A ripening wood apple or bael fruit (Aegle marmelos) in Cuttack, a city in Odisha on the north east coast of India. The bael fruit grows to the size of a grapefruit but it has a hard shell like a coconut, and any bleary-eyed rabbit who heard it smash behind him could be forgiven a moment of panic. The flesh is edible, and said to savour of marmalade and roses.
Part 1 of 2
ONCE upon a time, a rabbit dozing under a wood-apple tree woke with a start, and with this thought in his head: ‘What if the earth should suddenly crumble?’ At that moment a butter-fingered monkey in the branches above dropped a fruit. The shell smashed just behind the rabbit, who leapt into the air and bolted without a backward glance.
‘Why are you running?’ another rabbit called out after him. ‘Don’t you know?’ he replied breathlessly, ‘the earth is crumbling!’ and sped on, with the second rabbit close behind. Soon hundreds of rabbits were running for their lives. They shouted to the deer that the earth was crumbling, and the whole herd sprang away; the foxes heard the cries of the deer and bounded after them, stopping only to tell the elephants, who lumbered in their wake.
A lion heard the commotion, and standing on a hill he brought them all to a halt with three great roars. ‘Why’ he asked ‘are you all running?’
Part Two
All ears... a rabbit on the alert in a field in the Upper Doethie Valley, near the Tyncornel hostel some 20 miles southeast of Aberystwyth.
‘WE are running’ explained an elephant with dignity ‘because the world is crumbling.’ ‘Really?’ said the lion, surprised. ‘Where did you see this, elephant?’ The elephant admitted that he had it from a fox. ‘Ask the deer’ said the fox hastily. ‘The rabbits told us’ said the deer. Then the rabbits began nudging one another and whispering, until one said in a frightened squeak, ‘I heard it begin, I heard the sound of the earth crumbling by the wood-apple tree!’
‘Let us go and look’ said the lion soberly. So with some misgivings the rabbit rode on his golden back all the way to the tree, where the shattered wood-apple was still lying on the sunbaked ground. ‘That is what you heard, you foolish rabbit’ said the lion, and padded back to tell the others that the world was not crumbling after all. And they believed the wise King of Beasts, or they might all be running still.*
Addressing students at the Royal College of Music in 1918, Sir C. H. Parry spoke about two kinds of mistake: the good kind, mistakes we make when we are taking personal initiative, and the bad kind, “that unfortunate herding instinct of the race which makes people take their cues from one another, and lean up against one another, and do stupid things because so many other stupid people do them.” See Mistakes, Right and Wrong.
.jpg){kind=link}