Erewhon Revisited

of being great at conjectural emendations. “Can you not see how impossible it is for the Sunchild, or any of the people to whom he declared (as we now know provisionally) that he belonged, could have made the forgiveness of his own sins depend on the readiness with which he forgave other people? No man in his senses would dream of such a thing. It would be asking a supposed all-powerful being not to forgive his sins at all, or at best to forgive them imperfectly. No; Yram got it wrong. She mistook ‘but do not’ for ‘as we.’ The sound of the words is very much alike; the correct reading should obviously be, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, but do not forgive them that trespass against us.’ This makes sense, and turns an impossible prayer into one that goes straight to the heart of every one of us.” Then, turning to my father, he said, “You can see this, my man, can you not, as soon as it is pointed out to you?”

My father said that he saw it now, but had always heard the words as he had himself spoken them.

“Of course you have, my good fellow, and it is because of this that I know they never can have reached you except from an Erewhonian source.”

Hanky smiled⁠—snorted, and muttered in an undertone, “I shall begin to think that this fellow is a foreign devil after all.”

“And now, gentlemen,” said my father, “the moon is risen. I must be after the quails at daybreak; I will therefore go to the ranger’s shelter” (a shelter, by the way, which existed only in my father’s invention), “and get a couple of hours’ sleep, so as to be both close to the quail-ground; and fresh for running. You are so near the boundary of the preserves that you will not want your permit further; no one will meet you, and should anyone do so, you need only give your names and say that you have made a mistake. You will have to give it up tomorrow at the Ranger’s office; it will save you trouble if I collect it now, and give it up when I deliver my quails.

“As regards the curiosities, hide them as you best can outside the limits. I recommend you to carry them at once out of the forest, and rest beyond the limits rather than here. You can then recover them whenever, and in whatever way, you may find convenient. But I hope you will say nothing about any foreign devil’s having come over on to this side. Any whisper to this effect unsettles people’s minds, and they are too much unsettled already; hence our orders to kill anyone from over there at once, and to tell no one but the Head Ranger. I was forced by you, gentlemen, to disobey these orders in self-defence; I must trust your generosity to keep what I have told you secret. I shall, of course, report it to the Head Ranger. And now, if you think proper, you can give me up your permit.”

All this was so plausible that the Professors gave up their permit without a word but thanks. They bundled their curiosities hurriedly into “the poor foreign devil’s” blanket, reserving a more careful packing till they were out of the preserves. They wished my father a very good night, and all success with his quails in the morning; they thanked him again for the care he had taken of them in the matter of the landrails, and Panky even went so far as to give him a few Musical Bank coins, which he gratefully accepted. They then started off in the direction of Sunch’ston.

My father gathered up the remaining quails, some of which he meant to eat in the morning, while the others he would throw away as soon as he could find a safe place. He turned towards the mountains, but before he had gone a dozen yards he heard a voice, which he recognised as Panky’s, shouting after him, and saying⁠—

“Mind you do not forget the true reading of the Sunchild’s prayer.”

“You are an old fool,” shouted my father in English, knowing that he could hardly be heard, still less understood, and thankful to relieve his feelings.

V

My Father Meets a Son, of Whose Existence He Was Ignorant; and Strikes a Bargain with Him

The incidents recorded in the two last chapters had occupied about two hours, so that it was nearly midnight before my father could begin to retrace his steps and make towards the camp that he had left that morning. This was necessary, for he could not go any further in a costume that he now knew to be forbidden. At this hour no ranger was likely to meet him before he reached the statues, and by making a push for it he could return in time to cross the limits of the preserves before the Professors’ permit had expired. If challenged, he must brazen it out that he was one or other of the persons therein named.

Fatigued though he was, he reached the statues as near as he could guess, at about three in the morning. What little wind there had been was warm, so that the tracks, which the Professors must have seen shortly after he had made them, had disappeared. The statues looked very weird in the moonlight but they were not chanting.

While ascending, he pieced together the information he had picked up from the Professors. Plainly, the Sunchild, or child of the sun, was none other than himself, and the new name of Coldharbour was doubtless intended to commemorate the fact that this was the first town he had reached in Erewhon. Plainly, also, he was supposed to be of superhuman origin⁠—his flight in the balloon having been not unnaturally believed to be miraculous. The Erewhonians had for centuries been effacing all knowledge of their former culture; archaeologists, indeed, could still glean a little