Tales From Watership Down

  One cold, wet morning, when they both felt worn out by a long night of carrying worms, Rabscuttle said, "Master, do you think we could get the lendri to say when it will release us and take us through the forest? For I don't know how much more of this I can stand; and you don't look or smell right either, for the matter of that."

  El-ahrairah plucked up courage to ask the lendri that night, but the only reply he got was: "When I'm ready. Work harder and I may feel like it."

  One night they met a hare in the fields. After the usual scornful and wounding words, it ended, "And why you're doing it I can't imagine and nor can anyone else." El-ahrairah explained why they were doing it. "And do you seriously suppose that that lendri will ever let you go and help you on your way?" asked the hare. "Of course it won't. It'll simply keep you working until you either die or run away."

  At this, even El-ahrairah felt close to despair. Yet had he only known it, Lord Frith was not so far away from his faithful rabbits as they thought.

  Two or three nights later, as they were digging for worms quite near the sett, Rabscuttle noticed a place where the ground had been newly disturbed. "Look, master," he said. "Look at all that loose earth. That's not been dug long. It wasn't like that the other day. It'll be a good place for worms, don't you think?"

  They began digging in the soft soil. They had not dug very deep before El-ahrairah paused, sniffing and hesitating. "Come over here, Rabscuttle, and tell me what you think."

  Rabscuttle also sniffed. "There's something been buried, master, not so long ago. Something that's been alive but isn't now. Should we let it alone?"

  "No," replied El-ahrairah. "We'll go on."

  They dug deeper. "Master, that's a hand, the hand of a human being."

  "Yes," said El-ahrairah. "The hand of a woman. And if I'm not mistaken, the whole body's there. It wouldn't smell like that otherwise."

  "Surely we'd better leave it, master?"

  "No," said El-ahrairah. "We'll uncover some more."

  In the darkness and silence, they went on digging until it was plain that a whole human body had been buried.

  "Now just leave a light covering of earth," said El-ahrairah, "and we'll go away and forage somewhere else. What we want is for human beings to find that body, and soon."

  It was two days, however, before a man, wearing heavy boots and carrying a gun, came strolling along the verge of the forest. The rabbits, watching from the mouth of the sett, saw him catch sight of the newly dug ground, stop to look more closely, then go up to it and kick away some of the earth. As soon as he was sure of what was there, he marked the place with a torn-off branch and set off running as best he could with his gun and clumsy boots.

  "Now we'll go and tell the lendri," said El-ahrairah.

  Having heard what they had to tell him, the lendri joined them near the mouth of the sett. They had not long to wait. A hrududu, full of men, drove up and stopped nearby. The men got out and began surrounding the place where the body lay, with posts which had blue-and-white tape running between them. More men came, until there seemed to be men everywhere, talking together in loud voices.

  The lendri, plainly very much afraid, turned and went back down the tunnel as fast as it could. The two rabbits followed it.

  "We must keep up with it," panted El-ahrairah, "wherever it goes."

  Scrambling and stumbling, they followed the lendri down a side tunnel where they had never been before. It seemed not to have been used for some time past. In places it was partly blocked by fallen earth, which the lendri flung aside or behind it with great strokes of its Paws. The rabbits were showered with earth and sometimes struck painfully by small stones, but still struggled on behind the terrified lendri, which was clearly intent upon nothing but getting away from the men.

  After what seemed a long time, the tunnel led slowly upward and came out in the open air. At the mouth the lendri stopped, sniffing, listening and looking all about. Finally it came cautiously out into the forest, went a short distance forward and concealed itself in the cover of some thick bushes.

  "I don't think it knew we were following," whispered El-ahrairah. "We'll wait now until it moves off."

  As they waited, they listened for the sound of the men, but could hear only the faintest noise in the distance. "We must have come quite a long way," whispered El-ahrairah. "Creep out now, as quietly as you can. We can't stay here. If anything frightens the lendri, it'll bolt back into this hole and trample us down."

