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The Burrow

Franz Kafka

Written in the winter of 1923/24, months before Kafka's death. Published posthumously.

The burrow is my own design, and I’m happy with the way it’s turned out. The only visible trace of it from outside is a big hole, but that in fact goes nowhere; after a couple of feet you encounter bedrock. I don’t want to claim it was done that way on purpose, it’s just what was left over from one of my many false starts, but in the end I thought it would be a good ruse to leave this one hole unfilled. Many ruses are so obvious that they are self-defeating, that’s something I know better than most, and it’s certainly a bold stroke to leave the hole to indicate that there may be something worth investigating in the vicinity. But anyone who suspects me of cowardice and my burrow of being a monument to my cowardice misunderstands me. Perhaps a thousand paces from that hole, concealed under a removable flap of moss is the actual entrance to the burrow, it’s as secure as anything in this world can be; of course, someone can happen to tread on the moss or push through it, and then my burrow is wide open, and whoever wants to can walk in and destroy it for all time – though it should be pointed out that this requires certain rather rare aptitudes. I understand all that, and even now at its zenith, my life enjoys hardly a single hour of complete quiet; in that place in the dark moss I feel myself mortal, and in my dreams there is often a greedy snout rootling persistently around in it. People will say I should have filled in this actual entrance as well, a thin layer of compact soil at the top, a little looser further down, so that it wouldn’t require much effort for me to dig my way out afresh each time. But that isn’t possible; prudence actually demands that I have an instantaneous egress, prudence as so often demands the riskier approach; these are all laborious and time-consuming calculations, and the pleasure the shrewd brain takes in itself is sometimes the only reason one goes on calculating. I need instantaneous egress, because is it not conceivable that for all my vigilance I might find myself under attack from some unexpected quarter? There I am, living in peace in the innermost bowels of my burrow, and meanwhile the foe is silently and slowly tunnelling towards me. I am not saying his instincts are keener than mine, it’s possible that he is as unaware of my existence as I am of his, but there are passionate house-breakers who blindly churn through soil, and given the massive extension of my burrow there is every chance of running into one of my pathways somewhere. Admittedly I have the home advantage here: I have minute knowledge of all the paths and directions. The burglar may very easily become my victim – and a tasty one at that – but I am getting on, there are many who are stronger than I am and the number of my foes is infinite; it could happen that I am running from one of them and wind up in the clutches of another – oh, so many things could happen – at any rate I require the certainty that somewhere there is an easily accessible, fully open exit for me, that requires no further work on my part to reach, so that I never – please God! – find myself digging panic-stricken through loose soil, and feel the pursuer’s teeth clamped on my thighs. Nor is it only external foes that threaten me, there are also some within the earth itself. I have never seen them, but I have heard stories about them, and I firmly believe in their existence. These are creatures from within the earth; not even legend can describe them, even their victims can barely have seen them; they come, you hear the scratch of their claws just below you in the ground, which is their element, and already you are lost. It makes no difference here that you are in your home, because it’s really their dwelling. My exit will not save me from them, as it probably wouldn’t save me under any circumstances, but rather ruin me; still, it remains a source of hope, and I am unable to live without it.

Apart from that one main highway, I am connected to the outside world by other, very narrow, fairly harmless byways, which keep me provided with breathable air. They are the work of forest voles and I have cleverly incorporated them into my overall design. They offer me the opportunity of sniffing the air some way off, and thus afford me further protection; also they are conduits for all sorts of small creatures which I eat up, so that I enjoy a certain modest amount of game, sufficient to keep body and soul together, without even having to leave my burrow, which of course is a considerable asset.

The most delightful aspect of the burrow, though, is its silence – a deceptive silence, admittedly, one that can suddenly be broken, and then all bets are off, but for the time being it still endures. I can creep for hours on end through my passageways and hear nothing beyond the occasional rustle of some small creature which I can put a sudden stop to with my teeth, or the trickling of some loose soil that serves to indicate the timeliness of some repair or other – otherwise all is silence. The forest air blows in, it’s simultaneously warm and cool; sometimes I lie down and roll around in a passage for the sheer joy of it. It’s a fine thing to have such a burrow as old age approaches, to have a roof over one’s head as the autumn begins.

Every hundred yards or so I widen out the passageways to little round plazas, where I can comfortably curl up, warm myself and rest. There I sleep the sweet sleep of peace, of assuaged appetite, of an objective attained, of home ownership. I don’t know whether it’s an atavistic instinct or whether the perils of even this edifice are still such as to rouse me, but periodically I wake up in panic out of a deep sleep, listen to the silence, which day and night never varies, smile with relief, and lapse back with limbs relaxed into a still deeper sleep. Poor vagrants, without a home, on the roads, in the forests, at best finding temporary refuge in a pile of leaves or amongst a horde of fellow creatures, exposed to the full vindictiveness of heaven and earth! While I lie here in a plaza secured in every direction – I have more than fifty of them in my burrow – and between drowsing and profound unconsciousness I pass the hours that I select for the purpose.

Not quite at the heart of the burrow, well selected for the eventuality of extreme danger, perhaps not of pursuit, but certainly of a siege is my central plaza. While everything else may be the work more of a concentrated mind than body, this citadel is in all its parts the product of the very hardest manual labour. Several times extreme physical exhaustion almost led me to abandon the task; I rolled on my back and cursed the project, dragged myself outside and left the burrow untenanted. I could afford to do so, seeing as I had no intention of returning to it, until, hours or even days later, I ruefully returned to it, almost raising a hymn on finding the structure intact, and joyfully resumed my labours. The work on the citadel was more difficult than it had to be, by which I mean that the burrow as a whole did not benefit from it; it was simply that the earth at the place where I had decided to situate my citadel happened to be very loose and sandy and needed to be pounded down, to create a large, beautiful curved surface. I spent whole days and nights ramming my forehead thousands of times into the soil, I was happiest when bloodied, because that meant the walls were beginning to acquire firmness, and so, as may be conceded, I earned the rights to my citadel.

