The Dark Labyrinth (33 page)

“I say,” said Baird suddenly. “I found out some funny things about old Axelos. Is there a peasant girl here called Katina?”

“Yes,” said Graecen. “The servant.”

“He's married to her.”

“Rubbish,” said Graecen. “How could he?”

“The Abbot married them himself. Then another thing. This City in the Rock business.”

“It's gone, by the way. Fallen in.”

“The Abbot says it was quite genuine. They found it one day when they were looking for a smuggler. Then, he says Axelos gave him money and told him he should say that they built the damn thing, carved it and all that. What do you make of all that?”

Graecen was thinking how nearly he had proposed to Virginia. His scalp tingled at the nearness of his escape. He must get away before anything silly like that happened to him. “Eh?” he said, aware that Baird was staring at him.

“What do you make of
that
?” repeated Baird.

“I knew it was genuine the minute I saw it,” said Graecen loftily; “I have no idea why he should pretend it isn't.”

“Let's ask him,” said Baird, all curiosity; but Graecen got up and took a stroll up and down the lawn. “You know,” he said, his natural tact revolting at the idea of prying into other people's secrets, “I think it would be better if we didn't really. He's a very old friend of mine indeed. And I wouldn't like to embarrass and hurt him. Besides the whole place has disappeared now. Let's leave it.”

Axelos came out from the house in his straw hat and pyjamas. “It doesn't work,” he said, sitting down beside them. “What a country.”

“What a country,” echoed Graecen, his eyes fixed on the moving sea, and the dazzle of white buildings on the cape.

The three of them sat quite still and felt the sunlight soaking into them. Birds were singing in the planes. The summer had begun.

“I'm only sorry about the minotaur,” said Graecen sleepily, as Katina came out towards them in her bright clothes bearing a flask of wine and some glasses. “You could have spared me that Silenus, at my age.”

But Axelos silently contented himself by pouring out the dark sweet wine into the glasses and sighing.

Author's Note

N
ot only the characters depicted in this story, but the events also, are fictitious. Even the island of Crete may rest assured that no libellous motives suggested its choice as a
locale
. The following fragment from
The Islands of the Aegean
, by the Rev. Henry Fanshawe Tozer, M.A., F.R.G.S., Oxford University Press, 1875, must be held responsible for suggesting the story:

“Our object now was to recross the island on the Eastern side of Mount Ida to the town of Megalocastron, or Candia, on the northern coast; but before doing so we determined to make a
detour
to visit a place which is known in all the neighbouring district by the name of ‘The Labyrinth'
. Our host, Captain George, undertook to be our guide; and accordingly the next morning we started in his company and, fording the stream close under the Acropolis of Gortyna, ascended the hills towards the north-west and in an hour's time reached the place which bears the name. It is entered by an aperture of no great size in the mountain-side where the rocks are of clayey limestone, forming horizontal layers; and inside we found what looks almost like a flat roof, while chambers and passages run off from the entrance in various directions. The appearance at first sight is that of artificial construction, but more probably it is entirely natural, though some persons think it has served for a quarry. We were furnished each with a taper and descended by a passage, on both sides of which the fallen stones had been piled up; the roof above us varied from four to sixteen feet in height. Winding about, we came to an upright stone, the work of a modern Ariadne, set there to show the way, for at intervals other passages branched off from the main one, and anyone who entered without a light would be hopelessly lost. Captain George described to us how for three years during the late war (1867-1869) the Christian inhabitants of the neighbouring villages, to the number of 500, and he among them, had lived there, as their predecessors had done during the former insurrection, to escape the Turks, who had burned their homes and carried off their flocks and herds, and all other property they could lay hands on. He pointed out to us the places where the stones were piled up so as to form chambers, each of which was occupied by a family. When I inquired, half in joke, where their refectory was, he replied that far, far within there was a large and lofty central hall, capable of holding 500 people together, to which they gave the name, and that there they used to meet from time to time and dance, sing and enjoy themselves. They had brought a provision of bread to eat and oil for light; and water they obtained from a spring in the innermost part of the cavern, which appears to be the only one, for we saw no stalactites or dripping water in other parts. After wandering in different directions for half an hour, during which time we had not penetrated into one-tenth of its ramifications, we returned to the open air.

