ALLEGORY: A LIGHT CONCEIT
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must prepare his burrow against any kind of attack, and
this
he does
by perpetual and incredible industry.
He does talk uncertainly about some great earth-creatures that
he has heard tell of but never seen. He says, "Not even legend can
describe them. Their very victims can scarcely have seen them; they
come, ypu hear the scratching of their claws just under you in the
ground, which is their element, and already you are lost. Here it is
of no avail to console yourself with the thought that you are in your
own house; far rather you are in theirs."
But the only thing he can do is to go on building and rebuilding
his
house on the assumption that it must be his own if he made it.
He began the construction of
it
in his youth on a less ambitious plan,
and this initial part with its little involuted passageways has now be–
come the entrance, intended to confound the invader. He continued
to build on a larger plan, and kept remodeling. The rest of the bur–
row is ingeniously devised: intricate passages, dead-end corridors,
emergency supply cells, and burglar traps. Sometimes he sits hack and
feels happy and safe in his burrow. But his happiness depends upon
his safety, and this is in fact only an illusive, at best a periodic thing.
Between these periods he has days of agonized fear, starting from
sleep in terror at some dream, realizing all the inadequacies of his
defenses, and he sets out feverishly, often in the middle of the night,
sleep-grogged but panicky, to reorganize his whole dwelling, to make
new places of hiding, to tug his stores around and redistribute them
for newly conceived hazards.
His burrow has a single opening carefully covered with moss,
and he spends much of
his
life deciding and re-deciding whether or
not he needs another one. A second one would double the possibility
of an enemy's entrance, but it would also provide him with an
emergency exit. It would make his burrow vulnerable at both ends,
but he might well employ each in tum as a point of observation to
see
if
the other is being attempted. The doorway problem is one of
his
daily torments. Sometimes he hides outside in the bushes for hours
to see
if
there is any kind of prowler aware of its existence.
So he lives fluctuating between the sensations of security and
terror, devoting himself to frantic slavery for the defense of his life
and his home. No enemy ever appears, as far as we know from the
story, and there is no sound in the peaceful stillness of his hallways
