Erewhon, or, Over the range / by Samuel Butler with introduction and notes by Kenji Ishida.

  • Samuel Butler
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Erewhon, or, Over the range / by Samuel Butler with introduction and notes by Kenji Ishida. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    going higher and higher, I would look down upon a sea of whiteness, through which would be thrust innumerable mountain tops that looked like islands. I am there now, as I write ; I fancy that I can see the downs, the huts, the plain, and the river-bed— that torrent pathway of desolation, with its distant roar of waters. Oh, wonderful! wonderful I so lonely and so solemn, with the sad grey clouds above, and no sound save a lost lamb bleating upon the mountain side, as though its little heart were breaking. Then there comes some lean and withered old ewe, with deep gruff voice and unlovely aspect, trotting back from the seductive pasture; now she examines this gully, and now that, and now she stands listening with uplifted head, that she may hear the distant wailing and obey it. Aha ! they see, and rush towards each other. Alas I they are both mis¬ taken ;the ewe is not the lamb’s ewe, they are neither kin nor kind to one another, and part in coldness. Each must cry louder, and wander farther yet; may luck be with them both that they may find their own at nightfall. But this is mere dreaming, and I must proceed. I could not help speculating upon what might lie farther up the river and behind the second range. I had no money, but if I could only find workable country, I might stock it with borrowed capital, and consider myself a made man. True, the range looked so vast, that there seemed little chance of getting a sufticient road through it or over it; but no one had yet explored it, and it is wonderful how one finds
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