The Whispering Land

Next to the macaws the Brazilian rabbits were the creatures I was most delighted to have obtained, for they were animals I had long wanted to meet. The two we had got were only babies, and I lifted them out of their cage and they sat, one in each hand, comfortably filling my palms with the soft, fat warmth of their bodies, their noses wiffling with all the strange scents of food and flowers with which the patio was filled. At first glance you would have taken them for the young of the common European rabbit, but closer inspection soon showed the differences. To begin with their ears were very short for their size, and very neat and slender. The basic colouring on the back was a dark rich brown, flecked and patterned with rusty-coloured patches and blobs. Their feet and part of the leg was a bright, rich ginger, and, as I said before, they had a fine circle of white hair round each eye. Their nose and lips, I now noticed, were faintly outlined in white as well. When they were fully adult, I knew, they would still be among the dwarfs of their breed, being only half the size of the European wild rabbit. As far as I knew, no zoo in the world possessed these interesting little creatures, and I was delighted to have got them, though I had faint qualms about being successful in taking them back to Europe, for the rabbit and hare family do not, on the whole, take kindly to captivity,* and are reputedly difficult. However, these were very young, and I had hopes that they would settle down satisfactorily.

When I lifted the sacking off the front of the agouti's cage she leapt straight up into the air, and landed with a crash in her straw bed, quivering in every limb, with the expression of an elderly virgin who, after years of looking under her bed, has at last found a man there. However, with the aid of a piece of apple I managed to soothe her into a fairly reasonable state, and she actually allowed me to stroke her.

Agoutis are, of course, rodents, members of that enormous and interesting family that includes creatures like the harvest mouse, which would hardly fill the bowl of a teaspoon, to capybaras* that are the size of a large dog and in between these two extremes a great variety of squirrels, dormice, rats, porcupines and other unlikely* beasts. Agoutis are not, let us admit at once, the most prepossessing of their family. To be perfectly frank, they look like a cross between one of the smaller forerunners of the horse, and a rather lugubrious rabbit. Their basic colouring is a rich, shining mahogany, fading to reddish-ginger on their rumps. Their legs are chocolate brown, very long and slender and racehorse-like, ending in a bunch of frail, artistic toes which give them the ancient-horse look.* Their hind legs are powerful in order to support a backside that is out of all proportion to the forequarters, so that the creature looks, if I might put it like this, as though it had a hump-behind.* The head is rabbit-like, but again slightly elongated so that there is still a faint suggestion of horse about it. They have large, fine eyes, neat rounded ears and a mass of black whiskers, which are in a constant state of agitation about everything. Combine all this with the beast's temperament, its constantly neurotic state, its wild leaps into the air at the slightest sound followed by a period of acute ague,* and you begin to wonder how the species survives at all. I should imagine that a jaguar would only have to growl once and every agouti within a hundred yards radius would die of heart-failure immediately. Musing on this I lowered the sacking over the front of my agouti's cage, and she immediately leapt once more into the air and came down shaking in every limb. However, within a few minutes she had recovered from this terrible experience sufficiently to make an attack on the apple I had left in the cage for her. Luna had now, by the application of song and wine, worked himself into a pleasant state where he sat at the table, humming softly like a drowsy bee. We had a final glass of wine as a nightcap,* and then, yawning prodigiously, stumbled off to bed.

I was awoken at what seemed to me to be a most uncivilized hour of the morning by a burst of song from Luna's bed, in the opposite corner of the room. Song and music ran through Luna's being as naturally as the blood flowed through his veins. When he was not talking he was singing or humming, and he is the only man I have ever met who can stay up until three in the morning and rise at five, bursting into song before he is even out of bed. But he sang so pleasantly and with such obvious pleasure that you forgave him, even at that hour of the morning, and, after knowing him some time, you took no more notice of it than you would have done of a dawn chorus of birds.

"The moon is like a little white drum in the sky," he sang from under a pile of bedclothes, "leading me to my love with the dark hair and the magic eyes, behind the mountains of Tucuman."