The Dark Labyrinth

The Roof of the World

Truman dragged his wife clear of the chute of rocks and earth, dusted her down with many a violent oath, and suffered her to cling to his arm as they stood side by side, and watched the corridor fill up until the pile of dirt had completely sealed it off. The sound and fury of the fall was gradually sealed off too until at last they stood, as if in a padded cell, hearing the concussions and rumblings upon the other side continuing. Sound had become soft and distended — so that what they knew to be boulders falling beyond the wall seemed to be merely the noises off of some celestial pillow-fight. He was still panting from the effort of having to drag her away from the fall to a point of safety. “Listen to it,” she said shakily turning away and sitting down upon a rock. Truman listened grimly, his hand groping in his pockets to feel the comforting bulge of the lunch-carton and cold edges of the little torch.

They were standing in a corridor illuminated by the faint greyish light from a slit in the roof of a nearby cavern. The blocked mouth of the tunnel from which they had retreated still trembled under the landslip, whose echoes ran away in all directions, repeating themselves from all points of the compass. Truman listened carefully, hoping perhaps that some information might be gained from the noise. It still rang in his head, but soft and muffled, like a pulse; like the tapping of a finger upon the bone of the frontal sinus, or upon the mastoid. “Well?” said his wife anxiously, watching him. He sighed and turned to her. “I’m afraid they’ve caught it,” he said darkly. “Not a sound from them.”

He sat down beside her and mopped his forehead. Then he examined his cigarette-case, and the crumpled pouch in which he carried the coarse tobacco for his pipe. “Well,” he said, “there’s a smoke or two left.” He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. They smoked together in silence for a time, their faces turned upwards to watch the dense beam of dust-motes turning and twirling in the light from above. Truman was thinking frantically as he smoked, his jaw set at the angle necessary to register absolute determination. His wife had produced a pocket comb and was slowly combing her hair. She had recovered a good deal of her composure now. “What are you thinking?” she asked in a whisper; the dank gloom reminded her of a church and made her whisper. “What are you thinking?” she repeated again in a normal tone. Truman was thinking in a confused sort of way that there must be some exit, some opening of the corridors which would enable them to regain the daylight. He looked at her quietly and reflectively for a moment, saying nothing. She went on combing her hair, and then with a little smile got up and retreated to the farther end of the tunnel for a moment. He watched her as she squatted down, gathering up her skirts. “You’ve got a smut on your nose,” he said absently. He was trying to calculate how far they had come into the labyrinth, but the task was a hopeless one. In the darkness a journey of a few moments felt like a journey of hours — or even days. It seemed useless to speculate, to plan. They could only wander on and on until they ran out of food. His wife came back to him, brushing a cobweb from her mouth. She perched herself once more upon the rock beside him and said: “What do you think of the chances, eh?” The question was more rhetorical than anything else, yet Truman felt impelled to answer it. He coughed and stamped out his cigarette on the cold stone. He cocked his head and listened for a second as a small tributary series of bangs told him of landslips in other corners of the labyrinth, before speaking. “It’s like this,” he said at last forcefully, placing the forefinger of one hand in the palm of the other in a gesture of determination. “We have enough food for perhaps a day and a half if we’re careful. We should be able to walk about twenty miles before we have to pack up. Now this place can’t be more than a couple of miles long at the most. I think with a bit of luck we have a very good chance indeed.” It was a masterstroke, and she smiled her pleasure at the proposition, putting her hand in his arm and giving it a squeeze. “Let’s just go on,” he said, pleased at his own reorientation of a desperate situation in terms of probable success. “As if we were walking … in Devonshire.” This was an even happier illustration, for they had once been lost for a day on the moors above Tyre Basin, and had enjoyed the memory of that hazardous adventure ever since. They stood up and faced one another for a few moments while she smiled lovingly and brushed some of the dust from his lapels. “Now”, he said, “take it easy. Every hour we’ll rest for fifteen minutes. We won’t eat until three o’clock today. Got it?” While Elsie Truman was grateful for his masterly presentation of the fiction, and glad that their plan of action had been so intelligently developed, she could not resist a little banter — if only to let him know that his optimism had not completely taken her in.

“One important thing,” she said gravely, “is the old minotaur. You forget that.” Truman gave her a pat on the behind as she turned. “Well, let’s deal with that when we meet it,” he said equably.

They crossed the lighted area of the cave hand in hand and began the long walk which was, unknown to themselves, going to lead them out on to the Roof of the World. Slowly they bored their way from vault to vault and chamber to chamber, buoying themselves up with private jokes against that evergrowing feeling of unreality which comes to those who spend too long in the darkness. Yet the routine of their march, by its very strictness, seemed to have a purpose, a meaning. It was difficult going, for Truman used the torch as sparingly as possible, and the surfaces were widely different in structure, the faults and abruptions of the rock-face frequent. From time to time their hopes were raised as they passed abruptly into some dimly-lit cavern in which the shafts of sunlight, distilled and diluted in that green air, turned languidly in spirals or shuddered into activity as they passed and disturbed them.