In this citadel I keep my provisions: everything I manage to hunt down within the burrow that exceeds my immediate demands, and also everything I bring back from outside is piled up here. The citadel is so spacious that half a year’s supplies do not fill it. This enables me to keep my holdings nicely spread out, so that I can walk up and down among them, play with them, rejoice at their quantity and their various odours, and retain an overall sense of what is what. Then I can always make adjustments and, according to the season, make the necessary advance calculations and foraging plans. There are times when I am so abundantly catered for that, out of indifference towards food, I don’t lay a finger on the small fry that like to scuttle around here, though that may be incautious for other reasons. Because I am so regularly preoccupied with defensive preparations, my views regarding the exploitation of the burrow for such purposes are subject to constant revision, though within narrow parameters. Then it will seem to me to be asking for trouble to base the defences entirely around the citadel: the extension of the burrow offers similarly extensive possibilities, and it seems more in accord with prudence to keep my provisions a little spread out, and to keep various smaller plazas stocked with them; and then I will decree that every third plaza is to be a reserve storage depot, or every fourth one a principal depot and every second one an auxiliary depot, and so on and so forth. Or I will keep some pathways clear – for reasons of deception – of the piles of supplies, or I will make spontaneous selections of a mere handful of plazas, purely according to their position vis-à-vis the exit. Every successive plan entails much onerous lifting work; I need to make the calculations and then carry the goods back and forth. Of course I can do so in my own sweet time, without undue haste, and it’s not such a hardship to carry the good things in one’s mouth, stop for a rest when one feels like it, and have a nibble of whatever happens to take one’s fancy. What’s worse are certain times, usually when I wake in panic, when it seems to me that the current disposition is wholly mistaken, fraught with danger, and needs to be instantly corrected, without regard to my general fatigue and exhaustion, because then I will hurry, then I will fly, because I have no time to make any calculations as I move to execute some carefully honed new plan. I grab randomly what I can between my teeth, drag, lug, sigh, groan, stumble, until some chance shift in my prevailing, excessively dangerous state of mind puts a stop to this, and I gradually come round, sober sense returns, and I barely understand my over-hastiness. Then I inhale deeply the peace of my home that I have myself disturbed, return to my sleeping place, fall asleep on the spot in new-won exhaustion, and when I wake find I have as incontrovertible proof of my almost dream-like night’s work, a rat or something hanging from my teeth. Then there are other times when the siting of all provisions in one place is the way to go. What use to me are the supplies in little out-of-the-way plazas, how much is it even possible to store there, however much I take, it will only get in the way and perhaps even obstruct me in my effort either to defend myself or else to run away. Moreover, it’s a foolish but true fact that one’s morale suffers when one cannot see all one’s stockpiles in one place, taking in at a glance what one has. Is it not possible, too, for things to get lost in the course of constant moving? I can’t forever be galloping along my cross-passageways and rat-runs to see that everything is in proper order. The basic idea of a distribution of supplies may be correct, but really only when one has several sites at one’s disposal like my citadel. Several such sites! If only! But who could build on such a scale? Also, it would be impossible retrospectively to integrate them in the overall plan.

I will admit that this is a flaw in the design, just as it is always a flaw to have no more than one of anything. And I concede too, that during the original construction, I had a dim sense, though clear enough when I thought about it, that on some level I had a yen for a plurality of citadels; I didn’t give into it, I didn’t feel up to such an enormous task; yes, I felt too weak even to imagine the required labour, and somehow consoled myself with other feelings no less vague that what would ordinarily not be sufficient, would in my own exceptional case, by special grace, be so, probably because providence had a particular interest in the preservation of my steam-hammer brow. And so it is that I have only the one citadel, while the vague feelings that this one of all would this time be sufficient – they no longer exist. With things as they are, I must needs content myself with the one, the little plazas can’t possibly replace it, and so I then begin again, when the feeling has grown in me, to drag everything back out of the little plazas to my citadel. For a little while then, it’s a great comfort to me to have all the passageways and nodal points free, to watch the quantities of meat once again piling up in the citadel, wafting out to the outermost passageways their mingled odours which delight me as I stand far away identifying their respective provenances. Outstandingly peaceful times have often followed, in which slowly and step by step I move my sleeping-sites back from the outer periphery to the interior, diving deeper into the world of the odours, until I can no longer stand it, and one night I charge to the citadel, conduct a massive clean-up operation, and gorge myself to the point of utter insensibility on the best things I have. Happy days, but dangerous, and anyone with the ability to exploit them could easily destroy me at little risk to themselves. Here too, the want of a second or third citadel makes itself felt, as it is the great and singular accumulation of provisions that undoes me. I seek variously to protect myself – the allocation of foods to the smaller plazas being one such stratagem – unfortunately, like the other strategies, it leads through privation to even greater rapacity, which overpowers my logical mind and leads me to make unwarranted changes to the overall defences.

After such episodes, I tend to review the burrow in a bid to pull myself together, and after the needful repairs have been effected, I will often leave it altogether, if only for a brief stretch. The punishment of being gone for long seems to me too harsh, though I accept the need for occasional absences. There is always a certain feeling of formality when I approach the exit. During periods of domesticity I tend not to go there, even avoiding the upper reaches of the passageway altogether, nor is it at all easy to wander about there, because of the crazy zigzag of passageways I laid out; that was where my burrow began, back when I had little hope of ever fully realizing my blueprints, so I began almost a little whimsically, and the early pleasure I took in the work found expression in a labyrinth that at the time seemed to me the crown of all edifices, but which I deem today, probably more correctly, as a rather baroque bit of decoration, not really up to the standard of the whole thing, though perhaps amusing enough when viewed independently – here, make yourselves at home, I liked to quip to my invisible foes, and thought of them all choking to death in the initial labyrinth – but in reality it was no more than a rickety bit of ornamentation that would hardly be able to withstand a serious onslaught or a foe desperately struggling for his life.

Should I therefore rebuild it? I keep postponing the decision, and expect it will probably stay the way it is. Apart from the labour it would entail, it would also be about the most dangerous project one could imagine; at the time I embarked on the burrow, I was able to work there relatively undisturbed, the risk was not appreciably greater than any other time, whereas today it would amount to almost wantonly alerting the whole world to the existence of my burrow; today it’s no longer possible. I am almost glad about this, a certain sentimental regard for this first example of my handiwork is of course also a factor. Besides, if a great attack should come, what style of entrance would save me? An entrance can deceive, distract, torment an attacker, and this one does some of all three. But a really concerted attack is something I would have to seek to oppose immediately with all the resources of the burrow as a whole and all the forces of my body and soul – just to state the obvious. So let the entrance stay the way it is. The burrow has so many naturally occurring weaknesses anyway, let it also keep this one that was all my own work, as I have belatedly but now all too well come to recognize. All this is, of course, not to say that I’m not occasionally, or even permanently, disquieted by this weakness. If I avoid this section of the burrow in the course of my wanderings, then it is principally because its aspect is disagreeable to me; I don’t always care to be confronted by visible evidence of a shortcoming of the burrow when such shortcomings are too much present in my awareness anyway. Even if the mistake up there at the entrance endures forever, I would like to be spared the sight of it for as long as I may. Even if I am only heading in the general direction of the exit, and whole plazas and passageways still separate me from it, I still have the sense I am entering into an atmosphere of great danger; it feels sometimes as though my fur were thinning out, as though I might be standing there stripped to my moulted flesh, and be at that moment greeted by the howls of my enemies. Yes, perhaps the mere fact of an exit is enough to precipitate such unhealthy feelings, it marks the limits of the protections of home, but it is also this specific entryway that especially pains me. Sometimes I dream I have converted it, rebuilt it radically, from the ground up, or down, rapidly, with a giant’s strength, unnoticed by anyone, and now it is impregnable; and there is no sweeter sleep than on such nights, tears of joy and relief still glitter in the hairs of my beard when I awake from it.

I need to overcome the ordeal of this labyrinth when I go out, and then I find it both irritating and moving to get lost for a moment in my construction, and see the work still striving to justify its existence to me, even though my opinion of it was fixed long ago. But then I arrive under the moss cover, which I sometimes allow – that shows how long a period I don’t leave my home for – to knit together with the forest floor, and now all that is needed is just a little bunt of the head, and I am out in the open. For a long time I forbear to make the required movement, and if I didn’t have the labyrinth to negotiate, then who knows, I might just turn tail and go back inside. After all, why not? Your home is secure and well protected; you live in peace, are warm and well-fed, the master – sole master – of a multiplicity of passageways and plazas, and all that you are willing, if not to sacrifice, then at least to put at risk; you have every possibility of being able to reconquer it, but you agree to play a dangerous, even a madcap game with it. Are there any sensible reasons for doing so? No, there can be no sensible reasons for such a risk. But then I cautiously push open the trapdoor and I’m outside; I slowly let it fall back, and, as quickly as I can, sprint away from the tell-tale spot.

