Around the World in Eighty Days. Junior Deluxe EditionVerne, Jules
General
Around the World in Eighty Days. Junior Deluxe Edition
Verne, Jules
Adventure stories; Voyages around the world -- Fiction
The Rangoon--one of the Peninsular and Oriental Company's boats
plying in the Chinese and Japanese seas--was a screw steamer,
built of iron, weighing about seventeen hundred and seventy tons,
and with engines of four hundred horsepower. She was as fast, but
not as well fitted up, as the Mongolia, and Aouda was not as
comfortably provided for on board her as Phileas Fogg could have
wished. However, the trip from Calcutta to Hong Kong only
comprised some three thousand five hundred miles, occupying from
ten to twelve days, and the young woman was not difficult to
please.
During the first days of the journey Aouda became better
acquainted with her protector, and constantly gave evidence of
her deep gratitude for what he had done. The phlegmatic gentleman
listened to her, apparently at least, with coldness, neither his
voice nor his manner betraying the slightest emotion; but he
seemed to be always on the watch that nothing should be wanting
to Aouda's comfort. He visited her regularly each day at certain
hours, not so much to talk himself, as to sit and hear her talk.
He treated her with the strictest politeness, but with the
precision of an automaton, the movements of which had been
arranged for this purpose. Aouda did not quite know what to make
of him, though Passepartout had given her some hints of his
master's eccentricity, and made her smile by telling her of the
wager which was sending him round the world. After all, she owed
Phileas Fogg her life, and she always regarded him through the
exalting medium of her gratitude.
Aouda confirmed the Parsee guide's narrative of her touching
history. She did, indeed, belong to the highest of the native
races of India. Many of the Parsee merchants have made great
fortunes there by dealing in cotton. One of them, Sir Jametsee
Jeejeebhoy, was made a baronet by the English government. Aouda
was a relative of this great man, and it was his cousin, Jeejeeh,
whom she hoped to join at Hong Kong. Whether she would find a
protector in him she could not tell; but Mr. Fogg tried to calm
her anxieties, and to assure her that everything would be
mathematically--he used the very word--arranged. Aouda fastened
her great eyes, "clear as the sacred lakes of the Himalaya," upon
him; but the intractable Fogg, as reserved as ever, did not seem
at all inclined to throw himself into this lake.
The first few days of the voyage passed happily, amid favorable
weather and propitious winds, and the ship soon came in sight of
the great Andaman, the principal of the islands in the Bay of
Bengal, with its picturesque Saddle Peak, two thousand four
hundred feet high, looming above the waters. The steamer passed
along near the shores, but the savage Papuans, who are in the
lowest scale of humanity, but are not, as has been asserted,
cannibals, did not make their appearance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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