  They managed to slink silently some way along the forest floor, stopping at length as they came to a small clearing. Making his way cautiously round its edge, El-ahrairah found what he was looking for--the marks of tires in the muddy ground. They led away down a slight descent, and the rabbits followed them until they heard men talking nearby and smelled white sticks. They waited a long time in the undergrowth, until at last the men started up their hrududu and drove away.

  The sound receded in the distance. "Come on," said El-ahrairah. "We need to get out while it's still light."

  They had not gone far before they found themselves on the edge of the forest and looking out at green fields.

  "But is this edge the one we want, master?" asked Rabscuttle. "I mean, it could be another part of the edge where we were, couldn't it?"

  "Look at the sun," replied El-ahrairah. "It's almost in our eyes. The breeze is coming from in front of us too. This is the sunset side of the forest, all right."

  And so it proved. They slept that night in a thick bramble bush. Nothing disturbed them, and the following afternoon they came back to their own warren.

  "So the Black Rabbit was as good as his word," said El-ahrairah, gazing about him. "Not an enemy to be smelled, a fine evening, and everyone at silflay. They look all right too. Well done, Rabscuttle."

  "Well done, master," replied Rabscuttle, touching his nose to El-ahrairah's. "Look, here's a patch of clover. Let's sit down and eat it before we do anything else."

  However, as has been recounted elsewhere, their homecoming was by no means all that they could have wished.

  PART III

  12

  The Secret River

  The name of the second river is Gihon. No sooner has it

  come out of Paradise than it vanishes beneath the depths of

  the sea ... whence, through secret passage of the earth

  it emerges again in the mountains of Ethiopia.

  MOSES BAR CEPHA, quoted by JOHN L. LOWES

  in The Road to Xanadu

  Of the does who had escaped with him from Efrafa, Vilthuril always seemed to Bigwig the most strange and enigmatic, the hardest to understand. Not that she was unfriendly or standoffish. On the contrary, she was on good terms with every rabbit in the warren and was often ready enough for a chat: about such things as the weather, the grass, and the horses which galloped on the Down--about anything, really, which could give rise to no disagreement and upon which anyone could express a harmless view. She was a good mother and devoted to her mate, Fiver. She and Fiver had, in fact, discovered their affinity almost before the return from the Efrafan expedition: and during the night of Woundwort's attack--which, it will be recalled, Fiver had spent lying unconscious among Efrafans on the floor of the Honeycomb before awakening to defeat Vervain without striking a blow--Vilthuril had been distracted and almost mad with anxiety on his account.

  In dealings with Vilthuril, everyone sensed a certain reserve on her part and knew that she and Fiver spent much time in their inward world, the world of the mystic. No one resented this, since they instinctively recognized its validity, and anyway, as Bluebell remarked, so long as Fiver could emerge from it for the short time he required to demolish rabbits like Vervain, it seemed all to the good.

  Not that Vilthuril could not speak seriously and command the respect and attention of others when she wanted to; and since she did not want to very often, other rabbits usually piped down simply not to miss the opportunity of getting a bit of the real Vilthuril while it was going. This t
hey seldom or never regretted.

  One evening, in quite a full Honeycomb and certainly to his surprise, she remarked quietly to Hazel, almost as though they were alone together, "Has Hyzenthlay ever told you about the underground river in Efrafa?"

  "The what?" replied Hazel, startled for once out of his self-possession.

  "The underground river in Efrafa," repeated Vilthuril in the same quiet, conversational tone.

  "No, she certainly hasn't," said Hazel. And then, more to keep himself in countenance than for any other reason, he asked, "Bigwig, have you ever heard of the underground river in Efrafa? After all, you've been there and I haven't."

  "No, I'll be snared if I have," answered Bigwig, "and what's more, I'd need a lot of persuading that there was one at all."

  "There was," said Vilthuril, "but only three of us knew of its existence."

