caught in a labyrinth

King Minos of Crete had a secret shame — a monster, the Minotaur, born into his family with the body of a man and the head of a bull. He could not kill it and he could not let it roam, so he sent for Daedalus, the greatest builder of the age, and gave him a terrible commission.

Daedalus built the Labyrinth: a maze of stone passages that folded back on themselves in endless coils, corridor after identical corridor, with no straight line and no true centre a wanderer could ever be sure of reaching. It was designed for one purpose — that anyone who entered would lose all sense of direction and never find the exit.

Into this maze the monster was shut away, and to it, year by year, young men and women were sent as tribute. They walked in past the great gate and the corridors closed around them, and they turned this way and that in the gloom, doubling back, retracing steps that led nowhere, until hope itself gave out.

So perfect was the trap that even Daedalus, the man who made it, could barely find his own way out again once it was finished. The Labyrinth became a byword for any place from which there is no escaping by mere effort — where the harder you struggle, the deeper you seem to go.

To be caught in a labyrinth is to be lost like that: tangled in something so complicated and bewildering that every turn you take only leads you further from the way out.