Around the World in Eighty Days. Junior Deluxe EditionVerne, Jules
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Around the World in Eighty Days. Junior Deluxe Edition
Verne, Jules
Adventure stories; Voyages around the world -- Fiction
Passepartout went timidly ashore on this so curious territory of
the Sons of the Sun. He had nothing better to do than, taking
chance for his guide, to wander aimlessly through the streets of
Yokohama. He found himself at first in a thoroughly European
quarter, the houses having low fronts, and being adorned with
verandas, beneath which he caught glimpses of neat peristyles.
This quarter occupied, with its streets, squares, docks and
warehouses, all the space between the "promontory of the Treaty"
and the river. Here, as at Hong Kong and Calcutta, were mixed
crowds of all races--Americans and English, Chinamen and
Dutchmen, mostly merchants ready to buy or sell anything. The
Frenchman felt himself as much alone among them as if he had
dropped down in the midst of Hottentots.
He had, at least, one resource--to call on the French and
English consuls at Yokohama for assistance. But he shrank from
telling the story of his adventures, intimately connected as it
was with that of his master; and, before doing so, he determined
to exhaust all other means of aid. As chance did not favor him in
the European quarter, he penetrated that inhabited by the native
Japanese, determined, if necessary, to push on to Yeddo.
The Japanese quarter of Yokohama is called Benten, after the
goddess of the sea, who is worshipped on the islands round about.
There Passepartout beheld beautiful fir and cedar groves, sacred
gates of a singular architecture, bridges half hid in the midst
of bamboos and reeds, temples shaded by immense cedar-trees. He
saw holy retreats where there were sheltered Buddhist priests and
sectaries of Confucius, and interminable streets, where a perfect
harvest of rose-tinted and red-cheeked children, who looked as if
they had been cut out of Japanese screens, and who were playing
in the midst of short-legged poodles and yellowish cats, had been
gathered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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