  "Hyzenthlay?" asked Hazel. "Did you know about it?"

  "Oh, yes," said Hyzenthlay. "Thethuthinnang and I, we both knew the river well. The secret river, we used to call it. Do go on, Vilthuril. Tell them about the secret river. She was closest to it. She found it first and knew more about it than we did," she added to Hazel and Bigwig. "It was a matter of being, well, attuned to it more than anything else."

  There was a pause, as though Vilthuril was collecting herself to begin.

  At length she said, "It's almost impossible to convey to anyone who wasn't there what it was like to be a rabbit in Efrafa. In the burrows, between a Mark's two silflays of the day, you weren't really alive--not in the sense that everyone here understands it. The officers--whenever one of them happened to come into one of the Mark burrows--didn't actually stop you moving about. But there wasn't much point in moving about. In the first place it was usually rather difficult, because the burrows were crowded, but also one place in a burrow was much the same as anywhere else. It was the same with talking: you were forbidden to talk, but as a rule there wasn't much to talk about. I always felt that the officers wanted you to do absolutely nothing: to keep still, not to talk and not even to think, between silflays, unless you were required for mating, and there wasn't much enjoyment in that. A rabbit wasn't there can't really understand what the life was like.

  "Now, one day--or it may have been one night, for all I knew--I was sleeping or half sleeping--drowsing--at the furthest end of one of the Mark burrows--that's to say, the furthest away from the run leading up and out--when I began to sense something odd; something I'd never come across before. A current was coming through the burrow wall. It wasn't current of water or a current of air. It wasn't warm and it wasn't cold either. But something was coming through the wall and flowing away down the burrow; not spreading out into a pool and flooding it, as you might expect, but flowing down the length of it in a channel of its own.

  "By moving a little I was able to lie directly in its path--whatever it was--and then to face it head-on. And now there could be no doubt about it at all. A stream of something was coming through the burrow wall and breaking over me before it flowed away. It was slow but quite steady. No other rabbit in the burrow seemed to be in the least aware of it.

  "I lay there a long time, giving myself entirely up to it; letting it take possession of me, you might say. And eventually I came to grasp that what was coming to me through the wall was a flow of knowledge: knowledge that wasn't mine and had nothing to do with me. It wasn't my own imagination playing tricks. It wasn't a fancy originating in my own head. This was something from outside--outside Efrafa--that I was receiving. You couldn't drink it or smell it or feel it on your fur as hot or cold. But you could move out of it and get back into it again. I did this several times, to be sure.

  "It was trying to convey something, either to me or else to any other rabbit that might be able to receive it. I lay in it and tried to make my own mind as empty as I could. And sure enough, an idea came in quite clearly: an idea of two rabbits--two adult female rabbits--alone together, somewhere far from Efrafa. And as soon as I had grasped this, the stream made the knowledge larger. These were two does who had left their own warren in order to start a new one: a warren in which the does would predominate, a warren ruled by does.

  "There could be no question of this being an idea starting in my own head. I didn't have any sort of picture in my imagination. I simply knew of the two does' existence and of what they meant to do. I couldn't see them at all in my mind's eye, but I knew their names--Flyairth and Prake--and I knew they were somewhere out there, so strong and confident about what they meant to do that they could persuade other rabbits, bucks and does, to come with them. But where? All I could know was that it was somewhere sandy, on a gentle slope.

  "I must have stayed a long time in the flow of that underground river, because when I finally came out I felt exhausted. I fell sound asleep and slept until the Mark's next silflay, which was in the early afternoon. I wanted to talk to someone, to tell them about what I'd found--or about what had found me. But it was always dangerous to talk to anyone in Efrafa. Either they might be a Council spy or else--which was more likely--they might pass on what you'd told them, until everybody knew it as gossip.

  "I decided to tell Hyzenthlay, who I knew had got on the wrong side of the Council for asking to be allowed to leave Efrafa. I told her during silflay that afternoon, and she said she'd come down with me and find out whether she could feel the current in the way I had.