Elsie Truman was heartily grateful for her stout shoes and the coat. She talked a good deal, partly because the sound of her own voice was something she could not do without, partly to show her husband that her morale could answer every demand made upon it. He, for his part, hardly bothered to answer her, except with an occasional grunt. His whole energy was concentrated upon the journey itself, his mind, so to speak, was always ahead of them forearmed against possible pitfalls and disappointments, against dangers and disasters which might at any step overcome them. And wherever the track seemed wide enough he came up beside his wife and took her arm, unconsciously re-creating those thousand and one walks they had taken together, in comfortable familiarity, arm in arm; contributing to her own optimism and courage a sense of plausible continuity, a hope for the future. In his own mind, however, Truman was re-living those exciting films of his childhood which always ended with a chase across the underground cellars of Paris, or across the crooked roof-tops of London. They constituted the only poetry he had ever known, and now, as they toiled from cavern to cavern, from gallery to crumbling gallery, he could not help but imagine himself as a character in The Prisoner of Zenda or Toilers of the Sea, battling his way up towards the daylight. His mind was absolutely without fear, because he was convinced that his time had not yet come — as convinced as he had been during the bombardments of the late war. And this conviction seemed to place a merciful veil between himself and the reality in which he had become involved. Somewhere, quite near, was the real world where flowers blossomed and trees grew; there were human beings like himself obsessed with small problems, small responsibilities. Truman was quite determined not to lose his hold upon this world which, it seemed to him, he had hardly had time to get to know. So deliberate was this certainty that his wife impelled herself to test it from time to time with a remark like, “I’ve had enough of this. Why don’t we sit down a bit?” or “What about lunch? Don’t want me to die of hunger, do you?” He treated these reservations upon an agreed attitude as meaningless interruptions to a continuity of purpose he was determined to maintain. And regarding him, seeing his set and resolute features, and the way his neck had drawn itself into his body — the watchful, condensed approach of a boxer to an opponent — she was at once revived and restored in her own feminine resolution.

They stumbled and crawled through a network of caves and galleries filled with this delusive half-light which reminded her, as she said, of the Aquarium of Brighton; in which she half expected to see the vast and gloomy forms of fishes dawdling through the crannies and corridors around them. In the centre of one of them, scooped clear in the cold stone, lay what at first seemed to be a miniature lake — its black surface untouched by reflections or movements. She gave a little cry of interest and pleasure and advanced towards it with the intention of washing her face in it: but as she stopped, taking off her hat, her husband caught her arm. He was staring keenly down at the polished surface. They were aware of a faint sour smell, like that of slightly burnt milk. “Wash your face in that, would you?” said Truman softly, more to himself than to her, and, reaching down, picked up a twig off the floor. “Look.” He dipped the twig into the liquid and drew it out, letting the bitumen run sluggishly from its end, smoking like black sealing-wax. “Well I never,” she said, “it’s tar. How did it get down here?” It provided her husband with an excuse for a homily upon feminine irresponsibility and the evils thereof. He did not spare her, and she listened to him, outwardly very meek, but inwardly smiling in fond amusement at this oftrepeated performance. His concern was flattering, even if his opinion of her intelligence was not.

They took a turning now, and followed a slowly-descending gallery to a network of caves in which, as in a sea-shell, they could hear the distorted sighing of the sea. “It sounds so near,” she kept repeating painfully, “so very near”; but the rock offered no egress except in one place where they could stare down through a narrow trapdoor of stone, upon a patch of darkness broken from time to time by a small iridescence, a trembling as of sequins in a dark ballroom. “The sea,” he said, with longing suddenly breaking through his reserve. “If we could only reach it.” They sat for a time and smoked there. From time to time he stared down through that narrow shaft at the water coiling and uncoiling, and seemed to be trying to work out some way of climbing down to it. His wife watched him, blowing the cigarette-smoke through her nostrils. “I bet”, she said, “the others found a way down.” Truman looked at her in silence. “Into the sea?” he said at last with polite irony. “Why not?” she said. She had not been thinking of the sea at all, but since he chose to offer her a ground for argument, she saw no reason why she should not take the opportunity to talk a little. “I can just see Campion nipping into a tunnel like that and out into the sea in a moment.” Campion had become associated in both their minds with the qualities of deftness and cunning. Her husband put out his cigarette and said: “Lot of use that would be if he can’t swim a stroke.” He recalled a conversation with Campion about the length of time a man could stay afloat if he fell overboard. Campion confessed then that he was unable to swim. Mrs. Truman looked crushed, though the same affectionate amusement stirred in her as she heard the broad unconcern, the male superiority of his tones. She was getting really hungry now, but he would not let her eat, saying that it was not time.

The tunnels led them upward now, through crumbling arches and over pits and crannies, away from the soft walled-off sound of the sea bursting against the cliffs. They hated to leave the sound, so closely did it match those other sounds of the everyday world from which they seemed now to have been parted for centuries. A vague sense of gloom and unreality had descended upon them. They came at last to yet another nexus of corridors — a “terminus”, as she called it. While she sat upon a stone and rubbed her ankles her husband set off methodically to examine the various tunnels for clues by which they might guide themselves back towards the world. Three of them became, after a few yards, narrow and impassable. The fourth looked more interesting. It mounted steeply, and in the yellow beam of his torch, revealed a floor of limestone. There seemed to be traces of brown earth about, and this itself absorbed him, since so far they had passed through solid rock for the greatest part of the way. He walked on a few paces when his eyes fell upon some twigs lying near his feet. He picked them up. They were dry and brown. It was as if they had fallen from a head of a birch broom. Truman blew his nose carefully and methodically, switching off his torch as he did so. A vague excitement possessed him. Ten paces farther on the corridor narrowed considerably; here he stopped and examined the wall-face with intentness and concentration. His patience was rewarded at last. He gave a grunt of interest and picked from the wall a few small tufts of hair, measuring their height from the ground by spanning the distance, like a builder, finger to thumb. His wife was sitting waiting for him. She had found a pencil in her handbag and was scribbling on the rock. Truman sat down beside her and fell to studying the tuft of hair in the light which filtered in through the roof of the cavern. Absorbed in her game she did not look up. She was busy drawing hearts with arrows transfixing them, over each of which she wrote, laboriously and carefully, her own name and that of her husband. “I shall do this all the way along,” she said. “In case other people come this way.” He was sitting quite still, whistling softly through his teeth, abstractedly examining the clue from the tunnel, his mind working on possible solutions. “Well,” he said at last, “it can’t be a bear. Unless bears have browny-white hair. It’s pretty big though.”

