eir heads into
a sort of organ-pipe, so that their mouths should catch the wind and
sound with its blowing. It was horrible. However brave a man might be,
he could never stand such a concert, from such lips, and in such a place.
I heaped every invective upon them that my tongue could utter as I rushed
away from them into the mist, and even after I had lost sight of them,
and turning my head round could see nothing but the storm-wraiths driving
behind me, I heard their ghostly chanting, and felt as though one of them
would rush after me and grip me in his hand and throttle me.

I may say here that, since my return to England, I heard a friend playing
some chords upon the organ which put me very forcibly in mind of the
Erewhonian statues (for Erewhon is the name of the country upon which I
was now entering). They rose most vividly to my recollection the moment
my friend began. They are as follows, and are by the greatest of all
musicians:--{2}

[Music score which cannot be reproduced]

CHAPTER VI: INTO EREWHON

And now I found myself on a narrow path which followed a small
watercourse. I was too glad to have an easy track for my flight, to lay
hold of the full significance of its existence. The thought, however,
soon presented itself to me that I must be in an inhabited country, but
one which was yet unknown. What, then, was to be my fate at the hands of
its inhabitants? Should I be taken and offered up as a burnt-offering to
those hideous guardians of the pass? It might be so. I shuddered at the
thought, yet the horrors of solitude had now fairly possessed me; and so
dazed was I, and chilled, and woebegone, that I could lay hold of no idea
firmly amid the crowd of fancies that kept wandering in upon my brain.

I hurried onward--down, down, down. More streams came in; then there was
a bridge, a few pine logs thrown over the water; but they gave me
comfort, for savages do not make bridges. Then I had a treat such as I
can never convey on paper--a moment, perhaps, the most striking and
unexpected in my whole life--the one I think that, with some three or
four exceptions, I would most gladly have again, were I able to recall
it. I got below the level of the clouds, into a burst of brilliant
evening sunshine, I was facing the north-west, and the sun was full upon
me. Oh, how its light cheered me! But what I saw! It was such an
expanse as was revealed to Moses when he stood upon the summit of Mount