Village books

The walk over the range
as far as the statues is taken from the Upper Rangitata district,
with some alterations; but the walk down from the statues into
Erewhon is reminiscent of the Leventina Valley in the Canton Ticino.
The great chords, which are like the music moaned by the statues,
are from the prelude to the first of Handel's Trois Lecons; he used
to say:
"One feels them in the diaphragm--they are, as it were, the groaning
and labouring of all creation travailing together until now."
There is a place in New Zealand named Erewhon, after the book; it is
marked on the large maps, a township about fifty miles west of
Napier in the Hawke Bay Province (North Island). I am told that
people in New Zealand sometimes call their houses Erewhon and
occasionally spell the word Erehwon which Butler did not intend; he
treated wh as a single letter, as one would treat th. Among other
traces of Erewhon now existing in real life are Butler's Stones on
the Hokitika Pass, so called because of a legend that they were in
his mind when he described the statues.


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