The rushing of wind struck the last word from his lips, and he felt himself turning over and over as his body was poured down the ladder of blueness. A red roaring seemed to fill the horizon. Frightened kestrels fell with them from ledges of rock for a few metres and then planed out, whistling their curiosity and terror. The sea turned up its expansive shining surface and waited for them.
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 hun
ger, 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 sudde
nly 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.