  "She came, and she felt it, though not as strongly as I had, or so it seemed to me. But anyway, now there were two of us, and of course we were wondering whether other rabbits would discover it for themselves. We felt frightened of what might happen to us if the officers got to know. We hadn't done anything wrong, but believe me, that wasn't enough to keep you out of trouble in Efrafa. We were afraid we might be killed, because the Council would want to stop anyone else discovering the river. Or else they'd say that we'd made it all up. And of course Hyzenthlay was under the Council's suspicion already. So we didn't tell anyone else.

  "What came to me down the secret river that night was the knowledge that Flyairth and Prake had persuaded a whole lot of rabbits--bucks as well as does--to leave their warren and come to the sandy place where they meant to start a new one of their own. Just that I came to know and nothing more. But that night Hyzenthlay came to know it too, without asking me. So we both felt sure that it was true.

  "The next afternoon both Hyzenthlay and I were among the last coming down from silflay, and we found Thethuthinnang in my usual place at the far end of the burrow. We both felt fairly sure we could trust her with our secret, but we waited so see whether she'd find it by herself. It was soon clear to us that she was aware of something strange and puzzling, but we left it at that until silflay the next day, when we told her what we'd come to know ourselves. She'd felt it too, but less clearly than I had, and she hadn't been able to understand that it was a flow of knowledge until we told her.

  "After that, we all did our best to get into the secret river at least once a day or night. As a rule, the other two didn't receive the knowledge as clearly as I did, but after we'd been able to talk about it together, they always realized what had been coming on the current while they were in it.

  "After some time, we all three began to feel that we knew Flyairth and Prake well. But there were two things we didn't know. We didn't know whether those two does had anything to do with sending us this knowledge; and we didn't know whether the flow was going anywhere else besides Efrafa--to any other warren, I mean, or to any other rabbits. You see, we could do nothing to reply. All we could do was to receive the knowledge coming down the secret river, and to agree together, every day, about what it had been.

  "We all knew that Flyairth and Prake had established their warren--Thinial, they called it--as they wanted it, and that the bucks seemed content under the control of the does. Bucks who discovered that they didn't like it after all simply left, and no one stopped them. The small Owsla of does were well liked. They were certainly the cleverest rabbits to be found and didn't
bully others into resentment.

  "Several of them, so it seemed, bore litters of their own. They chose bucks whom they liked and mated with them. Then later, when they came to bear their young, they stood down from the Owsla for as long as they needed to bring them up and train them to look after themselves. When the young rabbits didn't need them anymore, they rejoined the Owsla.

  "Flyairth had two litters in this way, and as far as we could learn, her young rabbits had turned out well.

  "We received nothing else for a long time, and I supposed that now that Thinial was established and flourishing, there was nothing more for us to learn and the secret river knowledge had come to a natural end. I can't say I was sorry. The whole business frightened me. I was always afraid that somehow or other, General Woundwort would get to know. And yet I kept on, every night, lying in the river. It fascinated me: I couldn't keep out of it.

  "And then, one night, I found myself caught up in a kind of violent mist of confusion and turmoil out of which, for a long time, nothing came; or nothing I could understand, anyway. The others were as lost in it as I.

  "At last one thing stood out clearly--that is, one piece of knowledge. And that was the White Blindness. None of us had ever seen a rabbit dying of the White Blindness, but we knew as much as is common knowledge to all rabbits: how an infected rabbit stumbles about in the open, seeing nothing, so that in the end it may stagger into water and drown. And how other rabbits often become infected, so that a whole warren may be destroyed. We knew that it takes a rabbit a long time to die of the White Blindness.

  "All three of us received, that night, knowledge of the Blindness. It didn't do anything; it was simply there, like a stone or a tree. We didn't think it was coming down the secret river to infect us, but the mere knowledge of it, dominating everything else in the river and turning it into incomprehensible turbulence, was frightening enough.