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 from museums, and from volumes hard to come by, and still
harder to understand; but archaeologists were few, and even though they
had made researches (which they may or may not have done), their labours
had never reached the masses. What wonder, then, that the mushroom spawn
of myth, ever present in an atmosphere highly charged with ignorance, had
germinated in a soil so favourably prepared for its reception?

He saw it all now. It was twenty years next Sunday since he and my
mother had eloped. That was the meaning of XIX. xii. 29. They had made
a new era, dating from the day of his return to the palace of the sun
with a bride who was doubtless to unite the Erewhonian nature with that
of the sun. The New Year, then, would date from Sunday, December 7,
which would therefore become XX. i. 1. The Thursday, now nearly if not
quite over, being only two days distant from the end of a month of thirt