His wife turned round to see what he was doing, and as she did so the cavernous voice of the minotaur sounded, this time close at hand. Its resonance in that narrow place was deafening. It was accompanied by a rushing noise, as of dead leaves stirring in the empty caverns before a whirlwind. Dust began to trickle down from the balconies of stone. They jumped to their feet in alarm, turning their heads this way and that, responding to the tremendous echoes which multiplied the sound and flung it back at them from different corners of the place. “Christ,” said Truman. “There it is.” His eyes were wide and shining now, and she could see that he was having difficulty in cóntinuing to convert his fear into resolution. The echoes passed them, banging away down the tunnels. He leaned forward and said quickly: “Give me the knife, will you?” He was glad to feel the smooth handle of his old bowieknife in his hand. Taking off his coat, he draped it over his forearm in the manner of a bullfighter, explaining as he did so: “Its burrow can’t be far from the top, Elsie. Maybe if we find it, it will show us the way out.” Too fearful to answer him she stood with her back to the cold stone and waited as he made his preparations. “Now,” he said at last, pausing to listen to the vague explosions of sound sinking away behind them into the stone network. “Now then. Quietly, see? Follow me.” She heard the small sound of the blade as it clicked out of its case. He took up his torch and moved towards the tunnel quickly but with circumspection.

Their feet seemed to make a prodigious noise among the stones. They traversed a dozen low-roofed corridors without mishap. Nothing stirred around them in that damp air save the sound of their own progression, small, perfunctory, meaningless as the scratching of moles under the earth. Truman was nursing his failing torch, using it only in small spells, in order to see the way ahead. They would form a picture, so to speak, of every stage, snap off the light and accomplish it in darkness. His hand contracted lovingly about the blade of his knife, as he thanked God for its long sharp blade. Pen-knives had always been a mania with him, and he never travelled without one. The present bowie had been a present from a G.I. in the late war, a marvellous strong piece of workmanship, which he had re-ground himself before they left England. Now as he went forward to meet whatever reality chose to offer him in the way of chimeras — or obstructions more substantial — he felt the warm currents of his own life flowing through his bull-neck and powerful shoulders.

Some way along, the corridors suddenly became damp and clammy. They noticed that their floors had become of stone no longer, but of earth and rubble. The air exuded damp which mingled with the cold sweat on their foreheads. The last march had been upwards, along corridors leaning up at an angle, cutting diagonally through the honeycomb of caves and galleries. Hope mounted in them as they saw, here and there, the roots of trees struggling through the walls, their white frilly roots showing like clusters of worms. Truman felt his own breathing become thinner, easier, as if fresh air were already coming down to meet them, to buoy up their failing lungs.

They stumbled at last into a small natural amphitheatre in the rock and were about to cross it and enter the corridor beyond when they were startled by the blundering crashing sound of some heavy body in the darkness before them. A gust of sweetish breath seemed to swirl into the little cabin of rock and earth. Truman recoiled and switched off his torch. They stood hand in hand, trembling and waiting for the minotaur to reveal itself; and as they stood, their uneasy silence in that half-light was broken by a coarse grunting and slavering noise which reminded them irresistibly of a horse in its stall. Their eyes had already become accustomed to the dark monotonous light, and fixing them upon the tunnel ahead, they saw something move in the shadows behind a coign of stone — a parapet shaped not unlike a byre. Truman took ten paces forward very swiftly and silently, and pressed himself to the rock. Then, turning on his torch, he craned his head round the corner to stare speechless into the terrified eyes of a cow. For an age he continued to stand thus, his body pressed to the wall and his heart contracted into an icy lump in his breast. As he stood, letting the breath come slowly back into his body, his mind ranged over every available expletive in the English language which might express some of his relief — a small part of that overwhelming, overmastering relief that had bereft him of word or action.

Seeing him standing there, and imagining perhaps that the sight of whatever lay behind the rock had been so hideous as to unman him, his wife picked up a boulder and rushed to his side; she too found herself staring into the blood-red eyes of a cow. The stone fell from her hands. She could feel his body trembling with laughter now, and as she opened her mouth to speak, the cow turned tail and, letting fall an alarmed pat of excrement, bolted down the tunnel. “Quick,” they both shouted incoherently, and ran, screaming with laughter, in pursuit. They blundered down a series of arches, composed apparently of the roots of trees and then suddenly, absurdly, into the light of day.

Between laughter and tears they sat down and covered their eyes from the blazing radiance of the light, sitting thus for at least two minutes, during which through their parted fingers they caught glimpses of the world of familiar shapes; a sloping hill-side studded with swart green grey olives. They had emerged from between the roots of a huge plane tree. Somewhere water gushed. Lifting their hands from their eyes by small degrees they stared into the blue Aegean sky, and let it stare back at them, uncompromisingly, utterly blue. Trees were stirring faintly, as if in an awakened interest. Bees hung, slowly frying, in the flowers. The Roof of the World had revealed itself to them, in all its pristine novelty, as if by a razor-stroke. No extravagance of gesture or exclamation could do justice to its beauty. Elsie Truman kicked off her shoes and stretched her toes, lying back slowly in the grass. “It’s like being reborn,” she told herself as she lay, unspeaking and felt tears fill her eyes, and run slowly over her cheeks. Her husband, too, lay down and let his head rest upon his forearm; the coarse inhalations of his cigarette seemed delicious beyond expression. Life, which had seemed to offer them so little beyond a death by hunger in the labyrinth, suddenly crowded upon them both, not only with the blessings of movement and feeling, but also with those hundreds of memories and plans which they had not allowed to occupy their minds while their realization had seem remote. His lips moved silently from time to time, but he was not praying. He was talking to himself.

