The Dark Labyrinth (20 page)

The others had bundled out of the cars and were busy putting on coats at the suggestion by Fearmax that the corridors of the labyrinth might be extremely chilly. The guide himself had put on a tattered overcoat, and had produced a hurricane lantern which he now proceeded to light.

“I haven't any light,” said Campion, and a chorus of voices answered him saying that their combined torches would be light enough to see by; the guide smiled amiably as he got to his feet. “Now,” he said, with the air of one about to conduct a delicate experiment, “forward please to follow.”

At first they hesitated, so narrow and uninviting was the entrance—a single corridor of orange-red rock which took a steep turn after five paces and passed out of sight. “It is little bigger than an Egyptian rock-tomb,” said Graecen fretfully, as he turned up the collar of his coat and felt for his torch. The guide turned back and beckoned. “Plenty light inside,” he shouted encouragingly and disappeared. They followed him one by one. “Not too fast,” said Campion, as they entered the stone cave and heard the church bell of Cefalû become suddenly very distant, and then at last smother out in the subterranean roar and splash of a spring hammering on rock.

They were standing in another corridor, but longer than the first, and ending in a narrow causeway over a spring. “Dear me,” said Graecen. It was impossible that so small a spring should produce this thunderous echo; his own voice as he spoke sounded distorted and magnified out of all recognition Campion was pushing the others from behind. “Forward,” said the guide, swinging his lantern and advancing, while Virginia Dale timidly held on to the corner of his overcoat. They shuffled in single file along the stony path, ducked through another corridor, and crossed the middle-sized antechamber.

Mrs. Truman had taken her husband's arm. She gave it excited little tugs, not to signal anything in particular, but simply to register her pleasure and excitement. “What a place,” said Truman, turning his torch-beam this way and that. Fearmax was peering about him with his eyes screwed up, and with an uneasy expression upon his face.

“Sounds like a river somewhere,” said Virginia Dale, and the guide who had been lacing up his shoes gave her a glance of approbation and repeated his cry of “Forward”. He started to walk into the darkness beyond the dazzle of torch-light, swinging before him the little yellow puddle of light cast by the hurricane lamp. They followed him slowly, picking their way through the dimness over mounds of rubble and huge boulders which seemed, in the gloom, to bear the trace of human working. The fragile beam of Truman's torch seemed quite inadequate to pierce the almost solid blackness of the place; it showed merely a number of ledges covered thickly with the droppings of bats, while, when he turned it upward towards the roof, it simply thinned away and evaporated, rendering nothing. “This way to the two and sixes,” said his wife behind him in the shadow and gave a little tug at the tail of his coat.

Fearmax was busily examining a heap of stone and rubble from some ancient landslide. Campion stood by him striking matches and peering. Between them they lifted one or two of the stones and turned them over. “No, I don't think they are worked,” Campion was saying when the other interrupted him with a cry: “Look out!” A large scorpion stared unwinking into the beam of torchlight, its tail set as if by a spring, to strike. Fearmax laughed ruefully and they made their way farther along in pursuit of the others. “Lucky I didn't sit on it,” said Campion.

After negotiating the two small chambers, the whole party passed in single file down a rock-gallery which opened off from between them. “I think we've gone far enough,” said Virginia Dale. “Don't you? It's so eerie.” Despite the coldness of the air Graecen was sweating. He turned off his torch and mopped his forehead. The poor girl was afraid. He didn't blame her. Truman, however, whistled a few bars of “The Merry Widow Waltz”, and in the darkness—the cold eddy-less air of the cavern—it had a consoling human ring.

The gallery led them down at an ever-steepening angle until they stood before another natural door in the rock. The ladies found their feet beginning to hurt in their high-heeled shoes; all except for Mrs. Truman, whose rope soles were ideal for these harsh variations of surface and direction. Once assembled, the guide counted them as if they had been chickens. “Now please together,” he said earnestly, “and careful too.” Elsie Truman gave an excited tug at her husband's arm and he replied by pinching her arm reassuringly; in the little booth of light from the torches he saw her face with its young, friendly lines turned towards the short tunnel which was to lead them yet farther into the labyrinth.

“Another cave,” said Graecen.

“Underground river,” said the guide with a ridiculously proprietary air. It was obvious from his manner that the Jannadis Brothers were responsible for all these wonders. He placed the tail of his coat once more in Virginia's reluctant hand, and ordered them all to follow suit. Lantern in hand, he led his shuffling crocodile through the tunnel and into a cavern with a discernible flue in which filtered the vague semblance of light from the outside world; the reflections were strong enough for them to mark the track of the stream which passed through the farther end of the cavern with the noise of a miniature electric train. It flowed, greenish black, without a ripple except where it once more disappeared by vaulting clear through a piece of natural fan-vaulting. Truman knelt down beside it but his torch could not pierce the dark water. This time the interest and excitement of the party was not quite so loudly expressed. A silence had fallen on them; a sense of fatigue and suffocation at being so long out of the air. Yet when Graecen looked at his watch he found that they had spent barely half an hour in the labyrinth. And the air they breathed was cold and pure.

“Can we cross it?” said Mrs. Truman.

“Yes, please,” said the guide with alacrity, leading them to an overhanging bluff from which they could see a line of stepping-stones dotting the shining surface of the water. Despite its speed Fearmax noticed that the water did not break upon these stones but flowed round them, black and even as silk. He dabbled his fingers in the stream and withdrew them almost at once, exclaiming against the coolness of it. “What is odd,” he said to Campion, “is the rubbing noise; because the bed is scooped clean out of rock, and yet one seems to hear gravel being churned down it or something.” They stared down for a moment on to that placid surface, while the guide demonstrated how easy a crossing was for the benefit of Mr. Truman, whose native caution had suggested that the stepping-stones might sink. The guide, however, walked with an exaggerated sure-footedness, and appeared to satisfy the rest of them that the journey involved no great hazard. Virginia Dale, after a number of false starts and hesitations, obeyed Graecen's promptings and crossed, holding tight to his hand. They followed, one by one.

It was when Fearmax was mid-way across that they heard it for the first time: a long-drawn muffled roar which rose above the noise of the stream and echoed through the wilderness of galleries which surrounded them. The guide waved his lantern excitedly and laughed. “Good heavens,” said Fearmax, standing on the last stone, “what on earth was that?” They stood still, listening to the sound as it slowly died away in the distance.

“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?