The Dark Labyrinth

by Lawrence Durrell

  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.”

  “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, in
curious, 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?”

  It did. (Lumme, thought Truman, stifling a yawn, have I struggled so far and so hard, first with life and then with the labyrinth, in order to have nonsense talked to me on a plateau in Crete from which there is no escape?) His wife, however, seemed interested. Her cheeks became pink as always when she was excited, and she leaned forward, saying: “Do go on.”

  The stranger sat before the fire cross-legged and looked before her, stretching out a small hand from time to time to catch the warmth. “Godfrey said that one could even have a physical effect on the world around you. Now, here’s a funny thing. I began to notice since he left that the axe was not wearing out. You can’t imagine how important it was to us in the early days of house-building; we used it with great care. Even then it had to be ground once every so long. Godfrey did that. But since he left it has remained sharp and bright as ever; and you can see that I’ve done quite a lot of cutting with it. Just put your finger to it. Sharp, isn’t it?” She smiled up at Elsie Truman and said: “You are looking distressed. Please don’t. I’m not mad.”

  Mrs. Truman disclaimed the impeachment. She would have liked to hear more, but the stranger rose abruptly and said she would light them to their room. Picking from the corner a spill made of twisted reeds dipped in resin she led them to a small room with two beds in it. The window was boarded up, but the walls were whitewashed after the fashion of the living-room. It was bitterly cold. Elsie Truman began to cry. Her husband made no attempt to comfort her; he lay beside her staring at the ceiling and repeating in a perplexed voice: “You can say what you like, it’s a rum go. No doubt about it.” And fatigue triumphing at last over perplexity, he fell asleep, his hands under his armpits for warmth. His wife lay there for a long time listening to the graduations of the silence which came, it seemed, from the heart of some huge sea-shell; broken now and then by small noises, as of a mouse stirring, or as of ice-crystals being crushed beneath small feet. She could feel the presence of those icy peaks outside the window, standing up nude in the light of the moon, buried in their own snowy preoccupation. It was as if she had lost her way in one of her own dreams; yet underneath her growing sense of terror lay the feeling that perhaps it was only the unfamiliarity of this world that seemed inimical.

  In the middle of the night, in order to relieve the demands of Nature, she picked her way by memory to the large living-room with the fireplace in it. The moon was high now and its blinding dazzle played upon the silk screens covering the windows; a faint breath of wind moved them from time to time. She was about to open the front door when she saw, to her surprise, the silhouette of the woman, thrown by the moonlight upon the nearest screen; she was seated upon a three-legged stool, facing the panorama of mountains, her body wrapped in a rug. Her head was cocked up at an angle, as if she had heard a sound, and yet her whole attitude was one of repose. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Come out if you wish.’

  Elsie Truman felt rather like a small child caught on an escapade. “I just came down for a second,” she said, lifting the latch and stepping out on to the porch.

  The stranger did not turn round or say any more. So rapt was her expression that it seemed for a moment as if she might be praying. Elsie Truman went about her business, for the night was cold, and she was in no mood to hang about in that icy air. On her way back to the porch she heard the other say: “Elsie.” She did not turn but still looked upwards, her eyes fixed on the snows. “Yes,” said Mrs. Truman.

  “I suppose”, said the stranger, “you’d think me mad if I told you that I never sleep.” She emphasized the words with slow pleasure. “I spend every night here and feel perfectly refreshed. Here, sit beside me for a moment and I’ll tell you something.”

  “It’s cold,” protested Elsie Truman.

  “Just for a moment.” She obeyed, perching herself uncomfortably on the balcony wall. “Now then,” said the stranger, her eyes fixed upon the great range of snowy mountains whose ragged fissures glittered black and baleful in the moon’s light. “Feel my pulse. Normal, eh? Feel how warm my hands are, and my feet. If you were a doctor you would mutter respectful things about my arterial system.” She still spoke in a dreamy, abstracted voice as if she were employing the greater part of her faculties elsewhere. “Sleep”, she said indistinctly, “was invented for the tired. People are tired because their style of body or mind is wrong, just as athletes get tired if their position is a cramping one.” Elsie Truman blew on her cup
ped hands impatiently. She had once taken a biology course at the London Polytechnic, and nothing of the kind had been suggested. “There is no more need for sleep than there is for death,” said the woman slowly. Then she added with more emphasis: “I wish I could tell you what happened to me. When Godfrey had gone, between tea-time and dinner, without warning, with no premonition—a very odd, almost disagreeable sensation, but somehow one that I recognized inside as being useful. How can I put it? On a dark night you try to find the keyhole in the front door. You cannot. That is what our lives are normally like. Then at last your key suddenly slides into the groove and you are master of your house again. A half-second of relief and power. And another thing. This experience I felt was not an extraordinary one. It came out of ordinary faculties, through repose. I had never been still enough before. Here I got as still as a needle. Elsie, are you listening?”

  “Yes.” She was, all of a sudden, listening with great attention. It was as yet obscure and muddled in her mind, but something about the phrasing struck her with a sense of familiarity; reminding her of the occasion upon which Campion had revealed the existence of a beauty in her quite independent of her prettiness.

  “I remembered how life was before,” pursued the old lady quietly. “I was outside everything in a certain way. Now I participate with everything. I feel joined to everything in a new kind of way. Before I lived by moral precepts—for morality is an attempt to unite ourselves to people. Now I don’t feel the need for religion, or faith in the old sense. In my own mind, inside (not as something I think or feel, but as something I am) inside there I no longer prohibit and select. I include. It’s the purely scientific meaning of the word ‘love’. Does it sound rubbish? Do you understand a word I say?”