“And now,” she said, “let’s eat.”

“Eat away,” he said, lying motionless, feeling the unshaven flesh of his cheek between finger and thumb. She rose slowly, still weighed down by that marvellous convalescent sense of weariness and unpacked the by-now-battered sandwiches, peeling the damp paper from them with distaste. “Here,” she said, “eat something.” Her husband sat up and stretched, taking the bread from her fingers as he did so. “All the best,” he said, taking his first bite, and looking round him to trace the sound of running water which had been running like a musical accompaniment to his thoughts, along a parallel track. “It’s cold, you know,” she said, feeling the air upon her lips and throat as she sat down beside him. “I wonder where we are?”

The landscape in which they found themselves was startlingly wild and craggy, thought Truman, as he looked about him between mouthfuls of food. At each of the four points of the compass he could see the necks and shoulders of tree-denuded mountains butting up into the afternoon light. Their summits, topped with snow, caught the glittering rays of lights and flashed them back at one another — a thousand diamond-flashes against the grey bony twilight which was reaching up towards them from the lower slopes. Yet despite the gauntness of the further prospect they found themselves upon the declining edge of a bowl — perhaps a quarter of a mile round — in which fruit, trees, flowers, everything seemed to flourish. Faintly in their nostrils they smelt the cool rotten smell of vegetation which hangs about a snowline; yet the little bowl could only boast of one clump of firs upon its farthest edge. It was clear too that the backdrop of mountains was in some way divided from this small formalized territory, which fell away so steeply into space.

“Those mountains are a long way off,” muttered Truman in a puzzled voice. “And we don’t seem to be very high. I wonder where the sea is?”

They continued to eat with deliberation and enjoyment, hardly speaking, and when they had done Truman buried their scraps methodically in the ground under the plane tree.

“I wouldn’t,” said Truman slowly, still looking round him. “I wouldn’t be too optimistic, Elsie. We. can just as easily starve on a mountain as in a cave, you know. There’s no road I can see and no houses.”

She dusted the crumbs from her dress and said: “There’s bound to be a farm about somewhere. Besides, look,” her eyes had lighted upon a rock whose surface looked smooth and polished — as if with resin. “What?” said her husband. She got up and went over to it. “It’s a ‘greaser’,” she said, recovering the old Derbyshire word, with its memories of holidays spent on farms during her childhood. “That means some sheep or goats.”

They walked down into the little valley, hand in hand, looking about them curiously. The prospect looked, with all its cultivation, like the park of some great house — the result of deliberate labour and intention rather than the casual handiwork of Nature. A stream blundered over gravel. Birds sang. A walnut tree nodded its pronged branches in the wind. Farther down beyond the last bluff of rock, puffs of colour stood out against the grey, hills — peach-blossom. Warm, verdant, and unself-conscious the meadows seemed to have been tended and mown, lying in the shadow of the sun-burnt mountains. They were filled with a gradually growing sense of incredulity and amazement, comparing the richness of the amphitheatre in which they stood with the brooding hulks of stone which raised themselves in the air at every point. Their feet trod grass. Yet everywhere they turned their eyes picked up the formidable crests of mountains plunged in snow. “I can’t make it out,” he said slowly, “it seems queer somehow. It’s so warm.” His wife walked silently beside him tasting the purity of the air as it entered her lungs and was expelled from them. The mountains looked grandiose and beautiful rather than menacing. She was full of that light-headedness which comes upon all who walk upon the mountains of Greece, and feel the scent of thyme mingling with the pure cold air. Immense pearl-covered clouds hung in one corner of the sky, like canopies of silk. The gestures and manoeuvres they had set out to rehearse had degenerated into this immobile stillness. Occasionally one of them would throw a damp splash of shadow on the mountain-side. “It’s wonderful,” she said, unpreoccupied by the problems which he was turning over in his mind. “Simply wonderful.”

A tree knelt above the rocky pool into which the mountain water spun and curdled — a tree white to the lips with cherries. Small birds frisked in the branches. “Did you say we’d starve?” she asked mockingly, reaching up and pulling the ripe cherries from the stalk. “Come,” he said, and locking his arms about her thighs, lifted her towards the ripest clusters. He stood, his head against her thighs, and absently heard the words of an old song running in the back of his mind: “If you were the only girl in the world.” It stretched so far back into the past that he could no longer identify the incidents and localities connected with it. His wife wriggled as she tried to reach higher and higher. “Steady on,” he said, and as she leaned down to stop his lips with the cold fruit, “Where do you think you are? The Garden of Eden?”

They sat side by side on the bank and bathed their feet in the icy water, eating cherries and smoking one of his last cigarettes in alternate puffs. The shadows of the pine trees were growing longer. “You know”, he said, “we shouldn’t hang about much longer. It’s just as well to find out where we are before taking it easy.” She stood up and dusted her dress. Her feet were still cold from the icy water of the torrent, and she skippered up and down to stretch them and start the circulation. “Well?” she said, “after the minotaur I can stand anything.” He was wrapping up his raincoat once more and the thought seemed to strike him with some force. “You don’t think that was it?” he said incredulously. “What else?” she asked. Truman shook his head and puzzled over the problem for a moment; it was as if he were unwilling to admit that they had domesticated, so to speak, the minotaur; domesticated their terrors in the shape of a brown cow whose mooing could be picked up and amplified in the bowels of the earth. “I don’t know,” he said at last, and rising, joined her.