But I’m not really in the open – true, I’m no longer squeezing myself through the passageways, and instead am racing around the woods, feeling a surge of fresh strength in my limbs, for which the burrow seems to have, so to speak, no room, not even in the citadel, even if it were ten times its present size; also provisioning is better outside, hunting may be more difficult, and successes rarer, but the results are in every respect superior. I will deny none of this, and I appreciate it and enjoy it, at least as much as any other creature, and probably rather more, because I don’t hunt in the manner of a vagrant, foolishly or desperately, but calmly and with a sense of purpose. I am not made for life out of doors or condemned to it, because I know my time there is limited. I can’t hunt around there for ever, but when I am ready, so to speak, and tired of the upper life, I will be summoned by someone whose invitation I am unable to refuse. And so I am able to make the most of my time there, or rather I could or should have been able to, only I can’t. I am preoccupied with my burrow. I rush away from the exit, but it’s not long long before I’m back there. I look for a good observation post, from where I survey the entrance to my dwelling – this time from outside – for entire days and nights. Call me foolish, but doing so gives me deep satisfaction and even reassurance. I have the feeling then that I am not standing in front of my dwelling, but rather in front of my sleeping self, as though I had the good fortune to be at one and the same time fast asleep and to keep a vigilant eye on myself. I am, so to speak, set apart, permitted to see the shapes of night not only in the helplessness and trust of sleep, but to meet them in reality fully alert and with the calm judgement of one awake. And I find then that in an odd way I am not so badly off as I was inclined to think and probably will think again when I climb down into my abode. In this respect – and probably in others as well, but certainly in this one – my excursions are truly invaluable. Yes, however deliberately I built my entrance off to the side – where the overall plan imposed certain constraints – the footfall there, on the basis of say a week’s observations, is very great, but perhaps that’s the case in all inhabited areas, and it may well be better to be exposed to more footfall, which, by sheer press of numbers is more likely to carry on past, than to be exposed in eremitic isolation to a single diligently searching intruder. Here there are many foes and still more enemy supporters, but they get in each other’s way and in their distractedness go chasing past my burrow. I have never seen anyone actually nosing around the entrance, to my joy and no doubt theirs too, because mad with anxiety, I would certainly have hurled myself at their throats. And then there were others who came close whom I did not dare to interfere with, and from whom, if I so much as sensed them in the distance, I would have been compelled to flee; I oughtn’t really to express myself with any degree of confidence regarding their behaviour vis-à-vis my burrow, but it is probably enough to reassure me that I returned shortly afterwards, found none of them there anymore and my entrance undamaged. There were happy times in which I could almost tell myself that the world had ceased or at least relaxed its opposition to me, or that the mighty scale of the burrow had taken me out of the struggle for survival that had been mine until then. The burrow perhaps affords more protection than I thought, or that, when inside it, I dared to suppose. It went so far that I sometimes had the childish wish never to return to it, but to settle down somewhere near the entrance, to spend my life observing the entrance, and to concentrate and to find my happiness in the sure way the burrow – had I been inside it – would have kept me safe. Well, one often awakes in panic from childish dreams. What kind of protection did I think I might be observing? Is it even possible to judge the degree of danger in the burrow on the basis of what I experience whilst outside it? Are my foes able to perceive anything properly when I’m not in the burrow? Yes, they will have some awareness of me, but not full awareness. And isn’t the sense of full perception what one needs to judge normal dangers? So these are only partial or semi-experiments I am conducting here, calculated to afford me relief, only for their false reassurance to lay me open to greater dangers. No, I’m not watching over my own sleep, as I thought I was; rather, I’m the one who’s asleep, while my destroyer awaits. Perhaps he is among those who casually stroll past the entrance, just making sure, as I do, that the door is still intact and awaiting attack, strolling past because they know perfectly well that the master is not within or even that he is lurking in the shrubbery not far away. And I leave my observation post and feel fed up with life in the open; I feel that being here has nothing more to teach me, not now and not later. And I feel very much inclined to say goodbye to everything here, to climb down into my burrow and never come out again, let things take whatever course they will, and not try to delay them by any more useless observations. But spoiled by the fact that I’ve been allowed to watch everything that was happening by the entrance for such a long time, it feels particularly tormenting to go through the really eye-catchingly conspicuous procedure of descent and not to know what is going on behind my back, much less what will happen once the trapdoor has closed behind me. First I make trial runs on stormy nights, rapidly throwing down my prey – that appears to work, but whether it actually works will only be revealed once I have climbed down myself; it will become apparent – though not to me, or if to me, then only once it is too late. So I desist from that, and don’t climb down myself. I dig, of course, at a suitable distance from the actual entrance, a trial hole, no wider than I am, and also sealed off by a layer of moss. I creep into that hole, cover it over after me, wait through carefully calculated shorter and longer intervals at various times of day, then throw off the layer of moss, come out and make my observations. My experiences are very varied, both good and bad, there seems to be no general law or infallible method of climbing in. As a result I am both grateful not to have climbed into the actual entrance and frantic because I will soon have to. I am not a million miles from the decision to go right away, to take up the old cheerless life that offered no security whatever, that was nothing but an unending string of perils with each individual danger correspondingly impossible to identify and to counter, as the contrast between my secure burrow and the rest of life continually teaches me. Of course, a decision like that would be complete folly, produced by too much time spent meaninglessly at large; still, the burrow is mine, I have only to take one or two steps and I will be in safety. And then I break free of all my doubts and make a beeline for the door in plain daylight, determined to raise it up; but I somehow can’t do it, I run past it, and deliberately fling myself into a thorn bush in order to mortify myself, to punish myself for a fault I can’t identify. Because in the end I have to tell myself that I was right and that it really is impossible to descend without exposing the dearest thing I have to all around, for at least a moment – on the ground, in the trees, in the air. And the danger is not imaginary, it’s very real. It doesn’t have to be an actual foe that I provoke to follow me; it can perfectly well be a little innocent, some repulsive little female, pursuing me out of curiosity and so, without knowing it, becoming the leader of the world against me. It doesn’t have to be that either, perhaps it’s – and this is no better than the other; in some respects it’s the very worst – perhaps it’s someone of my own sort, an expert in burrows, some denizen of the forest, a lover of peace, but also an uncouth savage who wants to be housed without going to the trouble of building anything. If only he would come now, if only he discovered my entrance with his filthy greed, if only he started working on it, lifting up the moss; if only he could do it, if he were to swiftly shoulder his way in, and was already in so far that only his behind for a moment was still visible – then at last I could run at him; free of all concerns I could leap at him, bite him, tear his flesh, chew it and drain his blood and cram his carcass down there with the rest of the quarry; above all, though, and this is the main thing, I could be back in my burrow, and this time happy to admire the labyrinth, first of all, however, pulling the cover of moss shut after me, to rest, I think, for what remained of my life. But no one comes, and I am still dependent on myself. Constantly obsessed with the difficulty of the manoeuvre, I lose much of my timidity, I no longer physically avoid the entrance, I start circling around it, it’s become my favourite occupation, almost as though I was the enemy now, exploring the best opportunity to stage a successful break-in. If only I had someone I could trust, whom I could set in my observation-post, then I could calmly make my descent. I would arrange for my ally to observe the scene during my descent and for a long time after, and, in case of any signs of danger, to tap on the moss cover, or not as the case may be. Then everything above me and behind me would be tickety-boo, there would be nothing left – or just my trusted ally. Because if he doesn’t ask for anything in return, not so much as a tour of the burrow, and even that – willingly admitting someone into the burrow is something I would find extremely difficult; I built it for myself, not for visitors – I think I would refuse; even at the price that he would make it possible for me to get into the burrow, I think I wouldn’t admit him. But how could I admit him anyway, because then either I would have to let him go in by himself, which is beyond imagining, or we would have to go down together, which would annul the advantage he is supposed to give me – that of making his observations when I am in. And what about trust? The fellow I put my trust in when I look him in the eye, can I trust him as much when the moss is between us and I can no longer see him? It’s relatively easy to trust someone when you have him under observation, or at least are in a position to observe him; perhaps it’s even possible to trust someone at a distance, but to trust someone on the outside from within the burrow, and so from within a different world, that I think is impossible. But who needs such doubts; it’s enough to think of all the innumerable pitfalls that, during or after my descent, could prevent my confidant from fulfilling his duty, and the incalculable consequences for me of even the most minor hitch. No, taking everything together, I shouldn’t even lament the fact that I am alone, and have no one I can trust. I am sure that costs me no advantage, and it probably saves me from some harm. Trust is only to be placed in myself and the burrow. I should have thought about that sooner, and made some arrangements for the contingency that is currently preoccupying me. It would have been at least partly possible at the inception of the building. I should have designed the first passageway in such a way that it had two entrances at a suitable distance from one another, so that I could have entered in one place with the inevitable palaver, quickly crossed to the second entrance, lifted the moss there – which would have to have been adapted a little to the purpose – and spent a couple of days and nights on the qui vive. That’s the only way it could have been right; of course two entrances means a doubling of the risk, but that consideration would have had to be quelled particularly as one of the entrances, which would only have been conceived as an observation point, could have been kept very narrow. And with that I lose myself in technical deliberations, and I start to dream my old dream of the perfect burrow again; that calms me down a little; enraptured and with eyes closed I imagine distinct and less distinct architectural features to enable me to slip in and out unobserved.

