Word: labyrinth
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...DARK LABYRINTH (266 pp.)-Lawrence Durrell-Dutton...
...wildly disparate group of people, traveling the Mediterranean on a cruise ship called Europa, disembark in Crete to explore a labyrinth advertised as the mythic one of the fabled Minotaur. There is a lady missionary, a male medium, an archaeologist, an artist, a young girl clerk, and a jolly middle-aged couple who won the trip as a prize in a newspaper competition. A landslide cuts them off from the outside world. Several of them die, a few manage to return to everyday life, and two of them are transported to a peculiar, bucolic, almost supernatural existence in a valley...
Author Durrell's thesis is that everyone inevitably weaves his own destiny: "We live by a very exacting kind of poetic logic-since we get exactly what we ask for, no more, and no less." But only in the threatening dark of the labyrinth does man achieve the enlightenment with which to perceive his own fate...
...Dark Labyrinth is a new old book, written when Durrell was 33, midway between his youthful Black Book, a greyish imitation of Henry Miller, and the artful arabesques of The Alexandria Quartet...
...earlier Minoan civilization is newly being appreciated with the deciphering of the script called Linear B. As scholars, but few laymen, know, Crete, not Greece, was the land of the myths-of Zeus and the Titans, Prometheus, Hyperion, Orpheus and Hercules. It was on Crete that Daedalus built the labyrinth and Icarus took off for history's first air crash. The vast Palace of Minos, whose foundations were laid around 5000 B.C., grew to a colossal structure whose apartments were equipped with bathrooms and flush toilets...