“I think we should get up those trees,” he said, “and look down the slope. Maybe we are on the hill above that village — what’s it called? Cefalû? Yes, Cefalû.”

They crossed several small dry river-beds where winter torrents would run, and plunged into a dense grove of myrtles. As they mounted, behind a neighbouring hill, they caught sight of some sheep grazing. “You see,” she said, “I told you. There must be a farm hereabouts.” But the terrain offered no signs of paths or other cultivation beyond the well-kept appearance of its trees and woodland. It was as they took the final gradient and mounted the hillock towards the clump of pines, that they saw, below them, a stranger. He was sitting at the edge of the bank, where the stream suddenly grew deep and turbid, carving for itself small pools and marshes in the limestone. In his hand was a fishing-rod. His back rested against the bole of an olive tree. His head was covered by a bright handkerchief, and he appeared to be asleep. “At last,” said Truman with relief. “Our troubles are over,” and cupping his hands he shouted: “Hullo there!” as they started to descend towards the solitary figure. “Better try repeating that in Greek,” said his wife ironically. “He doesn’t seem to hear.” Indeed, the stranger still sat with his back to them, unheeding. It was only when Truman shouted a second time that he turned, and they saw that it was a woman. She stood up, dropping the fishing-rod, and stood, as if uncertain whether to fly or to await their approach. Truman and his wife marched happily down the slope, arm in arm, and, noting her attitude, felt called upon to justify their presence in the valley by shouting: “We’re lost.” But the woman gave no sign beyond the half-suppressed temptation to fly which was obvious in her attitude. She was dressed in brown trousers, and an old patched woollen sweater. A scarf was tied under her chin. As they approached her, Elsie said in an undertone: “Doesn’t seem much good. She doesn’t understand. Doesn’t look Greek though somehow, does she?”

It was when they got much closer that they saw she was an old woman, with a slight boyish figure, and a short-cropped head of silver hair. Two brown eyes, set in her puckered face, and surrounded by a network of fine crowsfoot wrinkles, regarded them with distrust and a certain alarm. She stood and faced them across the stream, one hand reaching nervously behind her to touch the olive-bole, as if to take confidence from the feel of it. Elsie was reminded of a child shyly holding the edge of its mother’s skirt. She nudged her husband. “Go on. Talk,” she said. A look of comical indecision came over Mr. Truman’s face. He concluded from the silence of the old woman that she had not understood their remarks in English. Of Greek he had none. However, squaring himself and opening his mouth he said haltingly: “English. We English. Ingleses,” pointing first to himself and then to his wife.

The woman smiled now for the first time — a smile of relief mingled with enlightenment. “Thank God,” she said in a voice which was harsh, but which carried in it some quality of distinction and self-possession that reminded Truman at once of Graecen. “Thank God. I thought you were from Evan — you’d come to take me back.” She relaxed all of a sudden, and bending forward the better to accommodate her body to the laughter, laughed aloud, patting her thighs with her hands. “You speak English, then?” said Truman, rather nettled at having been forced to debase his tongue with pidgin. “Well,” she said, taking up the fishing-rod, and drawing the handle of a wicker pannier over her arm, “I am American actually. My name is Adams, Ruth Adams.” She walked downstream for twenty paces in order to ford it upon a series of stepping-stones, talking as she did so. “I haven’t seen a stranger in years,” she said, with the small harshness of tone, but with the same note of authoritative self-possession that made her voice pleasing and musical to listen to. “You must forgive me. When you don’t see strangers you forget how to be polite to them.” She crossed the stream and walked down the bank towards them. Elsie Truman saw that in place of shoes she was wearing a number of pairs of khaki stockings, with the soles padded in some way. At close range she looked even older; and yet in some curious way the proportions of her face retained an almost childish smoothness of contour. Yet it was deeply wrinkled. She stood before them now in her brown corduroy trousers much patched, and stretched out a shy hand as they introduced themselves. Her wrists were small and finely formed, but her finger-nails were unkept and broken, and her palm was as hard to the touch as that of a ploughman. “Ruth Adams,” she murmured to each in turn. “You must”, she said, “have come up through the labyrinth.” The word restored to Truman the sense of urgency and danger which the last few minutes in this landscape had all but dispelled. “Yes,” he said quickly, “and there are several others down there. We want to get help to them as quickly as possible.” The stranger turned and walked slowly beside them, saying: “You must be tired out. Come along with me and we’ll see if I can’t fix you something to eat.” Elsie Truman walked beside with a feeling that something was wrong; she had shown no trace of hearing her husband’s words about the others. “There are,” she said carefully, with an almost academic correctness (she felt that perhaps the difference in American and English idiom might have led to a misunderstanding), “there are no less than four or five people lost in those caves.” The stranger looked quickly up at her for a second, smiling, and then said: “I’m sorry. I did hear your husband. But there’s nothing we can do, you see. There’s no other way up here except through the labyrinth.”

“No other way!” Truman tripped himself — by the very force of his own exclamation it seemed — recovered and halted to confront her. “What did you say?”

“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.”

“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?”

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 cupped 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?”

Indeed a strangely disquieting sense of familiarity had begun to grow in Elsie Truman’s mind. It was as if the conversation had outlined hitherto undescribed blocks of experience lying within her. It was as if a part of herself had been an untenanted house, with all its huge furniture covered in dust-cloths of accepted prejudice, vague and shapeless. “I don’t know,” she said, afraid of making a fool of herself. “I feel uncomfortable and foolish.”