As I lie there thinking, I rate these features very highly, but only as technical accomplishments, not as real advantages, because what, when it comes down to it, is the point of this unhindered slipping in and out? It all points to an unquiet mind, an uncertain sense of self, unclean appetites, bad habits, which will all become much worse in view of the burrow that is standing there, capable of imbuing me with peace, if only I open myself to it wholly. Now of course I am outside, and seeking a possibility of re-entering it, that’s where technical modifications would indeed be very desirable. In my present state of anxiety I tend to underestimate the burrow, seeing it merely as a hole in the ground, to be crawled into as safely as possible. Of course, it is such a hole, or ought to be, and if I merely imagine I am beset with dangers, then with gritted teeth and all the willpower at my command, I want the burrow to be nothing but a hole designed for my salvation, and that it might fulfil this clearly set task to the greatest degree possible, and I don’t greatly mind what else it is or can be. But the situation is that in reality – that reality for which in moments of panic one has little sense, and even in tranquil times, it is a perspective that takes some acquiring – it may afford considerable security, but not enough, for do one’s worries ever quite stop when in it? They are other, prouder, more substantial, often greatly repressed worries, but their consuming effect is perhaps the same as those worries that life outside affords. If I had only conceived the burrow for my personal security, then I would not have been cheated, but the relationship between my vast labour and any actual security, at least inasmuch as I am able to feel it and profit from it, would not be a favourable one from my point of view. It’s a painful admission to make, but it has to be done, particularly in view of the entrance over there, which seems to seal itself against me, the builder and owner – yes, positively to be clamped shut. But that’s the thing: the burrow isn’t just a hole to dive into! When I’m standing in the citadel, surrounded by my towering stocks of meat, facing the ten exits that radiate from there, each one fulfilling its role in the overall plan, going up or down, straight or curved, widening or narrowing, and all equally silent and empty and ready, each one after its fashion all set, to lead me on to the numerous plazas, and these too all of them empty and silent – then I have little thought of security, then I know exactly that this is my castle, which I carved out of the recalcitrant earth by scratching and biting, stamping and butting, my castle that can never belong to another in any way, that is so much mine that in the end I can take the mortal wound from my foe quite calmly, because my blood will drain away into my soil, and will not go to waste. And, other than this, what is the point of the lovely hours that I like to spend half peacefully asleep, half joyfully awake in my passageways, these passageways that are so nicely adapted for my personal use, for luxurious stretching, for childish rolling around, for dreamily lying there and then blissfully dropping off to sleep and the little plazas, for all their uniformity of appearance, each one well known to me, each one effortlessly identified by the curve of its walls, they enfold me peacefully and warmly, as no nest enfolds a bird. And all – all! – silent and empty.

But if that’s the case, what am I hesitating for, why am I more afraid of the intruder than of the possibility that I may perhaps never see inside my burrow again? Well, this last is happily an impossibility, I have no need to rationalize what the burrow means to me, I and the burrow belong together in such a way that I could calmly, perfectly calmly, for all my fears, settle here, not even seeking to persuade myself to open the entrance; it would be absolutely enough if I were to wait here idly, because in the long run nothing can separate us, so certain am I that I will descend there again. But how much time may pass until then, and how many things can happen in that time, here as much as down there? And it’s purely up to me to try and reduce that period of time, and to do the requisite thing right away.

