cavern once more. The place was honeycombed with tunnels. He once more began to trace out the cella and examine the workmanship. Where now was the inscription?
The rest of the party were standing in the side-chapel examining the statues when Graecen found them. Inscriptions? The guide would show him immediately. There was a united groan when it was found that these would involve the negotiation of a further tunnel. The guide spread his hands resignedly. What could he do?
It was a very narrow tunnel, whose walls were of a soft shaley conglomerate. Graecen realized how easily it crumbled when he put out a hand to steady himself. It did not seem safe at all. However, they managed to enter the small cave in which there stood a battered inscription in marble. Graecen saw with a thrill that it was part hieroglyph and part character. The air was so close, however, in the confined space that they could not stay long.
It was on the return journey that it happened; they had entered one of the larger of the side-chapels and were about to enter a tunnel in single file when with the noise of wet linen flapping on a line a large partridge got up from a dark corner and sailed through the roof like a comet. At once the guide began to show interest; there was possibly a nest. If so it was skilfully hidden, for though they combed the ledges in the direction from which it had come they co
uld see no trace of a nest. Not content with this exploration, the guide hoisted himself upon a boulder and began to climb the wall. It was particularly silly and dangerous, as Campion had pointed out in acid tones, since if he broke his leg they would never find their way out. To Fearmax’s remonstration the guide, however, only turned a grinning face and waved one hand, imploring patience and confidence in his powers. He disappeared across one of the ledges and. returned into the light to show them his find—eggs; as he did so the projecting rock on which he was standing began to move.
Graecen, who was standing farther back just inside the entrance of the greater cavern saw the whole thing happen like a slow-motion film of some great disaster; for a moment the guide stood, his hands raised in a desperate effort to get his balance. The huge stone, dislodged, appeared to move with the slowness of a safe door; the ring of lights below opened like a flower as the panic-stricken shout went up. “Look out!” He heard Miss Dombey’s voice above all the rest, and caught a sudden flash of Fearmax’s face in a beam of torch-light. The concussion, too, seemed drawn out into slow-motion sound. It was tremendous. Stone on stone, it rang out like a terrific hammer-blow on the stagnant air. From the side of the cavern issued a hail of complementary boulders and a great stream of mud and debris. The echo seemed to split his ear-drums. In the space of a few seconds he found himself lying on his back upon a moving tide of mud and stones which had completely blocked up the entrance to the cavern and cut him off from the rest of the party. The noise was still going on, though whether it was merely the echo or its original he could not tell. Somewhere in the very core of the noise he thought he heard, for a second, human voices shouting, but he could not be sure. Now from all quarters of the labyrinth there came noises of boulders falling, walls peeling and caving in, sympathetic disturbances set in motion by this great fall, whose vibration still crammed the air with eddies of sound. Graecen found he had cut his wrist; a stone had hit him on the back of the head; apart from this he was all right—but for how long? Small stones were falling from the roof of the cavern. What had happened to the others? In that confined space they had been trapped and beaten to death or suffocated. Or perhaps through those side-corridors.…
The guide had not escaped. His body lay under a great stone in ten feet of debris; but the others had had time to dodge out of the way of the oncoming avalanche into the safety (or what seemed then to be the safety) of the undercut entrances of tunnels. Up these vents they were propelled by the air squeezed out of the cavern, jammed like cartridges in the muzzle of a gun. The Truman couple found themselves gasping in a narrow tunnel with a hail of sticks and stones pressing upon them; Fearmax found himself lying on the ground while Miss Dombey moaned and wrung her hands over him. The ends of his trousers were soaked. He was lying in a large stagnant puddle while the noise reverberated behind them. He had received a blow on the shoulders which had knocked all the wind out of his body. He moaned and sat up, feeling for his torch. Meanwhile Campion struggled up what seemed an endless flight of stairs, half supporting the figure of Virginia, who had fainted. The full proportions of the disaster had not had time to weigh on them; they were still full of the surprise and horror of the incident, and had none of them dared to think that they had suddenly been buried alive, lost, entombed in the labyrinth which they had set off to explore that morning.
Meanwhile Graecen was standing, not more than twenty feet away from the burrows where they crawled, turning over the cold coins in his pocket and mumbling incoherent blasphemies in a hysterical voice. To him at least the full magnitude of the tragedy was apparent, since he alone seemed to have any chance of finding his way out. Now as he sat on a rock and rubbed his face clean with his handkerchief his mind, never very mercuric, seemed to be working at lightning speed trying to memorize the twists and turns of the paths by which they had come. It was hopeless. Somewhere they had forded a river, a long time ago. He looked at his watch and found that it had stopped. What was to be done? Graecen felt the blood freeze in his veins as he got slowly to his feet and walked round the cavern examining the numerous tunnels which offered themselves to his frightened eyes like so many gaping mouths eager to swallow him.