“It is not important”, said the other, “to anyone but yourself. I thought I would try to explain why it is that I never sleep. And also why it is that I shan’t die until I really want to — until I’ve really explored this world to the full. Until I’m used up and, so to speak, emptied out of this world into the next.”

Elsie Truman stared fixedly at a chip in the masonry and said: “I would like to know more about it. I feel I know what you mean, but I can’t express myself. How do you … did you … find it? I mean the feeling?”

For a long time the woman said nothing, she arched her brows as if she were trying to locate within herself the sources of the spring. At last she said: “I don’t know.” She closed her eyes. “There’s no positive way. It’s rather a negative business — becoming still enough inside to be receptive to it. You can’t seek for it, but if you prepare for it it will come and settle on you like an Emperor moth. In fact, not ‘seek and ye shall find’ as the Bible says, but ‘prepare and ye shall be found’. Oh, I can’t hope to make it any clearer.”

“There was a man on the ship,” said Elsie Truman slowly. “A painter; he is lost too, by the way, in the labyrinth. He painted my portrait, and said a lot of things which sounded as if they were the same sort of feeling. I thought I was a bit in love with him. I went to his cabin one night and we slept together: he was furious afterwards because he said it was a betrayal of this thing. I thought it was silly, myself, but he maintained that it was not love I was looking for but that other thing he had got. And that by letting him make love to me, he was simply producing it in an inferior way. There was some truth in it for I soon found out that I did not love him. But he had a queer kind of life in him, and I was interested in that: he said I had duped myself by pretending it was love, and he had duped me by letting me think it was. Altogether it was very confusing and I felt miserable.”

The woman said nothing. Elsie Truman suddenly felt as if she had committed a solecism. “I simply felt”, she said lamely, “that he was talking about the same sort of thing as you are.”

“Yes,” said the stranger. “Obviously.”

“He was furious with himself and me.”

“It was silly of him on one plane.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“He was right about it on another.”

Elsie Truman stood up and dusted herself down. “Well, which plane is one to be on?” she said peevishly. “One is in life after all, which is full of people and things and situations. There isn’t room for everything, you know.”

“Perhaps not.”

She did not turn her face away from the snows. “Perhaps not,” she repeated softly. Yet looking at that smooth childish face with its wrinkles, and the deep repose of the expression, Mrs. Truman felt a sense of inadequacy and panic: all the limitations of urban man in the shape of nails, clothes, teeth, seemed to press upon her as she stood in the shadow of the porch to say good night. As she climbed into bed a strange sense of anger and joy took possession of her. “It would take a helicopter exactly an hour to get us out of here,” she repeated to herself triumphantly, though from where she expected the helicopter to come, she did not specify. She lay awake for a long time, however, thinking of the silent figure outside the porch, in the light of the moon, awake.

The adventure did not in any sense become real to them until they had been several weeks on the plateau. It was as if the shock had been delayed. They still carried in them, so to speak, the taste of their former lives: the only thing which constituted a term of reference to this elegaic existence among the ferns and the fruit trees on the little plateau that Godfrey had called Eden, and which Truman himself had called “The Roof of the Bloody World”. It was some time before Elsie Truman felt, with a sense of panic mixed with pleasure, that there was indeed no further continuity between all she had left and all she had inherited. How remote the past seemed: memories of a smoky house and garden in England, memories of holidays at Clacton, rides by bus or helicopter in the damp highways of the capital. Even the heavy battledress with its familiar shaggy cut of shoulder and bust (as a transport driver in the late war, she had been used enough to uniform) seemed now to be a new costume, a new treatment of her personality in terms of … what precisely? She did not know. Something vaguely connected with growth, development. Helping to lift out the crude wooden frames of the beehives, or to select salads from grass by the river, or to select edible mushrooms from the plot below the pine-wood, she would stop for a moment and try to bring the realization more clearly into focus, wiping her brown face upon her arm where the fine golden hair testified to the heat of the summer which was upon them. It was as if her nature, the inner elements of her nature, were composing themselves kaleidoscopically into some new pattern.

Meanwhile, around the three of them the aerial landscape drew in neat formal shapes: supple strokes of cypress and pine, greeny grey parasols of olive. In the smaller life of the house things were also taking shape according to a plan. Three people eat more than one. Truman’s enjoyment at expending his energy and skill upon the crude little olive-press was something new to him. It was as if the work came from new centres of feeling. Happiness had been something positive before. It had become something negative now, but lucid, far more satisfactory. It made him more comprehensible to himself. Yet his energy was repaid only in olive oil from the frugal crop of last year.