And now, unable to think for tiredness, with head hanging and shambling legs, half asleep, more groping than walking, I go over to the entrance, slowly lift the moss, slowly climb down; out of sheer distraction I leave the entrance uncovered for an unnecessarily long time, but then call myself to order, climb back up to make amends, but then why climb up? It’s only the moss cover that needs to be pulled shut – all right – so I climb back down, and now at last I pull the moss cover shut. It’s the only way I can settle this thing, in such a state. Then I lie under the moss on top of the quarry I’ve dropped, bathed in blood and meat juices, and finally begin to sleep the longed-for sleep. Nothing is bothering me, no one has followed me, above the moss things at least appear to be peaceful and even if it weren’t so, I am past the stage of being able to observe; I have changed places, I have returned to my burrow from the upper world, and I feel the effect immediately. It’s a new world that gives me fresh strength; whatever in the upper world felt like tiredness doesn’t apply here. I have come home from a journey, crazed with tiredness, but the reunion with my old premises, the settling-in activities that await me, the need to give all the rooms at least a superficial inspection, but above all to go through to the citadel – all that transforms my tiredness into restlessness and enthusiasm, it’s as though during the moment of my re-entering the burrow I had taken a long and restorative nap. The initial work is very laborious and claims me utterly: getting the quarry through the narrow and thin-walled passages of the labyrinth. I press forward with all my strength, and I am making headway, but progress is far too slow; to speed things up, I tear off some of the mass of flesh and force my way past the rest, shuffle through it, now I have just a little bit in front of me, now it’s easier to transport, but I am caught in the middle of my meat supplies here in the narrow passageways that I don’t always find it easy to get through when unencumbered, I could even asphyxiate in my own provisions, sometimes I can only keep them at bay by guzzling and swilling them down. But I get through, I make reasonable time, the labyrinth is negotiated; sighing with relief, I stand in one of the standard-gauge passageways, bundle the quarry down a rat-run into a main passage steeply sloping down to the main plaza, designed for just such eventualities. Now my labour’s over, the whole kit and caboodle rolls and trickles down almost by itself. Finally back in my citadel! All is unchanged, no major calamities seem to have happened, such minor damage as I take in at a glance will be put right in no time. But first I have to face the long wanderings through the passageways, but that’s no effort, that’s like chatting with friends, just as I did in the old days, or – I’m not that old, but my memory for some things has dimmed – as I did or heard of others doing in the old days. I start out deliberately slowly on the second passageway; after inspecting the citadel I have endless time, whenever I am in the burrow I have endless time, because everything I do there is good and important and, if you like, sustaining. I start out on the second passageway, then break off the inspection halfway, cross to the third passageway and follow it back to the citadel, and now I need to take the second passageway again, and I’m toying with the work, and adding to it and laughing to myself and delighting in it and my head is spinning with all the work, but I don’t stop. It’s for your sake, you passageways and plazas and above all you, my citadel, that I’ve come here, setting my life at nothing after trembling over it for so long from sheer stupidity, merely postponing my return. What do I care now about danger, since I’m with you? You belong to me, I belong to you, we’re together, what can happen to us? Even if the creatures up above are milling around, and their snouts are itching to push through the moss. With its silence and emptiness the burrow welcomes me back and echoes what I say. But now I am overcome by a certain lassitude and roll myself up in one of my favourite plazas; I still haven’t inspected everything by a long way, I want to finish the inspection; I have no thought of sleeping here, I’ve just given into the temptation to stop here for a moment as if I was going to sleep, I want to see if I can still do it like before. Well, it seems I can, but I’m not able to rouse myself, I stay here, fast asleep. I must have been sleeping for a very long time. I am only just waking from the last cycle of sleep; it must have been a very light sleep, because the thing that has awakened me is a barely audible hissing. I straightaway understand that the small fry, far too little attended to by me, have tunnelled some new path while I was away, their path has encountered another, older one, the two airs have collided and produced the hissing sound. What an assiduous crowd they are, and how irksome in their industry! By listening carefully at the walls of my passageways and undertaking trial drillings, I will have to establish the site of the disturbance, and then deal with the noise. Incidentally, the fresh tunnel, if it somehow chimes with the form of the burrow, may come in handy as a new supplemental airshaft. But I mean to pay more attention to the little things from now on; I won’t spare a single one.

Since I have extensive practice with such investigations, it probably won’t take me very long, and I can begin right away – yes, I have other work waiting for me, but this is the most urgent task – I require silence in my passageways. This particular sound is relatively innocent; I didn’t even hear it at first, even though it will have been present already; I had to be fully re-acclimatized to hear it, if you like, it’s a sound that requires the hearing of the owner-occupier doing his proper job. And it’s not even constant, as such sounds tend to be, there are long breaks in it, evidently a function of occasional blockages in the air-flow. So I commence my investigations, but I am not able to find the right spot to intervene; I start a few random excavations, of course nothing turns up, and the great labour of digging and the still greater labour of filling in and making good is all in vain. I don’t even succeed in coming any closer to the source of the sound: it continues reedily at regular intervals, sometimes like hissing, sometimes more like whistling. I could ignore it for the time being; I do find it terribly disruptive, but there is little doubt as to its presumed source, so it will hardly grow any louder; on the contrary, it’s been known – admittedly, I’ve hardly ever cared to wait that long – for such sounds to disappear by themselves over time owing to the further efforts of the little burrowers; and that aside, some chance event often leads one along the trail of the disturbance, while more systematic investigation can turn up nothing for long periods. So I comfort myself, and would rather wander through the passageways and visit the plazas, many of which I have not yet revisited, and in between times treat myself to periodic visits to the citadel; but it won’t let go of me, I am compelled to go on looking. A lot of time, a lot of time, time for which I have better uses, is taken up by the little folk. On these occasions, it is usually the technical difficulty that attracts me. I imagine, for instance, based on the sound that my ear from long experience is able to analyse minutely, in scrupulous detail, the exact cause and then I am compelled to check whether the reality bears any relation to it. With good reason, because without a positive identification I am unable to feel safe, even if it’s just a matter of knowing which way a grain of sand will go as it rolls down a surface. A noise like that is by no means unimportant in such a context. But important or not, and try as I may, I find nothing, or rather, I find too much. It had to happen in my favourite plaza, I think to myself, and I go far away from it, almost halfway to the next plaza; the whole thing is a joke really, as though I wanted to prove that it wasn’t my favourite plaza that has disappointed me, but that the disturbances are elsewhere, and smiling, I set myself to listen; then, I kid you not, I hear the same hissing sound here as well. It’s nothing; sometimes I think no one but me would be capable of hearing it; admittedly, with my practised ear, I am hearing it ever more distinctly, even though in reality it’s exactly the same sound, as I can tell by making the comparison. Nor does it get any louder, as I can tell by leaving the wall and standing in the middle of the passage and listening. It takes considerable concentration, even immersion, to pick up the ghost of a sound, which is more guessed at than actually heard. But it’s this constant volume all around that I find most disturbing because it won’t permit itself to be reconciled with my original assumption. If I had correctly guessed the source of the noise, then it should have been loudest from a specific place that I would have had to discover, and then be diminishing from there. But if my explanation wasn’t correct, what else could it be? There remained the possibility that there were two centres of the sound, that I had thus far picked up equally distant from both of them, and that as I approached one, the volume from it would increase, but by simultaneously decreasing as I left the other one, the overall volume remained more or less constant. I almost thought that, when I listened intently, I could hear differences in quality that bore out the new hypothesis, though these were extremely hard to make out. At any rate, I would have to greatly extend the area of my operations. So I follow the passage down to the citadel and start to listen there. Curious, it was the same sound here as well. Now it’s a sound produced by the digging of some inconsequential animals that have made use of my absence to get up to no good; at any rate there is no question of any threat to myself, they are purely concerned with their work, and so long as they encounter no obstruction, they will carry on in the same direction; I know all that, but even so it baffles me and excites me and confuses the faculties I need for my work that they have dared to penetrate as far as the citadel. In that respect I’m not interested in any distinctions: was it the considerable depth at which the citadel is located, was it its great extension and the corresponding strong movement of air, which frightened the diggers, or was it simply the fact that it was the citadel – the absolute grandeur of the place – that had got through to their dull wits by some agency or other? Thus far at least I had not observed any excavations touching the walls of the citadel. Animals sometimes came here, in numbers, drawn by the powerful exudations; this actually is where I had some of my best hunting, but they usually dug their way in somewhere up above, struck a passageway, and came down it – sheepishly maybe, but powerfully attracted nonetheless. Whereas now they were apparently coming through the walls. If only I had managed to follow through on the grand plans of my youth and early manhood, or if only I had had the strength to carry them out, because it wasn’t that I lacked the willpower. It was one of my most cherished plans to seal off the citadel from the soil around, walling it in but only to a thickness roughly corresponding to my own height, and above that to create a hollow space – on a narrow foundation unfortunately not entirely separable from the soil – going all around the citadel. This hollow space I had imagined – and surely rightly – would have provided the most beautiful accommodation I could ever have had. To dangle on the curve, to pull myself up, to slither down, to turn somersaults and once again feel the ground under my feet, and all these games literally on the body of the citadel, though not in its actual confines; to be able to avoid the citadel, to allow my eyes to relax from it, to put off the joy of seeing it again to some future time, and yet not to be away from it, but to have it literally in my grasp, something that is impossible if one has nothing but the humdrum open approach to it; and above all to be able to guard it, to be so amply compensated for the inability to see it that certainly, had there been a choice between remaining in the citadel or the hollow, then certainly you would have chosen the hollow space for the rest of your days, always promenading up and down there, protecting the citadel. Then there would be no noises in the walls, no impertinent digging up to its purlieus, then peace would be guaranteed, and I would be its guarantor, I wouldn’t be listening, nauseated, to the scrabbling of small fry, but with rapture to something I totally miss: the sound of silence over the citadel.

