Ben - Chapter Sixteen

Upon the completion of the roar aforementioned, Ben sat with his bun tail planted into the dirt, eyes crossed and bi-monoculars seated at the wrong angle. Rather dazed and disheveled from the pulsating sound-waves and the rapid flight of the forest faunae.

Then came the sound. The unusual rumble. The sound of liquid, solid and gas passing through a cacophony of living pipes. An organ made of organs. A living thing. A presence. The movement of mountains. The pump on an old ship. The sounds from a horror film. The memories of a mudslide. This rattle of water and air, the jostling, the competition and the buildup.

The zoo of sounds had stopped. The unfamiliar. The stillness and silence even more unsettling. The buildup before the crucial result was announced. The tension.

And just when it was most expected, the rattling started. Like the sound of a Spitfire dying, riddled with Luftwaffe bullet holes, before ditching involuntarily into the sea. The mountain shaker had begun. Ben had read the old parchments and was privy to the whispers, but had never been witness in his own or other generations.

The living mountain of fur and black nostril roared, opening its mouth like a ropax car ferry. The crackling of gas and liquid was unleashed upon the whole forest, like a million hands slapping a million barrels of water in unison to produce this vile trumpeting.

Save for the sound, that almost knocked this rabbit on his head-end for the second time, the smell was something else. Indeed something that this author could not forget to write about. A smell so pungent it could strip the chrome from a tap, could peel even the finest wallpaper from the most coveted trees, and implode coconuts from across the forest.

The sickly gas would remain for some minutes and hide Ben from the inquisitive eyes and nostrils of this vast brown, perhaps smart in smell but not sight or tactics.

Ben used this to his advantage and made a quick exit through the yellow mist. He would live to tell the tale.