Ruth Adams was obviously glad to have them with her, to temper her solitude. “I am so glad”, she said, “that when I die you will inherit it all. I like to think of the house being kept up, and things still going on. Don’t look like that. I have a feeling you won’t go away. You will pass through the restlessness and irritation you feel now. Evan and John were different. They were worldly in a weak way, they had nothing to learn: or perhaps I should say everything. They went off into the labyrinth to find the way back. They wanted me to go with them but it was too late by then. I often wonder whether they got through or not. It seems unlikely. And yet from time to time people and things get through from the other side. Once a donkey came loaded with geological equipment. Now you. But you are exactly right for this place.” They were sitting together before the fire after the midday meal. “Most people,” she said, warming to her favourite topic, and yet showing by the diffidence of her smile that she was at any moment ready to drop it in favour of anything more interesting to them. “Most people’s characters are like badly done-up paper parcels. And the outlines of the good personality, or the balanced one, are as simple and geometric as a problem from Euclid. I wonder why the world goes out of its way to drug itself — to retain the confusion? Of course, it’s easy to pronounce judgment when one is out of the world as we are: but surely things like pleasure and work should be dithyrambic? Not narcotics designed to retain the turbid confused state of one’s inner man. The things you were telling me, Mr. Truman, about the growth of the state as a concept, and the beginning of social conscience — all this is only a detour, a long and vicious detour through the material amenities towards a happiness that will continue to elude men just so long as they continue to elude themselves and each other. Look at those faces.” She pointed to where the firelight danced upon the charcoal portraits of her vanished companions. “Godfrey’s face is the only one which retains any traces of a noble human animal. His despair and suffering were of a fine order. There was literally nothing else for him to do save to fall to his death — indeed in one sense his false step was deliberate, as deliberate as his olive-press and his bath. He. belonged neither to the world outside, where he thought he preferred to be, nor even to this little heaven. There have been great spirits of discontent like him before. But as for the others, John, my husband, and Evan.” She waved her small hand idly towards them. “Look at their features. They had to forfeit their place and start again at a lower level of growth. Like snakes and ladders. Accident brought them here, and all their energies went in trying to get back. Of course, in a sense they did belong outside. I feel released by their departure. I suppose there is a special world for them and people like them — it must resemble one of those mock-Tudor road-houses you used to see on the Great West Road. But in a sense Godfrey is always with me. He taught me what to recognize in myself: I learned from him that death doesn’t exist except in the imagination. Thus I was hardly sad when his discontent carried him through to the other side — like stepping into a mirror. I was sorry on another plane altogether. I missed his tea-time conversation: his flag still flutters from the rock — but I showed you. Ah, but I fear you think I’m talking nonsense again.”

Very often it sounded like absolute nonsense; yet in the course of time the very boundaries of language themselves seemed to fall away, so that the meaning of what she said seemed to render up overtones and distinctions more clear to either than had seemed possible. It was as if they were being initiated into an entirely new vocabulary.

One day while they were standing, paddling in the little basin where the icy water from the trout-stream curled about their ankles and whispered in the cresses they picked, Elsie Truman asked curiously: “Ruth, is there nothing you miss from your old life?”

“Everything. If I were taken back tomorrow by force — if Evan came for me, I would go without a murmur. But that’s because I really know how to live anywhere now. I think I’m a person now, not a fog. Perhaps my influence would be helpful, beneficent. But when you say ‘miss’ you really mean ‘long for’. I don’t long for anything — not even for lunch, which is going to be late unless we hurry …”

“It’s odd”, she said on another occasion, “that we live between the two accidents which might alter our lives completely. If we broke the burning-glass one day, for example, where should we be? If a helicopter such as you describe, Mr. Truman, were to come and settle on the meadow: we should have to choose between going and staying. Either accident is possible. Death or Life? Life or Death?”

“Think of them all,” said Truman. “Cities, manganese mines, governments, clubs. India, China, Russia — makes you wonder what it all means. Cotton, iron, steel … where does it all lead?”

“All parts of an unco-ordinated pattern. Man as a person looking for what I think I’ve found. The search throws up bright bits of gold and information which catch his attention and prevent him from looking deeper into himself. Yes, a staggering spectacle of a genus, engaged in a wasteful way of living. And yet every activity leading back like an arrow on the map to central metaphysical problems of the self. The wars of factories, of diplomats, of concepts — all hopelessly entangled in the opposites that created them.”

“Could you teach them any different?” Truman spoke piously, enviously, as if there were nothing he himself might wish to do more than to alter humanity.

“I would not try: any more than I try to alter you.”

“What would you do then?”

“Nothing. Pay my rent like everyone else.”

Truman grunted with disappointment. He had hoped for something more simple: a formula, a maxim. “I bet”, he said, “you’d find a little hill covered with gorse and olive-trees and heather. And build yourself a house and some beehives. And keep a goat.”

“Yes,” said his wife. “And wait for us to come along, with new ways of making hot bath water and milking the goat. I bet you would fetch up here just the same. It suits you.”

“It suits you too, but you haven’t fully realized it yet.”

“Well,” said Truman, “I never was one for grumbling. And the life is remarkably healthy in spite of the cooking.”

He made his way slowly from the house whistling softly and crossed the meadow. “I have no more idea of what everything is all about,” he said to himself gravely in an undertone. “I’m fogged. That’s what it is. Completely fogged.” Yet he felt remarkably clear-headed in that blue air. “Fogged,” he insisted from time to time as he milked the goat and wandered off for a walk. “Bloody well fogged.”

He stopped upon the bluff and stared across the vast bluish plains towards the distant hills tremulous in mist. “Someone must come out one of these days,” he thought, “to prune those orchards. I wonder whether we could signal.” He put the thought carefully aside as if it were something fragile and breakable. In the kitchen Elsie had already lit the wood fires. She was about to start cooking some wood-pigeons for lunch. “Hunger,” said Truman trenchantly, “that’s all I feel. Hunger. You keep your philosophy, my girl, for after meals.”

His wife was smelling her hands carefully, inhaling the faintly musty odour of the dead birds. “You go away,” she said. “It won’t be ready for hours yet.”

He stood irresolutely and watched her moving about. “Are you happy?” he said at last with peculiar diffidence, standing on one leg and folding his arms across his chest. She looked at him smiling.

“I never stop to consider,” she said. “I mean, really contented,” he continued.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Are you?” “I’m fogged,” he said, exploring his teeth with his tongue. “I’m absolutely fogged. I don’t know what I feel about anything any more. I feel as light as a feather. I feel absolutely fogged.” It gave him a peculiar sense of relief to confess himself; and at the same time he was irritated not to be able to define his feelings more clearly.