But none of this beauty exists, and I need to go about my work; I should be almost glad that the citadel is involved, because that will lend me wings. It increasingly appears that I will need all my strength for what at first seemed a rather modest task. I listen attentively now to the walls of the citadel and wherever I press my ear, high and low, to the walls or to the ground, at the entrances or deep within, everywhere I hear the same sound. And how much time, how much concentration goes on picking up this sporadic sound. If you want, you can take some little comfort from the fact that here in the citadel, as opposed to the passageways, if you take your ear off the ground, you hear nothing – that’s a function of the dimensions of the citadel. It’s only to rest, to bring myself back to reality that I periodically undertake these trials, and then I’m happy when I hear nothing. What’s happened, after all? My first attempts at an explanation totally failed in the face of this phenomenon. But then I must quickly reject other accounts that present themselves. You might suppose that what I am hearing is the small fry at work. But that would fly in the face of all experience; something I have never heard before, that was always present – I can’t suddenly overnight have begun to hear it. My sensitivity to disturbances in the burrow has perhaps become more acute over the years, but my actual hearing can’t have become keener. It’s in the nature of the little creatures that one doesn’t hear them, or else I would never have tolerated them; at the risk of starving, I would have exterminated them. But maybe – I have a sneaking suspicion – this is some animal I am unacquainted with. It’s a possibility; of course I’ve observed the forms of life here below minutely and for a long time, but the world is varied, and one is never short of nasty surprises. It couldn’t be a single specimen, there would have to be a major herd of them that had suddenly moved into my territory, a major herd of small animals, that, since they are at least audible, must be larger than the small fry, if not by much, since the noise of their labour is still quite faint. So they could be animals unknown, a migratory herd moving through, disturbing me, yes, but not here for very long. I could wait it out, and avoid doing unnecessary work. But if they are new animals, why is it I have yet to see them? I have undertaken much digging to try and nab one of them, but I haven’t succeeded. It occurs to me that they might be really tiny creatures, much smaller than the varieties known to me, and that the only considerable aspect of them is the noise they make. I go back through my spoils, toss the lumps of soil up in the air to break them up into tiny bits, but I find no trace of the noise-makers. It dawns on me gradually that these random excavations are not the way to go; I will end up tunnelling through the walls of my burrow, scraping up something here and there, but not taking the time to repair the cavities; already, many places have heaps of earth blocking the path and the view. I may find it only marginally upsetting that I can neither walk around nor look nor rest, and often I find I’ve nodded off over my work in some hole or other, one paw clawed into the soil I wanted to pull a piece out of with the last of my energy. I will change my methods. I will construct a wide trench in the direction of the noise, and not stop digging until, regardless of my theorizing, I have succeeded in finding the true source of the noise. Then if it is in my power, I will deal with it, and if not, I shall at least have some certainty. This certainty will bring me either calm or turmoil, but whichever it is, there will be no doubt about it and it will be justified. This resolution does me good: everything I’ve done so far strikes me as having been over-hasty, attributable to the excitement of returning home, not yet free of the alarms of the upper world, and not yet fully reabsorbed into the tranquillity of the burrow; still over-sensitized by having gone without it for so long, I have allowed myself to be utterly distracted by a new and admittedly remarkable phenomenon. So what is it? A gentle hiss, only audible at long intervals, nothing at all really, you might get used to it, well, maybe not that, but you could be content merely to observe it for a while, give it a watching brief, i.e. listen in every few hours or so and patiently note the results, but not do as I did and rub your ear along the walls, and scratch open the ground almost every time you pick up the sound, to no end, other than to express your inner disquiet. That’s all about to change now, I hope. And then again, I don’t hope – as I admit to myself with eyes closed, furious with myself – because I am trembling with this agitation every bit as much as I was hours ago, and if common sense didn’t hold me back, I would probably just start digging somewhere else, regardless of whether I heard anything there or not – dully, stubbornly, just for the sake of digging, not so very different from the small fry that digs for no reason, or only because they eat the soil. My sensible new plan both tempts me and doesn’t. There are no objections to it, at least I know of none; it is bound, as I see it, to lead to a result. And all the same, at some level I don’t trust it, I have so little faith in it that I am not even alarmed by the possible terrors of what it may ultimately turn up, I don’t even believe in the terror; yes, it seems to me that from the very first appearance of the noise, I had thought of such a purposeful excavation, and the only reason I didn’t embark on it was because I had no confidence in it.

Of course I will begin to dig such a trench: I have no other choice; but not right away, I will put off the work a little, until common sense has returned to me, I won’t plunge into it. First I’ll make good the damage I’ve done to the burrow with my scrabbling around; that will take some time, but it’s important; the new trench will in all probability be long if it does actually get anywhere, and if it leads nowhere, it will be positively unending; at any rate that work will require a longer period of absence from the burrow, not so much maybe as lately in the upper world, and I can break off the work when I feel like it and go on visits home; and even if I don’t, the air from the citadel will still waft across to me, and accompany me while on the job, but it still entails a period of absence from the burrow proper and the surrender to an uncertain destiny, so let me at least ensure that I leave the burrow in good order; I don’t want it to appear that in fighting for my peace and quiet, I ended up destroying it and leaving it derelict. So I begin scraping the soil back into the holes, work I know intimately, I’ve done it thousands of times almost without feeling that it was a job at all, and that, especially as regards the final pressing down and smoothing out – this is not patting myself on the back, it’s the simple truth – I am a past master at. This time, though, it feels hard, I’m absent-minded, I keep stopping to press my ear to the wall to listen, indifferently letting pawfuls of earth I’ve just hoisted up trickle back down the slope. The final cosmetic improvements, which call for heightened concentration, are almost beyond me. Ugly bulges are left, unsightly cracks, not to mention the fact that overall it’s impossible to give a patched piece of wall any of the old elan. I try to console myself by saying it’s just a provisional job. When I’m back, once peace has been restored, I can give it a proper professional going-over, and it will all be done in the twinkling of an eye. In fairy tales, things are forever being done in the twinkling of an eye, and this bit of consolation is no more than a fairy tale. It would be so much better to do the job properly now, much more practical than forever interrupting it, traipsing through the passages and identifying fresh places where I can hear the noise; which is actually terribly easy, because it involves nothing more than stopping pretty much anywhere at random and listening. And then I make further unhelpful discoveries. Sometimes it feels as though the noise has stopped – you remember there are long pauses – sometimes you can ignore a little hiss, because of the way the blood is throbbing in your ear, then two pauses merge into one, and for a while you imagine the hissing has stopped for good.

