"That said, Ibn-Hakam took his leave. Allaby tried to think that the Moor was mad and that that absurd labyrinth of his was a symbol, a clear testament to his madness. Then he reflected that the notion of madness squared with the extravagant house and the extravagant tale, but not with the lively impression that the man Ibn-Hakam himself gave. Perhaps such tales were indigenous to the sandy wastes of Egypt, perhaps such oddities like the dragons in Pliny, were attributable less to an individual person than to a whole culture.... In London, Allaby pored through back issues of the Times; he found that such a rebellion had in fact occurred, as had the subsequent defeat of al-Bokhari and his vizier, a man with a reputation as a coward.
"The moment the brickmasons were done, Ibn-Hakam set up house-keeping in the center of his labyrinth.
He was never seen again by the townspeople; sometimes Allaby feared that Sa'id had already gotten to him and killed him. At night, the wind would bring us the sound of the lion's roaring, and the sheep in the pen would huddle together in ancestral fear.
"Ships from Eastern ports would often anchor in our little bay here, bound for Cardiff or Bristol. The slave would come down from the labyrinth (which at that time, I recall, was not pink but bright crimson) and exchange African words with the crews; he seemed to be looking out for the vizier's ghost among the men. Everyone knew that these ships carried contraband, and if they were carrying outlawed ivories or liquors, why not the ghosts of dead men?
"Three years after the house was built, the Rose of Sharon anchored at the foot of the cliffs. I was not one of those who saw the ship, so it's altogether possible that the image I have of her is influenced by some forgotten print of Aboukir or Trafalgar, but my understanding is that she was one of those very elaborately carved vessels that seem less the work of shipwrights than of carpenters, and less that of carpenters than of cabinetmakers. She was (if not in reality, at least in my dreams) a burnished, dark, silent, swift craft, manned by Arabs and Malays.
"She anchored around dawn one morning in October. Toward night-fall, Ibn-Hakam burst into Allaby's house, totally unmanned by terror. He could hardly manage to tell Allaby that Sa'id had found his way into the labyrinth, and that his slave and lion had been murdered. He asked in all seriousness if the authorities could do nothing to protect him. Before Allaby could answer, he was gone, for the second and last time—as though snatched away by the same terror that had brought him to the house. Sitting there alone now in his study, Allaby thought with amazement that this terrified man had brought iron tribes in the Sudan under his thumb, had known what it is to do battle and what it is to kill. The next day, he noticed that the ship had sailed (for Suakin in the Red Sea, it was later learned). It occurred to him that it was his duty to confirm the murder of the slave, and so he climbed up to the labyrinth. Al-Bokhari's breathless story had sounded like mad fantasy to him, but at one corner in the long corridors he came upon the lion, which was dead, and at another, he found the slave, who was dead, and in the central chamber, he found Al-Bokhari himself, whose face had been smashed in. At the man's feet there was a coffer inlaid with mother-of-pearl; the lock had been forced and not a single coin remained."
The final periods, weighted with oratorical pauses, strained for eloquence; Unwin figured Dunraven had pronounced them many times, with the same self-conscious gravity and the same paucity of effect.
"How were the lion and the slave killed?" he asked, to feign interest.
The incorrigible voice answered with somber satisfaction.
"Their faces had been smashed in, as well."
To the sound of their footsteps was added the sound of rain. It occurred to Unwin that they would have to sleep in the labyrinth, in the central chamber of the tale, and that in retrospect he would surely see that long discomfort as adventure. He remained silent. Dunraven could not contain himself; like a man who will not forgive a debt, he asked:
"Quite an inexplicable story, don't you think?"
Unwin answered as though thinking out loud:
"I don't know whether it's explicable or inexplicable. I know it's a bloody lie."
Dunraven burst forth in a torrent of curses and invoked the eyewitness of the rector's elder son—Allaby, apparently, having died—and of every inhabitant of Pentreath. No less taken aback than Dunraven must have been, Unwin begged his pardon. Time, in the dark, seemed slower, longer; both men feared they had lost their way, and they were very tired by the time a dim brightness coming from above showed them the first steps of a narrow staircase. They climbed the stairs and found themselves in a round apartment, a good bit run-down and gone to seed. Two signs of the ill-fated king remained: a narrow window that looked out over the moors and the sea, and, in the floor, the trap door that opened onto the curve of the staircase. The apartment, though spacious, was very much like a jail cell.
Driven to it less by the rain than by the desire to live for the memory and the anecdote, the friends did spend the night within the labyrinth. The mathematician slept soundly; not so the poet, who was haunted by lines of poetry that his rational mind knew to be dreadfuclass="underline"
Faceless the sultry and overpowering lion, Faceless the stricken slave, faceless the king.
Unwin had thought that the story of Al-Bokhari's murder held no interest for him, yet he awoke convinced that he had solved it. All that day he was preoccupied and taciturn, fitting and refitting the pieces, and two nights later, he rang up Dunraven and asked him to meet him at a pub in London, where he spoke to him these words, or words very much like them:
"Back in Cornwall, I said the story that you'd told me was a lie. What I meant was this: the facts were true, or might be true, but told in the way you told them, they were clearly humbug. Let me begin with the biggest lie of all, the incredible labyrinth. A fleeing man doesn't hide out in a labyrinth. He doesn't throw up a labyrinth on the highest point on the coast, and he doesn't throw up a crimson-colored labyrinth that sailors see from miles offshore. There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one. For the man who truly wants to hide himself, London is a much better labyrinth than a rooftop room to which every blessed hallway in a building leads. That piece of wisdom, which I submit to you this evening, came to me night before last, while we were listening to the rain on the roof of the labyrinth and waiting to be visited by Morpheus. Warned and corrected by it, I chose to ignore those absurd 'facts' of yours and think about something sensible."
"Set theory, for instance, or the fourth dimension of space," Dunraven remarked.
"No," said Unwin with gravity. "I thought about the Cretan labyrinth. The labyrinth at whose center was a man with the head of a bull."
Dunraven, who had read a great many detective novels, thought that the solution of a mystery was always a good deal less interesting than the mystery itself; the mystery had a touch of the supernatural and even the divine about it, while the solution was a sleight of hand. In order to postpone the inevitable, he said:
"A bull's head is how the Minotaur appears on medals and in sculpture. Dante imagined it the other way around, with the body of a bull and the head of a man."
"That version works just as well," Unwin agreed. "What's important is the correspondence between the monstrous house and the monstrous creature that lives inside it. The Minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth—but no one can say the same for a threat dreamed in a dream. Once one seizes upon the image of the Minotaur (an image that's unavoidable when there's a labyrinth in the case) the problem is all but solved. I do have to confess, however, that I didn't see that that ancient image was the key to it, which is why it was necessary for your story to furnish me with a better, a more exact, symbol—the spider web."