He left her and went for a walk by the stream, with his hands thrust deeply into the. pockets of his battledress. He had intended to carry this feeling of confusion with him and to try and clear it up, but his hand closed about his beloved knife, and soon he was whittling at a branch of walnut, whistling through his teeth as he worked. He presumed that this must be happiness. He raised his eyes and looked across the valley. Below them he saw birds making their short elliptical flights, busy upon errands whose purpose was like his own, but more mysterious, more beautiful. An almost damnable sense of the mysterious nature of the world took possession of him. He would have smoked if he had had any cigarettes left. Instead he went, still whistling, and mended the rough parapet of the little trout pool into which the stream overflowed, working slowly like a beaver. Looking down into the wrinkling water he saw the sunlight freckling the smooth pebbles of the stream’s bottom; it reminded him of the freckles upon his wife’s nose. She had become swarthy and more beautiful, with brown face and arms always bare to the sunlight. He had changed also: was bearded now. He regarded his image in the flowing waters with curiosity and humorous indulgence. His eyes stared back at him shining with strange watery lights. “It’s rum”, he told himself, “for an ordinary bloke like you. Very rum.”

The season moved towards its centre — towards autumn and the pressing of the little grape yield: towards winter with its rude terrors of wind from Tartary. Their function became more absolutely defined by the work demanded by the season. Yet there was no sense of calendar time left in either of them. They gathered the barley and the wild corn; they gathered the burst vessels of fig from the trees, full of the cloying honeyed richness of summer. Day after day the great fireplace had to be stacked with logs against the cold. There was work to be done. Ruth Adams, gentler, less communicative now, shared these labours with them, working in a quiet enjoyment of the time which as yet neither knew properly how to share.

The small orchard gave them fruit. The old woman taught them how to make wine from flowers. From the little marshy hollow below the cliffs — the last point at which the stream bent suddenly in upon itself and rushed through a sill of rock — they gathered the bulbs of swamp orchis for their tea; or nearer the house camomile, sage, vervain. It seemed as if very little were lacking — though both wine and bread were of a crude quality as yet.

Autumn came and with it the first rain — millions of silver needles bounding from the rocks and concavities around them. They worked on in a peasant frenzy of determination not to let the rain steal their barley, or to let the old woman find them inferior to herself in the tasks of existence. They were learning. Elsie Truman’s hands had become hard and calloused from the work, but her face and her carriage had been improved. She was serener, yet more alive. “You’re like a gipsy,” her husband told her, as she lay in bed beside him. Her body had filled out, become firm and round. “I almost feel as if I were going to have a child,” she told him. “Doesn’t seem likely somehow or possible at my age, does it?” She did not add any reflections upon her private conviction that the child, when it came, would be Campion’s. That could wait for futurity — the futurity of comprehension and tranquillity when, by the terms of self-knowledge, such small offences against defined loyalties could be added up and probably forgiven. The child, too, in a sense, still belonged to the old world of troubled relationship; had as yet no place in this quiet house.

Tenderly he put his arms about her shoulders and laid his bearded face beside hers on the pillow. Their love too had suffered a metamorphosis, for he regarded her now with something like admiration and surprise. She had changed; was less approachable, more withdrawn into herself — and by consequence infinitely more desirable than the shadowy companion whose journey through the labyrinth he had made easier by his jokes and his courage. “A savage,” he said sleepily, thinking of the easy naturalness of her demeanour, her warmth: as if passion itself were the last point of communication between them. As if in everything else she had become possessed by herself, gradually excluding him — her dependency on him — for something richer, deeper, more intimate.

For days now their world was circumscribed by clouds which closed in on them like wet washing, grey, green, blue, according to the angle of the sunlight shining through them. They walked every afternoon to the bluff and sat watching the landscape below shine up in sudden rifts: watching the wind tear aside a corner of the veil and show them the pristine sky.

Softly “whewing” they heard the storks passing overhead all night long, moving towards Egypt, their necks and wings straining towards the warmth. The torrents were swollen, too, and the crying of the birds mingled with the musical enunciation of water on stone, on wood, water on moss and lichen.

There was nothing, in the deepest and most vital sense, to be said; no summing-up, no judgment to be passed upon what had begun to travel through them — time in its pure state — as water will run noiselessly through fingers trailed from a boat. Even the snow, when it came, seemed part of the order and style of the little universe which hemmed them in. Its soft drifts mounted against the walls of the house they lived in, sparkling with a thousand dewy points in the sunlight. It climbed up the sides of the byres which Truman had built for the sheep and the cow. These animals too had found their way up through the labyrinth. Happiness for them also had become an idle proposition.

Dawns came now with an immensity and terror that staggered them: the first raw burst of colour in the east spreading upon the snow-capped mountains around them, like blood swelling from wounds. As the season deepened they could hear the roar of avalanches where the higher snow melted upon the desolate face of stone. The wind strummed fitfully in the pines. They might have been in Asia.

When spring came they took to walking on fine evenings to Ibex Point and sitting there upon the mossy network of stones which seemed almost to be the remains of some old fortress. Below them Godfrey’s pennant still hovered in the breeze. Beyond, the valleys curved away towards the final foothill, fitfully blue and peaceful. It seemed to them at such times that they had reached the meridian of human knowledge. The luminous landscape echoed, in its tranquillity, the thought. If there was no way back there was at least no way forward: the discovery of themselves was itself complete enough to prevent them wanting, hoping, striving. “I feel,” said Truman, struggling with the inadequacies of his vocabularly. “I feel O.C. Universe,” and his wife lying down with her hands behind her head, smiled up her content and happiness as she chewed a grass-stalk. She had realized that the roof of the world did not really exist, except in their own imaginations!