You stop listening, you leap up, life is turned upside down, it’s as though a source has opened from where the silence of the burrow streams forth. You do anything rather than check your new discovery, you go looking for someone you confided it to unquestioned before, you race off to the citadel, you remember that with everything you are, you have awakened to a new life, that it’s ages since you had anything to eat, you grab a handful of something from the now somewhat soiled provisions, and are still gulping it down as you run back to the place where you made your incredible discovery; at first you want nothing more than casually, fleetingly, while snacking, to hear it again, you cock an ear, but the merest half-attention is enough to tell you that you’ve made a howling blunder, because there’s the hissing again merrily in the distance. You spit out what’s in your mouth and feel like treading it into the ground, and you go straight back to work, though you’re not sure where to start, some place where something needs doing, and there’s no shortage of those, so you mechanically get busy doing something, as if a foreman has arrived on site and you had to put on a bit of a show for him. But after you’ve been working in that style for some little time, you make your next discovery. The noise seems to have got louder, not much louder, of course, but distinctly louder, you can clearly hear it. And this sounding louder seems to suggest a coming closer, and much more clearly than you hear the louder sound, you seem to see the pace at which it is getting nearer. You recoil from the wall; you try to take in all the possible implications of this latest discovery. You have the feeling you never really put the burrow on any sort of proper defence footing; you meant to, of course, but contrary to all the lessons of life you thought the danger of an attack and hence the putting on a defence footing was remote, or if not remote (how could that be possible!), then at least less important than designing it for a peaceful life, which was what became your priority throughout the burrow. A lot of things could have been done in that other direction, without even changing the basic design, but over the years quite unaccountably it hasn’t been done. I’ve been lucky over all these years; luck made me its darling. I was uneasy, but unease within an overall context of luck doesn’t matter.

The thing to do now, and urgently, would be to revisit the burrow with a view to its defence, imagine every conceivable defensive modality, then come up with a strategy and a concomitant schedule of work, and then straightaway embark on it, as fresh as a youngster. That would have been the thing, for which, as I say, it is too late, but that would have been what was needed, not all the digging of some kind of massive experimental trench that actually serves no purpose, which leaves me defenceless even as I put all my strength into seeking out the danger, as if it couldn’t come along soon enough at its own speed. All of a sudden I no longer understand my own earlier plan, the once rational scheme seems to be wholly unreasonable; once again I drop my work and I stop listening too; I no longer want to come upon any more reinforcements; I’ve had enough of these discoveries; I drop everything; I would be perfectly happy if only I could succeed in resolving my own inner turmoil. Once again, I allow myself to be drawn away by my passages, I come to others, ever more remote, that I have not seen since my return and are still untouched by my scrabbling claws, whose silence is roused by my coming and settles over me. I don’t surrender to it though, I don’t even know what I’m looking for, probably just to pass the time. I wander around until I get to the labyrinth, I am drawn to listen at the moss cover; these are the remote objects, remote at any rate for the time being, that hold my interest. I go up there and listen. Profound silence; how I love it, no one disturbs my burrow here, everyone has his own business which has nothing to do with me, how ever did I manage to get to this point? Here under the moss is now perhaps the only place in my burrow where I can listen for hours and hear nothing. A complete reversal, my vulnerable point has become a place of peace, while the citadel has been polluted by the noise and perils of the world. And worse, even here there is in reality no peace, nothing has changed, silent or rackety, danger lurks just as it did above the moss, but I have become insensitive to it, too much preoccupied with the hissing within my walls. Am I overwhelmed by it? It grows louder, it comes closer, but I wend my way through the labyrinth and stop up here under the moss, it’s almost as if I were leaving the building to the hisser, happy just to have a little peace up here. The hisser? Am I coming to a different and definitive sense of the source of the noise? The noise surely comes from the runnels dug by the small fry? Isn’t that my settled opinion? I don’t think I’ve departed from it. And if it doesn’t come directly from their runnels, then somehow it does so indirectly. And if it should be nothing to do with them, then there are no assumptions to be made, and one would have to wait for the source to appear or to be found. One could even now be toying with suppositions; it would be possible to say for instance that a water leak must have happened far away, and what I take to be a hissing or whistling is actually a rushing sound. But quite apart from the fact that I have no experience of this sort – the one time I stumbled upon ground water I immediately diverted it and it never came back in this sandy soil – apart from that it remains a hissing and is not to be misinterpreted as a rushing. But what good are all one’s injunctions to remain calm: the imagination refuses to rest and I still insist on believing – pointless to deny it to oneself – that the hissing comes from an animal, not from many little ones, but a single big one. There are things that suggest otherwise: the fact that the sound may be heard from all over, and always at the same volume, and indifferently day and night. Of course, one’s first assumption would be that there are many small animals, but since I surely would have encountered them in the course of my digging and haven’t, what I am left with is the existence of a single large animal, especially as what seems to contradict this assumption are just things that don’t rule that out, but merely make it dangerous beyond all imagining. That’s the only reason I refused to credit this hypothesis. Now I will desist from this self-deception. For a long time I’ve toyed with the idea that the reason it can be heard a long way away is because it’s working furiously, its progress through the soil is like a pedestrian’s over the ground, the earth shakes all around its digging, even when it’s passed through, this after-quake and the sound of its working are merged in the great distance, and I, hearing just the last ebbing away of the sound, hear it everywhere the same. What contributes to this is the fact that the animal is not heading towards me, which is why the noise doesn’t change, rather it has a plan whose purpose I can’t detect, but I have to assume that this animal – perhaps without even being aware of my existence – is encircling me, it has probably already traced several circles around my burrow since I first became aware of it. And now it seems the noise is getting louder, which means the circles are closing in. What gives me pause is the quality of the sound, the hissing or whistling. When I scrape and scratch at the soil in my way, it sounds very different. The only way I can account for the noise is by saying to myself that the principal tools of this animal are not its claws – though maybe they are used in some auxiliary way – but its snout or trunk, which, aside from its immense strength, evidently must have some kind of edge as well. Presumably it drills its trunk into the soil with a single mighty thrust and rips out a large piece of it, and all this time I hear nothing – this is during the pause – but then it draws breath for a fresh thrust, and this drawing of breath, which must be an earth-shattering sound, not just on account of the animal’s brute strength, but also because of its haste, its zeal, this sound comes through to me as a soft hissing. What I remain unable to account for is its uninterrupted working, perhaps the rhythmic intervals allow it tiny rest periods, but it hasn’t needed a substantial period of rest yet, day and night it digs, always equally fresh and strong, with its mind focused on the plan it wants to carry out, and for which it possesses all needful attributes. Now, I wasn’t ready for such an opponent. But apart from its idiosyncratic qualities, all this just betokens something I always had cause to fear, and should always have made preparations for: someone is coming. How was it, I wonder, that things remained blissfully quiet for so long? Who so directed the paths of my opponents that they made great detours around my property? Why was I kept sheltered for so long, only to be so alarmed now? What were all those minor threats I spent my time thinking through, compared to this one! Did I hope, as owner of this burrow, to prevail against all comers? When, as owner of this great and sensitive work, I am truly defenceless against any serious attacker, when the joy of ownership has spoilt me, the burrow’s vulnerability has rendered me vulnerable, its injuries hurt me as much as if they had been mine own. This is what I should have thought about in advance, not just my own defence – though how irresponsibly and inconsequentially I did that! – but that of the burrow. Care should have been exercised that individual parts of the burrow, and as many of these as possible, if they came under attack, should have been targeted by landslides that could be arranged at a moment’s notice, to separate the attacker from the less exposed parts, and by using such quantities of earth and to such effect that the attacker would not even have guessed that the actual burrow still lay ahead of him. And more, these landslips should have been calculated not merely to conceal the burrow, but also to bury the assailant. And I didn’t undertake the least step in this direction, I was childishly irresponsible, I spent my adult years with childish things; even the thought of danger to me was something to play with and I neglected to think about actual dangers. And there was no shortage of warnings either. Not admittedly anything on the scale of the present warnings, but still there was something similar during the infancy of the burrow. I was working then as a sort of junior apprentice on the first passageway – the labyrinth had been laid out in a crude way, I had already hollowed out the first little plaza, but its dimensions and the finish of the walls were inadequate; in short, everything was so much in its initial stages that it could only be accounted a trial, something that, when your patience gives out, you could abandon without any great regrets. Then, during one of the breaks in the work – all my life I allowed for far too many breaks in the work – I was lying among piles of soil and suddenly I heard a sound in the distance. Young as I was, I was more curious than frightened. I dropped my work and settled myself to listen, at least I knew to listen and wasn’t running up to the moss to stretch my limbs and not hearing anything. At least I was listening. I could clearly tell that there was digging, like mine, a little feebler from the sound of it, but how much of that was attributable to the distance I couldn’t tell. I was excited, but somehow remained calm. Perhaps I am in someone else’s burrow, I thought, and the owner is on his way. If that had turned out to be the case, then I, who have never been aggressive or acquisitive, would have decamped, to build elsewhere. But remember I was still young and without a burrow of my own, so I could still be calm and collected. What happened next provoked no greater excitement; it was just hard to interpret. If the party digging was really trying to get to me because he had heard me digging, then, if he really was changing direction, as he seemed to be doing, it wasn’t easy to tell whether he was doing so because I, by stopping, had robbed him of his sense of direction, or if he had merely changed his mind. Perhaps I had deceived myself entirely, and he had never been making for me; at any rate the noise for a while grew louder, as though he was drawing nearer, and as a young person I might not even have been unhappy to see the digger suddenly rise up through the soil, but nothing of the sort happened; from a certain point on, the sound of digging began to weaken, it grew quieter and ever quieter, as though the digger had gradually changed direction, and suddenly it stopped altogether, as though he had decided in favour of a completely different direction and was moving away from me into the distance. I listened for him in the silence for a long time before getting back to work. Well, the threat was clear enough, but soon enough I forgot all about it, and it barely had any effect on my building plans.