He chose the most familiar and set off down it memorizing every detail as he did so. A phrase of Hogarth’s came unexpectedly into his mind and comforted him. “After all, Dickie,” Hogarth had said, “if you think of death as a continuation of a process that has been going on for a considerable time it is not so serious a business as it really seems.”
Was it not? Dying in bed was one thing; dying while your mother stood by you to smooth the pillows and hold your hand. But to die, slowly suffocating in this dense black pit—that was quite another. And what of the others? He stopped suddenly. He should have shouted, should have tried to reach them. Yet this had been so obviously an impossibility. He raised his head and shouted their names, scared at the sound of the echo that he raised. Then he listened dully to the icy silence that descended over the network of chambers and tunnels. His own footsteps sounded tiny and remote, like the scratching of a mole a thousand miles under the world. Once indeed he thought he heard the thin wailing of a voice which might have belonged to Miss Dombey, but when he stopped to listen only silence seeped coldly out of the labyrinth.
It was like a nightmare—one of those nightmares in which one feels trapped: but it ended suddenly when he happened upon a narrow strip of daylight, and found that he had blundered out on to the back of Cefalû, in full sight of the house he had come to die in. Graecen was trembling all over at the narrowness of his escape. He sat on a rock drinking in mouthfuls of the blue air, tasting the scent of the thyme, watching the blue race of the sea beneath the house. Never had the world seemed so desirable a thing. Rising at last on unsteady legs he made his way towards the house.
Axelos was sitting in the middle of the lawn, in the shadow of a plane tree, counting out money on to the green baize top of a folding card-table. Before him stood his servants waiting to receive their wages. He looked up as Graecen lurched across the gravel to the lawn, his sense of urgency giving him a drunkard’s stagger.
“Dickie,” said Axelos, recognizing him and getting up. “How very nice.”
Graecen stood foolishly agape, one hand pressed to his racing heart, trying to speak. His friend advanced slowly across the lawn, with his familiar waddle. He was wearing pyjamas with a green and blue striping and an old straw hat. A cigar smouldered slowly away under his nose.
“An accident,” Graecen said at last, sinking into a chair. “They’re all trapped in the labyrinth.”
He gave as accurate an account of the accident as was possible under the circumstances. Axelos set out with two of the servants for the mouth of the labyrinth, leaving him there, seated in the low deck-chair, his head tilted back, his eyes closed. He was waiting for his heart to slow down—or stop altogether. The palpitations had made him feel cold and sick. As soon as his suitcase came down he would give himself an injection. Now he emptied his mind, drew his breath deeply and regularly, and watched the dappled shadow of the sunlight, playing through the plane tree, flicker upon his eyelids. Kestrels were skimming and alighting upon the great limestone cone of Cefalû. He could hear their thin cries suddenly cut off—as if by scissors—when they dived. From the direction of the house came voices arguing—a familiar sound; they were spreading the news of the accident. Graecen sighed and stirred. He had forgotten to tell them that Baird was safe. The only one besides himself. His thoughts turned once more to the little party smothered in rock and earth in that burst antrum of stone; stuck like air-bubbles in glass beyond hope of rescue. He got up slowly and walked up the steps into the house.
The Enemy’s Grave
His farewells completed Baird squared his shoulders under the old service pack and walked down the rocky road; he felt that they were standing silently watching him as he skirted the cherry grove, crossed the little circle of cultivation, and disappeared up the familiar cliff-path. He did not turn round a
nd wave good-bye—the preoccupation with his mission was complete, creating a solitude around himself. His heart, however, was beating rather fast and he felt a trifle out of breath as he progressed along the ridge of the mountain with a taciturn and dogged persistence. Oddly enough it was not the familiar associations of danger and sudden death that came back to him as he entered the familiar scene of so many actions; rather was it the cumulative memories of days dedicated to boredom, to apathy, to waiting. Here, by this very myrtle bush, they had waited, the Abbot and he, for the mules to catch up; they had been arranging an ambush, and were doubtful of its success. He remembered with utter clarity the face of the Abbot as he shredded up the packet of cigarettes and moistened the tobacco into a chewable quid—for smoking had been forbidden during an operation. He remembered every word of that last conversation. They had discussed the illness of Koax and his possible death. A little higher up where the hill-side jutted he would smell the familiar scent of almonds and oranges from the little grove at the crown of Penthali.
He crossed a rock-torrent by the much-worn stone bridge, over which all their supplies had come; the water still gnashed as it leaped through the sluice and into the stony bed it had carved for itself the other side. At the last corner before he turned west he repeated the familiar action which had become a habit-pattern with them all—stopping for ten minutes under the oak tree to see if anyone followed him along the path, and then lighting a cigarette. He could hear the thin beat of his heart in the crisp mountain air—a small tedious noise as of knitting needles at work in his breast.
The Dark Labyrinth Page 16