Around the World in Eighty Days, Chapters Nine to Eleven

In which the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean show themselves propitious to Phileas Fogg's designs, Passepartout is only too happy to get off with the loss of his shoes, and Phileas Fogg buys a conveyance at a fabulous price; and in which our narrator anxiously awaits our heroes' arrival in America, where he will not have to look up pronunciations of words and names with possibly archaic spellings every other sentence.



For real, I had forgotten just how many foreign place names are in this book, which seems an odd thing to forget about a book that's completely about traveling to a bunch of foreign places. I've tried to look up proper pronunciations for all of them (leading to these entries taking much longer to create than normal), but some of them don't have pronunciation guides I can find, or sometimes perhaps spellings that aren't used anymore and I can't find anything about them at all, so I just faked it as best I could. I apologize for any mispronunciations setting your teeth on edge every time you hear them.

Illustrations!

8:12 - They put in at Steamer Point.

Oh, and a couple of notes: Several mentions are made, starting at 1:50 of Sepoys, who are basically (as the text indicates) Indian soldiers. At 4:22, reference is made to the historians/geographers Strabo, Arrius (which looks like it actually refers to Arrian), and Artemidorus (not to be confused with this Artemidorus, who apparently wrote books about the divinitory meanings of dreams, or something.) 

9:12 - Passepartout, according to his custom, loitered about.

17:52 - The dancing girls in Bombay.

19:24 - He upset two of his adversaries.

The brigadier-general thinks about how Phileas Fogg's trip lacks transire benefaciendo, which is a Latin phrase meaning essentially "to travel and do good," something which Phileas certainly has no time for.

25:02 - The steam twisted itself into spirals.

At 25:08, the text defines "vihara" as a sort of abandoned monastery, but it seems that these specifically Buddhist monasteries are still very much in use.

At 27:30, Passepartout blames Mr. Fogg in petto for not bribing the railway engineer, with in petto meaning "privately." No, no big fight between master and servant.

Among the methods of transportation found at the end of the railway line, we hear about zebus, which are more or less as the text described them: "humped oxen;" palanquins, which is another word for "litters," those chairs or small rooms carried on poles by servants; and four-wheeled palkigharis, which I have NO IDEA what it is. The closest I can find is the palki, which appears to be another form of litter, which makes no sense with "four-wheeled." I dunno.

31:41 - They found there a half-tamed animal.

Last, the mahout (handily defined in the text) loads two howdahs on the back of the elephant for our heroes to ride in, where a howdah is, well, a carriage put on an elephant's (or sometimes a camel's) back for people to ride in, though it sounds in this case like it's not sitting atop the elephant's back, but more hanging on either side, like saddlebags.


If you would like to read along, I unfortunately can't find my translation by Stephen W. White online, but the George Towele translation can be found at Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection, which is also where I got the illustrations, or the more accurate but rather fusty Henry Frith translation at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!