Between that time and the present I came to man’s estate, but it still feels as though nothing has really happened, I still make great pauses in my work and listen at the wall, and the digger has again changed his intentions, he has turned tail, he is coming back from a journey, he thinks he has left me enough time to get ready to welcome him. But on my side, everything is even less prepared than it was then, the great burrow lies defenceless, and I am not a little apprentice any more, I am an old master builder and whatever strength I still have denies itself to me when it comes to making a decision. But however old I am, it seems to me that I wouldn’t mind being older still, so old that I couldn’t even get up from my billet under the moss. Because in reality I can’t stand it here, I hurtle down into the burrow as though I had filled myself with fresh anxieties and not with calmness. What was the state of things now? Had the hissing got quieter? No, it had grown louder. I listen at ten random spots and my mistake is clear to me: the hissing has remained the same, nothing has changed. There are no changes over there; they are quiet and unworried about time, while here every instant jolts me, the listener. And I take the long way down to the citadel, everything around me seems in a state of turmoil, seems to be staring at me, seems to be avoiding my eye, so as not to disturb me, and then strains to read the saving intentions from my expression. I shake my head, I have none as yet. Nor do I go to the citadel to carry out any sort of plan. I pass the place where I was going to start digging the trench, I test it again, it would have been a good place, the trench would have gone in the direction where most of the little airshafts are, which would have greatly facilitated the work, perhaps I wouldn’t even have had to dig all that far, wouldn’t have had to dig as far as the source of the noise, perhaps further listening at the airshafts would have sufficed. But no thought is strong enough to motivate me for this trench-digging. So this trench is to give me certainty? I have reached a point where I don’t even want certainty. In the citadel I select a nice piece of skinned red meat and crawl off onto one of the earth piles, there will be silence there, inasmuch as there is any silence still to be had anywhere. I lick and nibble at the meat, think by turns of the strange animal making its way in the distance and then of me and the time I have remaining to enjoy my stockpiles. This last is probably the only realistic plan I have. Otherwise, I am trying to second-guess the animal. Is it migrating or is it working on its own burrow? If it’s migrating, then it might be possible to come to some accommodation with it. If it breaks through into my terrain, then I can give it some of my provisions, and it will be on its way. Yes, it will want to be gone. On my pile of earth I can of course dream of everything, even of accommodation, even though I know for a fact that such a thing is impossible and that the moment we clap eyes on each other, yes, even the moment we sense one another’s proximity, both equally insensate, neither first, neither second, with a wholly new hunger, even if in other respects we are completely satiated, we will bury our claws and teeth into one another. And as ever, so here with all justification, because even if he’s migrating, who, in view of this burrow, wouldn’t change his plans? But maybe the animal is digging in his own burrow, in which case I mustn’t even dream of an accommodation. Never mind that it’s such an exotic animal that its burrow would tolerate a neighbour, I know that mine won’t, at least not one within earshot. Now the animal admittedly seems to be very far off, if only it would withdraw a little further, maybe the sound would disappear too, perhaps then everything would turn out as before, then it would remain a grim but harmless experience, it would spur me on to the varied improvements, when I have calm and am no longer under the immediate press of danger, I am capable of quite respectable work. Maybe, given all the extraordinary possibilities of its technique, the animal will give up and stop extending its burrow in the direction of mine, and will compensate itself in the other direction. That too is not something that can be arranged by negotiation, but purely by the mind of the animal itself, or through some force exerted from my side. Either way, what will be decisive is whether and what the animal knows of me. The more I think about it, the more unlikely it seems to me that the animal has even heard me; it’s possible, if hardly likely, that it has had some news of me, without hearing me. As long as I hadn’t known about it, it won’t have heard me at all, because I was keeping quiet, there is nothing more quiet than the reunion with the burrow; then, when I embarked on my relief trench, it might have been able to hear me, even though my style of digging is really terribly discreet; whereas if it had heard me, I surely would have noticed something, it would have stopped in its work from time to time to listen – but everything went on unchanged—