He noticed that he was no longer sweating and this bothered him too. He should be sweating, he should be more frightened. Then to his amazement he saw that the sun had sunk quite far in the direction of the west. He came to a dead halt almost in shock. Why was time passing so rapidly? It must be four o’clock at least and when he glanced at his watch he saw that it was actually half past four. And therefore he had missed Diana. What a ludicrous thing. This maze, inert and yet malevolent, was preventing him from doing what he ought to have done and forcing him to do other things instead. Probably he would never see Diana again. And then the thought came to him, threatening in its bareness, what if he had chosen to walk into this maze in order to avoid her? No, that was idiotic. Such an idea had never come into his head. Not for one moment.
He looked down at his shoes and saw that they were white with dust. His trousers were stained. He felt smelly and dirty. And what was even more odd when he happened to see the backs of his hands he noticed that the hair on them was grey. That surely couldn’t be. But it was true, the backs of his hands had grey hair on them. Again he stood stock-still trying to take account of what had happened. But then he found that he couldn’t even stand still. It was as if the maze had accelerated. It was as if it could no longer permit him to think objectively and apart from himself. Whenever a thought came into his head it was immediately followed by another thought which devoured it. He had the most extraordinary vision which hit him with stunning force. It was as if the pathways in his brain duplicated the pathways of the maze. It was as if he was walking through his own brain. He couldn’t get out of the maze any more than he could get out of his own head. He couldn’t quite focus on what he sensed, but he knew that what he sensed or thought was the truth. Even as he looked he could see young people outside the café. They seemed amazingly young, much younger than he had expected. They were not the same ones as the early laughers, they were different altogether, they were young children. Even their clothes were different. Some of them were sitting eating ice-cream at a table which stood outside the café and had an awning over it. He couldn’t remember that awning at all. Nor even the table. The fisherman had disappeared from the stream. The cemetery seemed to have spawned more tombstones.
His mind felt slow and dull and he didn’t know where to go next. It came to him that he should sit down where he was and make no more effort. It was ludicrous that he should be so stupid as not to get out of the maze which others had negotiated so easily. So he couldn’t be as intelligent as he thought he was. But it was surely the maze that was to blame, not himself. It quite simply set unfair problems, and those who had solved them had done so by instinct like animals. He remembered someone who had been cool and young and audacious and who had had a white handkerchief in his pocket like a flag. But the memory was vaguer than he had expected, and when he found the handkerchief it was only a small crumpled ball which was now in his trouser pocket. He turned and looked at the flag which marked the centre of the maze. It seemed that he would never reach it.
He felt so sorry for himself that he began to cry a little and he couldn’t stop. Water drooled from his eyes, and he wiped it away with his dirty handkerchief. There didn’t seem to be so many people in the maze now. It was a stony wilderness. If there was one he could recognise as successful he would follow him like a dog. He would have no arrogance now. His brow puckered. There was someone he remembered as existing outside the maze, someone important, someone gracious, elegant, a magnet which he had somehow lost. She was . . . but he couldn’t remember who she was. And in any case had she been outside the maze? Had she not always been inside it, perhaps as lost as he was himself?
Slowly and stubbornly he plodded on, no longer imagining that he would leave the maze, walking for the sake of walking. The twilight was now falling, and the café was shut. He could hear no sounds around him, no infestation of the maze, and yet strangely enough he sensed that there were beings there. If he could no longer escape from the maze then he might at least reach the centre and see what was there. Perhaps some compensating emblem, some sign, some pointer to the enigma. Perhaps even the designer of the maze sitting there in a stony chair. He set his teeth, he must not give in. He must not allow the thought to control him that he had no power over the maze, that in fact the power was all the other way. That would be the worst of all, not only for him but for everybody else.
And then quite ironically, as if the seeing of it depended on his thought, there was the centre, barer than he had expected, no emblem, no sign, no designer.
All that was there was a space, and a clock and a flag. The clock pointed to eleven. The sun was setting, red and near in the sky. It was a big ball that he might even clutch. The twilight was deepening. For a moment there, it was as if in the centre of the maze he had seen
