COUNTRY LIFE
THE quarry floor is almost overgrown with fine grass and the place Is a suntrap with the rock walls becoming hot in the afternoon. I sat there watching men `working in the fields on the other side of the valley and, while I was watching, a small stone dropped behind me. I looked up and saw a rabbit scurrying along a ledge. It took shelter in a gorse bush about twenty feet from the ground, but after a while it moved again and eventually gained the lower ground and a clump of weeds. In a few minutes it deserted the weeds and bolted across the road, going through the sheepwire and vanishing among ferns. It had had quite an adventure up along the top of the quarry. I glanced at the way it had come from the grass at the top, down the earth layer, past the bank of ling and on over the dizzy cavern where the cliff had been undermined. Something had started it on that dangerous journey where to turn back might have been fatal. Perhaps, unlike myself, it did not suffer from vertigo, a weakness that kept me on a cliff for an hour when I climbed in search of seabirds' eggs in my boyhood.
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