"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.