“Notwithstanding the modern name, and the opinion of some scholars in favour of this place, there is no reason for supposing that this was the original Cretan labyrinth. The place was in all probability a mythical conception, like the stories attached to it, though like many other Greek legends, it may have been attached to some geographical feature, such as a cavern; but all Greek writers localize the story at Cnossus, besides which the coins of that city bear as their emblem an idealized representation of the Labyrinth.

“Ascending the hillside, we crossed a plateau, the ground beneath which is mined by the Labyrinth, and at one point Captain George pointed out to us the position of the refectory underground. Higher up we obtained a view of the snowy mountains of Crete together, comprising the Dictean Mountains, Ida, Kedros, and the White Mountains.”

A Biography of Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a novelist, poet, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet, his acclaimed series of four novels set before and during World War II in Alexandria, Egypt. Durrell's work was widely praised, with his Quartet winning the greatest accolades for its rich style and bold use of multiple perspectives. Upon the Quartet's completion,
Life
called it “the most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time.”

Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Durrell was an avid and dedicated writer from an early age. He studied in Darjeeling before his parents sent him to England at the age of eleven for his formal education. When he failed to pass his entrance examinations at Cambridge University, Durrell committed himself to becoming an established writer. He published his first book of poetry in 1931 when he was just nineteen years old, and later worked as a jazz pianist to help fund his passion for writing.

Determined to escape England, which he found dreary, Durrell convinced his widowed mother, siblings, and first wife, Nancy Isobel Myers, to move to the Greek island of Corfu in 1935. The island lifestyle reminded him of the India of his childhood. That same year, Durrell published his first novel,
Pied Piper of Lovers.
He also read Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
and, impressed by the notorious novel, he wrote an admiring letter to Miller. Miller responded in kind, and their correspondence and friendship would continue for forty-five years. Miller's advice and work heavily influenced Durrell's provocative third novel,
The Black Book
(1938), which was published in Paris. Though it was Durrell's first book of note,
The Black Book
was considered mildly pornographic and thus didn't appear in print in Britain until 1973.

In 1940, Durrell and his wife had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. The following year, as World War II escalated and Greece fell to the Nazis, Durrell and his family left Corfu for work in Athens, Kalamata (also in Greece), then Alexandria, Egypt. His relationship with Nancy was strained by the time they reached Egypt, and they separated in 1942. During the war, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassy. He also wrote
Prospero's Cell,
a guide to Corfu, while living in Egypt in 1945.

Durrell met Yvette Cohen in Alexandria, and the couple married in 1947. They had a daughter, Sappho Jane, in 1951, and separated in 1955. Durrell published
White Eagles Over Serbia
in 1957, alongside the celebrated memoir
Bitter Lemons of Cyprus
(1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize,
and Justine
(1957), the first novel of the Alexandria Quartet Capitalizing on the overwhelming success
of Justine,
Durrell went on to publish the next three novels in the series—
Balthazar
(1958),
Mountolive
(1958), and
Clea
(1960)—in quick succession. Upon the series' completion, poet Kenneth Rexroth hailed it as “a tour de force of multiple-aspect narrative.”

Durrell married again in 1961 to Claude-Marie Vincendon, who died of cancer in 1967. His fourth and final marriage was in 1973 to Ghislaine de Boysson, which ended in divorce in 1979.

After a life spent in varied locales, Durrell settled in Sommières, France, where he wrote the Revolt of Aphrodite series as well as the Avignon Quintet. The first book in the Quintet,
Monsieur
(1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize while
Constance
(1982), the third novel, was nominated for the Booker Prize.

Durrell died in 1990 at his home in Sommières.

This photograph of Lawrence Durrell aboard his boat, the
Van Norden,
is taken from a negative discovered among his papers. The vessel is named after a character in Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer.
(Photograph held in the British Library's modern manuscripts collection.)

One of Nancy Durrell's photographs from the 1930s. Pictured here is the
Caique,
which they used to travel around the waters of Corfu. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin, property of the Gerald Durrell Estate.)