Watership Down

>Even in the dry heat of summer's end, the great forest was never silent. Along the ground - soft, bare soil, twigs and fallen branches, decaying leaves black as ashes - there ran a continuous flow of sound. As a fire burns with a murmur of flames, with the intermitting crack of exploding knots im the logs and the falling and settling of coal, so on the forest floor the hours of dusky light consumed away with rustlings, patterings, sighing and dying of breeze, scuttlings of rodents, snakes, lizards and now and then the padding of some larger animal on the move. Above, the green dusk of creepers and branches formed another realm, inhabited by the monkeys and sloths, by hunting spiders and birds inumerable -creatures passing all their lives high above the ground. Here the noises were louder and harsher - chattering, sudden cacklings and screams, hollow knockings, bell-like calls and the swish of disturbed leaves and branches. Higher still, in the topmost tiers, where the sunlight fell upon the outer surface of the forest as upon the upper side of an expense of green clouds, the raucous gloom gave place to a silent brightness, the province of great butterflies flitting across the sprays in a solitude where no eye admired nor any ear caught the minute sounds made by those marvelous wings. The creatures of the forest floor - like the blind, grotesque fish that dwell in the ocean depths - inhabited, all unaware, the lowest tier of a world extending vertically from shadowless twilight to shadeless, dazzling brilliance. Creeping or scampering upon their furtive ways, they seldom went far and saw little of sun and moon. A thicket of thorn, a maze of burrows among tree-trunks, a slope littered with rocks and stones - such places were almost all their inhabitants ever knew of the earth where they lived and died. Born there, they survived for a while, coming to know every inch within their narrow bounds. From time to time a few might stray farther -- when prey or forage failed, or more rarely, through the irruption of some uncomprehended force from beyond their daily lives.