Graecen, who was standing farther back just inside the entrance of the greater cavern saw the whole thing happen like a slow-motion film of some great disaster; for a moment the guide stood, his hands raised in a desperate effort to get his balance. The huge stone, dislodged, appeared to move with the slowness of a safe door; the ring of lights below opened like a flower as the panic-stricken shout went up. “Look out!” He heard Miss Dombey’s voice above all the rest, and caught a sudden flash of Fearmax’s face in a beam of torch-light. The concussion, too, seemed drawn out into slow-motion sound. It was tremendous. Stone on stone, it rang out like a terrific hammer-blow on the stagnant air. From the side of the cavern issued a hail of complementary boulders and a great stream of mud and debris. The echo seemed to split his ear-drums. In the space of a few seconds he found himself lying on his back upon a moving tide of mud and stones which had completely blocked up the entrance to the cavern and cut him off from the rest of the party. The noise was still going on, though whether it was merely the echo or its original he could not tell. Somewhere in the very core of the noise he thought he heard, for a second, human voices shouting, but he could not be sure. Now from all quarters of the labyrinth there came noises of boulders falling, walls peeling and caving in, sympathetic disturbances set in motion by this great fall, whose vibration still crammed the air with eddies of sound. Graecen found he had cut his wrist; a stone had hit him on the back of the head; apart from this he was all right — but for how long? Small stones were falling from the roof of the cavern. What had happened to the others? In that confined space they had been trapped and beaten to death or suffocated. Or perhaps through those side-corridors.…
The guide had not escaped. His body lay under a great stone in ten feet of debris; but the others had had time to dodge out of the way of the oncoming avalanche into the safety (or what seemed then to be the safety) of the undercut entrances of tunnels. Up these vents they were propelled by the air squeezed out of the cavern, jammed like cartridges in the muzzle of a gun. The Truman couple found themselves gasping in a narrow tunnel with a hail of sticks and stones pressing upon them; Fearmax found himself lying on the ground while Miss Dombey moaned and wrung her hands over him. The ends of his trousers were soaked. He was lying in a large stagnant puddle while the noise reverberated behind them. He had received a blow on the shoulders which had knocked all the wind out of his body. He moaned and sat up, feeling for his torch. Meanwhile Campion struggled up what seemed an endless flight of stairs, half supporting the figure of Virginia, who had fainted. The full proportions of the disaster had not had time to weigh on them; they were still full of the surprise and horror of the incident, and had none of them dared to think that they had suddenly been buried alive, lost, entombed in the labyrinth which they had set off to explore that morning.
Meanwhile Graecen was standing, not more than twenty feet away from the burrows where they crawled, turning over the cold coins in his pocket and mumbling incoherent blasphemies in a hysterical voice. To him at least the full magnitude of the tragedy was apparent, since he alone seemed to have any chance of finding his way out. Now as he sat on a rock and rubbed his face clean with his handkerchief his mind, never very mercuric, seemed to be working at lightning speed trying to memorize the twists and turns of the paths by which they had come. It was hopeless. Somewhere they had forded a river, a long time ago. He looked at his watch and found that it had stopped. What was to be done? Graecen felt the blood freeze in his veins as he got slowly to his feet and walked round the cavern examining the numerous tunnels which offered themselves to his frightened eyes like so many gaping mouths eager to swallow him.
He chose the most familiar and set off down it memorizing every detail as he did so. A phrase of Hogarth’s came unexpectedly into his mind and comforted him. “After all, Dickie,” Hogarth had said, “if you think of death as a continuation of a process that has been going on for a considerable time it is not so serious a business as it really seems.”
Was it not? Dying in bed was one thing; dying while your mother stood by you to smooth the pillows and hold your hand. But to die, slowly suffocating in this dense black pit — that was quite another. And what of the others? He stopped suddenly. He should have shouted, should have tried to reach them. Yet this had been so obviously an impossibility. He raised his head and shouted their names, scared at the sound of the echo that he raised. Then he listened dully to the icy silence that descended over the network of chambers and tunnels. His own footsteps sounded tiny and remote, like the scratching of a mole a thousand miles under the world. Once indeed he thought he heard the thin wailing of a voice which might have belonged to Miss Dombey, but when he stopped to listen only silence seeped coldly out of the labyrinth.
It was like a nightmare — one of those nightmares in which one feels trapped: but it ended suddenly when he happened upon a narrow strip of daylight, and found that he had blundered out on to the back of Cefalû, in full sight of the house he had come to die in. Graecen was trembling all over at the narrowness of his escape. He sat on a rock drinking in mouthfuls of the blue air, tasting the scent of the thyme, watching the blue race of the sea beneath the house. Never had the world seemed so desirable a thing. Rising at last on unsteady legs he made his way towards the house.
Axelos was sitting in the middle of the lawn, in the shadow of a plane tree, counting out money on to the green baize top of a folding card-table. Before him stood his servants waiting to receive their wages. He looked up as Graecen lurched across the gravel to the lawn, his sense of urgency giving him a drunkard’s stagger.
“Dickie,” said Axelos, recognizing him and getting up. “How very nice.”
Graecen stood foolishly agape, one hand pressed to his racing heart, trying to speak. His friend advanced slowly across the lawn, with his familiar waddle. He was wearing pyjamas with a green and blue striping and an old straw hat. A cigar smouldered slowly away under his nose.
“An accident,” Graecen said at last, sinking into a chair. “They’re all trapped in the labyrinth.”
He gave as accurate an account of the accident as was possible under the circumstances. Axelos set out with two of the servants for the mouth of the labyrinth, leaving him there, seated in the low deck-chair, his head tilted back, his eyes closed. He was waiting for his heart to slow down — or stop altogether. The palpitations had made him feel cold and sick. As soon as his suitcase came down he would give himself an injection. Now he emptied his mind, drew his breath deeply and regularly, and watched the dappled shadow of the sunlight, playing through the plane tree, flicker upon his eyelids. Kestrels were skimming and alighting upon the great limestone cone of Cefalû. He could hear their thin cries suddenly cut off — as if by scissors — when they dived. From the direction of the house came voices arguing — a familiar sound; they were spreading the news of the accident. Graecen sighed and stirred. He had forgotten to tell them that Baird was safe. The only one besides himself. His thoughts turned once more to the little party smothered in rock and earth in that burst antrum of stone; stuck like air-bubbles in glass beyond hope of rescue. He got up slowly and walked up the steps into the house.
The Enemy’s Grave
His farewells completed Baird squared his shoulders under the old service pack and walked down the rocky road; he felt that they were standing silently watching him as he skirted the cherry grove, crossed the little circle of cultivation, and disappeared up the familiar cliff-path. He did not turn round and wave good-bye — the preoccupation with his mission was complete, creating a solitude around himself. His heart, however, was beating rather fast and he felt a trifle out of breath as he progressed along the ridge of the mountain with a taciturn and dogged persistence. Oddly enough it was not the familiar associations of danger and sudden death that came back to him as he entered the familiar scene of so many actions; rather was it the cumulative memories of days dedicated to boredom, to apathy, to waiting. Here, by this very myrtle bush, they had waited, the Abbot and he, for the mules to catch up; they had been arranging an ambush, and were doubtful of its success. He remembered with utter clarity the face of the Abbot as he shredded up the packet of cigarettes and moistened the tobacco into a chewable quid — for smoking had been forbidden during an operation. He remembered every word of that last conversation. They had discussed the illness of Koax and his possible death. A little higher up where the hill-side jutted he would smell the familiar scent of almonds and oranges from the little grove at the crown of Penthali.