Ahab's Adventure's In Wonderland; or The Rabbit

Chapter Thirty-Four

Heading north-eastward from the Chapel-house, we next found ourselves in vast meadows of carrot, the orange vegetable upon which the Jack-Rabbit largely feeds, and the very food which Moby Dick had absconded from Captain Ahab's vegetable garden. We saw that for leagues and leagues it undulated round us.

Numbers of rabbits could be seen, who, secure from the attack of any rabbit hunters such as we were, with open jaws sluggishly hopped through the carrot, making quite a feast for themselves. As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters hopped, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of brown dirt upon the green sea.*

But it was only the sound they made as they munched the carrots which at all reminded one of mowers. Seen from our vantage point, especially when they paused and were stationary for a while, their vast brown forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the great hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species of the leporidian of the field. And even when recognized at last, their immense cuteness renders it very hard really to believe that such fluffy masses of fur can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse.

Indeed. in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the soil (for much like a worm or a grub, rabbits are well known to dig their homes beneath the Earth) with the same feelings that you do those from above ground. For though some old naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the soil are of their kind in the field; and though taking a broad general view of the thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for example, does the soil furnish any mammal that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog?

But though, to farmers in general, the native inhabitants of the underground have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the soil to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Orpheus traveled to the and by his music softened the hearts of and , who agreed to allow his deceased wife to return with him to earth on one condition: he should walk in front of her and not look back until they both had reached the upper world. Orpheus alone of all men traveled into the underworld. However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the underworld, the world of soil, will insult and murder him; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the Earth which aboriginally belongs to it.

Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and swallowed them up for ever. But not only is the soil such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the soil dashes even the mightiest rabbits up, for when the rains come in abundance in the spring, it is not uncommon for us to find drowned coneys in the fields after the worst storms.

Consider the subtleness of the soil; how its most dreaded creatures burrow underground, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of emerald. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of mole. Or the groundhog. Or the badger. All these fearsome predators live beneath the soil, waiting for the farmer to sleep in order to feed upon his abundance.

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the soil beneath and the land above; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appealing foliage ocean covers the rocky soil, so does the skin of man often cover the turbulent inner nature of a savage. God keep thee!