Hope enquired.
“In a manner of speaking. I think that Locatelli might have been playing a game or a trick in the published version, adding an extra enigma to his caprice—or there might conceivably have been a misprint. I shall alter the scordatura—the tuning of violin, as Mr. Hope says—in the way that ought, in my opinion, to have been specified, but was not. I believe that I might be first to play the piece in public as it was really intended to be played. It is possible that even Locatelli never played it in public himself, given the great unpopularity of the sequence in his own day. It is risky, I know, but Carmela cannot play, and Paganini has made capricci popular again, so I feel that I must risk it now, or never. It is something that I have wanted to do for a long time. I hope you will all be tolerant of my whim.” He looked anxiously at Lady Phythian as he pronounced the last sentence, but he had lost her attention long before and she was staring out of the window again, watching the wilds of Cambridgeshire go by.
“That’s fascinating,” Michael said, generously. “I shall look forward to it greatly.”
“Thank you,” the violinist said, with more relief than genuine gratitude—but Carmela Monticarlo smiled at him again, more dazzlingly than before, and Michael blushed deeply, somewhat to James Escott’s amusement and Quentin Hope’s ironic delight.
Almost as soon as Signor Monticarlo, having ridden his hobby-horse to exhaustion, had fallen silent again, Hope and Escott resumed their contest. Having killed off the topic of progress for the time being, they launched into a debate about mazes and labyrinths. Hope generously took time out to explain to Michael that a labyrinth, technically speaking, was a “unicursal” design in which there were no branches, so that anyone walking a labyrinth was bound to end up at the center, albeit by a tortuously roundabout route, while a maze was “multicursal”, thus creating the possibility that someone who kept taking wrong turnings might get lost indefinitely.
“One has to bear in mind, of course,” Hope added, “that the Labyrinth—the one that Dedalus allegedly built in Crete for King Minos, was actually a multicursal maze, not a labyrinth in the stricter sense of the term. The Greeks mislabeled it, although they knew perfectly well what the difference was, as Plato makes clear in the Euthydemus, where Socrates likens logic to a labyrinth, in which the conclusion is always certain even though it seems to be the result of a roundabout process.”
“Except, of course,” Escott was quick to put in—as Hope must have known that he would—“that Dedalus didn’t build the Labyrinth for Minos at all. In fact, he built it for Ariadne. The Greek myth of Theseus misrepresents the situation horribly, but that’s of late origin. Homer makes it perfectly clear in the Iliad, when he describes Achilles’ shield, which bore the design of the Labyrinth, and states in so many words that the Labyrinth was constructed for Ariadne. If that were not enough, when Hope and I were exploring the ruins of Knossos we found inscriptions to the same effect, which identified Ariadne explicitly as the Mistress of the Labyrinth.”
“Leading us to conclude,” Hope put in, “that Minos’ daughter Ariadne—like yourself, Lady Phythian—was named after a more prestigious figure, presumably a goddess. Minos’ daughter was probably a priestess as well as a princess, whose duties included dancing the Labyrinth, according to a prescribed ritual.”
“Which would imply that Dedalus was a priest rather than an engineer,” Escott said, taking up the thread again. “Just as the fact that Achilles’ shield bore a Labyrinth design proves that the Cretan Labyrinth—and ancient mazes in general—were magical in purpose, intended as protective devices. Unfortunately the Cretan Labyrinth seems to have failed in its purpose, since the entire Minoan civilization was destroyed in an enormous catastrophe.”
“Actually, it proves no such thing,” Hope objected, “since Achilles was naturally invulnerable—save for his heel—and had no need of protective magic in his shield. And although Minos’ daughter was, by virtue of her sex, the person who had to perform the maze ritual intended to evoke her namesake, the Mistress of the Labyrinth, it was undoubtedly Minos who commissioned his high priest, Dedalus, to construct the Labyrinth.”
“Where did the Minotaur fit in?” Michael asked, innocently.
“He probably didn’t, in any literal sense,” Hope opined, “although the Greek emphasis on his role in the myth has given rise to the popular idea that mazes were intended as traps for monsters and demons rather than—or as well as—tracks for ritual processions and dances. That idea is also supported by folklore from elsewhere that often sets dragons in the heart of mazes, but the Minotaur doesn’t seem to me to be a mere variant of a dragon. Personally, I suspect that Minos put about the story of Pasiphaë’s passion for a bull and subsequent motherhood of a monster in order to pay her back for poisoning some of his younger paramours. Then he used the myth of the Minotaur as a pretext for denying his priestesses—including his wife and daughter—access to the Labyrinth, where they might have used that privacy to hatch plots to threaten his increasingly tyrannical authority. It was presumably the same motive that led him to imprison the architect of the Labyrinth within it. While Escott and I were exploring, we actually found a subterranean cell with a curious high-walled roof-garden; we had no way of knowing whether that might actually have been Dedalus’ prison, but Old Harry Langstrade was very excited by it. At any rate, the volcanic eruption rendered the political issues surrounding Minos’ despotic tendencies redundant. The catastrophic destruction of the entire Cretan culture set the progress of civilization back by hundreds of years, until Athens.…”
“Rose up to continue the tortured rigmarole of Hope’s vapid fancy,” Escott said, waspishly. “In fact—to get back to your original question, Laurel—the real key to the Minotaur’s supposed dual nature lies in the fact that the previous king of Crete, Asterius, had adopted Minos after he had allegedly been sired on Europa by the god Zeus, in the guise of a bull—so it was Minos himself who was accused, in vulgar parlance, of being a human/taurean hybrid when his reign became excessively cruel. The Minotaur was merely a symbol, invented to describe his monstrousness, but it was a particularly potent image in combination with the Labyrinth, partly because it did recall previous folklore placing dragons in the hearts of mazes. Mazes were associated throughout the ancient world with dragons and their mundane kin, as evidenced by Herodotus’ description of the Egyptian City of Crocodiles, in which mummified kings were laid to rest amid mummified crocodiles. Hope and I searched for the lost city while we were in Egypt, but never found it. In any case, the mysterious Mistress of the Labyrinth was probably more closely analogous to Circe than to Athene, and that may be why Pasiphaë is sometimes represented in Greek myth as kin to Circe.…”
At this point, Michael followed Lady Phythian’s example and tuned out again, returning his gaze to the flickering telegraph-poles in spite of their seeming mesmeric threat, and consenting to drift into a light doze. While the conversation remained in such ostentatiously esoteric intellectual territory he deliberately reduced it to a mere buzz in his ears, akin to that of an irritating fly. He found, after a while, that he could ignore the telegraph poles too, by focusing his eyes on more distant points in the landscape—church steeples and belfries proved particularly useful—and tracking them as they retreated, relative to the speeding train, at a far more leisurely pace, as if they too were making a polite withdrawal from an arena of conflict that they found uncomfortable.
Michael did not consider himself to be stupid, or ignorant, but he always felt uncomfortable in the presence of naked erudition. He had not had the privilege of a university education, let alone of taking an exotic Grand Tour, and he knew that he would be at something of a disadvantage among the company assembled at Langstrade Hall, not only with respect to Hope and Escott but Gregory Marlstone, who had been studying natural philosophy at Corpus Christi while Hope and Escott were Classical scholars at Balliol. On the other hand, the present Lord Langstrade had apparently been a very undistinguished scholar at Merton, and had gone straight into the family business thereafter, while Marlstone had done likewise, following in his
