The Rabbit and the Dragon King

One morning, a sea turtle crawled up onto the sand.

It crawled slowly, as turtles do. But this time it had not come up to bask in the sun. It had come to carry out a task that the whole court beneath the sea had given it.

Old Korean storytellers say it all began on the sea floor, in the palace of the Dragon King.

The king down there was in pain. It was no strange illness. A hook from someone out fishing had caught in his body by bad luck, and no one could work it loose.

The whole palace was thrown into confusion. The court physicians were summoned. They sat in council for a long time, arguing back and forth and leafing through one book of medicine after another.

At last they reached a verdict, and it stunned everyone at court.

For the king to recover, he needed a poultice made from a rabbit's eyes. And the eyes had to be fresh.

The trouble was that rabbits live on land.

Everyone at the sea court looked at one another. No fish could go ashore. No shrimp could climb a mountain.

Then a voice spoke up from the back. It was the turtle.

The turtle explained that it could swim in the water and crawl on land as well. It often came across rabbits on the beach and knew them by sight. So it was sure it could coax one down to the palace.

So the turtle was given the task. That was why, that morning, it crawled up onto the sand.

The turtle searched for a long time and finally found a rabbit sitting on a hillside.

It said nothing about the king. It said nothing about medicine either. It simply started an ordinary conversation and asked a few friendly questions. Then it gave a very soft sigh and began to describe the place where it lived.

Down under the sea, the turtle said, it is beautiful.

There are green forests where the trees sway all day long and are never still.

There are mountains of rock, and the rock is always cool, however hot the summer gets.

There are valleys. There are caves. There are places a rabbit on land could not imagine in a whole lifetime.

The rabbit sat and listened, its ears standing straight up.

The turtle let a silence fall so the words could sink in. Then it said, unhurried, that the rabbit could climb onto its back and be carried down to see for itself. There was nothing to worry about, the turtle said. It was perfectly safe.

The rabbit climbed onto the turtle's back.

There is something here that the tale never says outright, though everyone who hears it notices. Nothing the turtle said about the sea floor was made up. Under the sea there really are swaying forests. There really are cool mountains of rock. There really are caves and valleys. Every word the turtle said about the sea floor was true.

It left out only one detail, and that was the reason for the invitation.

Down below, it truly was beautiful. The water was clear and blue, plants swayed on either side, and the rocks were cool, just as the turtle had said. The rabbit was so busy looking that it forgot all about the way home. It followed the turtle right into the palace.

And there, waiting in front of a door, the rabbit overheard a few words from people talking in the next room.

Those words mentioned medicine. They mentioned the king. And they mentioned the rabbit's own eyes.

What the rabbit did next is the best part of the story.

It did not cry out. It did not run, and running would have done no good anyway, with water on every side. It did not say one word of reproach to the turtle.

It stood still and thought very fast. Then it walked in and spoke as calmly as anything.

"Oh, if only someone had said so sooner," the rabbit said. "The trouble is, we rabbits have two sets of eyes. Our real eyes are very precious, so we bury them carefully in the sand on the shore to keep them from spoiling. The pair on my face is only made of crystal. We wear it just for dusty days. It would be no use at all in a poultice."

The whole palace was bitterly disappointed.

The rabbit went straight on, sounding very eager. "But never mind. Let me make one trip back to the shore. I will dig up my real eyes and bring them right down."

It sounded perfectly reasonable. And the beauty of this lie is that it asked no one to believe in any magic. It rested on one thing nobody under the sea could check. No fish had ever gone ashore to learn how many sets of eyes a rabbit has.

So the turtle carried the rabbit back up to the shore.

The moment it touched the sand, the rabbit leapt off the turtle's back and ran without stopping up the mountainside.

Only when it was safe did it turn around. It called down to the beach, more or less like this: "My real eyes are buried in the sand. Anyone who wants them can go down and dig for them."

Then it vanished into the grass.

From that day on, whenever the rabbit caught sight of the turtle on the beach, it kept far away.

The turtle was left sitting on the sand, facing a wide and endless beach. There was sand everywhere, and not a single pair of eyes was buried anywhere in it.