Philip Jose Farmer (12 page)

“Transmit, for the love of God! And of Passepartout!” the Frenchman cried. “Transmit! Transmit!”

A shout came from above. Passepartout looked upward, and his eyes rolled.

“Mother of Mercy! They will shoot straight down! They cannot...”

His words were beaten into thin sheets by the terrible nine clangings. And they were deaf again, though happy. At least, Passepartout smiled. The expression of Fogg, holding to the cord minus its load, did not change. A second later, both were busy hanging onto Kiouni. It took half an hour to get the nerve-shattered animal back to the buried distorter.

Arriving at the desired spot, Passepartout descended from the elephant, dug up his watch, cleaned its surface, and reattached it to his old watch chain.

On the slow journey back up the slope, Passepartout said, “Sir, is it permitted to ask a question?”

“Certainly,” Fogg said, “though the answer may not be permitted.”

“One certainly carried an unusual number of unusual watches.”

“That is an observation, not a question.”

“But where are these deadly watches obtained? I have seen nothing to indicate their existence. No one could have slipped them to you en route, surely?”

“They were originally in my bureau in my house. A man who runs his life by the watch would not seem out of character if he had some spare chronometers.”

“But how did you, sir, get them past my eyes? I am not altogether dull-eyed.”

“They were in my vest from the beginning.”

“Ah! And if a prying Capellean had found them and opened them for examination?”

“The first one to be tampered with would have blown up in his face.”

“But, sir, I might have found one and, being curious...”

“Then you would have discovered that there are certain things into which you should not pry.”

Passepartout was silent for a while. He wiped the sweat off his face and said, “And the rajah’s distorter? Was that a bomb you attached to it?”

“Set to go off when we were transmitted.”

Passepartout exclaimed with delight.

“And now we will return to London? We have killed a major Capellean and destroyed their distorter.”

“That is the third question, and you stated that you had only one in mind.”

There was another silence. A leopard screamed in the distance. Mr. Fogg said, “We will not return. The bet has not been canceled.”

“And this dangerous man of whom you spoke?”

“He is the one I told you to watch for while we were on the 
Mongolia
. And there are no more watches.”

Passepartout wished to ask more questions but was deterred by Fogg’s tone of finality.

 11 

When they returned to the bungalow, they found the Parsi still snoring beneath the tree and Sir Francis in the same position in which they had left him. They restored Kiouni to his spot beneath the tree where the beast, half-asleep, began ripping off branches and stuffing them into his mouth. Fogg and Passepartout crept into the bungalow, lay down, and this time both slipped away.

Two hours later, they were awakened by the Parsi. Mr. Fogg asked him if he was tired because of standing watch all night. The Parsi replied that he did not feel in the least fatigued. He could go for several days without a wink of sleep. Mr. Fogg, of course, made no comment.

At six o’clock, two refreshed and two tired men crawled onto the elephant. Kiouni, despite lack of food and sleep, seemed to have vast reservoirs of strength. He went almost as speedily as the day before. Nevertheless, the guide remarked about the beast’s tendency to shy at any sudden movements of the brush or the animals in it. And they had to pause for half an hour to allow 
Kiouni to eat and so quell some of the rumblings in his stomach.

They passed down the lower branches of the Vindhya Mountains and near noon went by a village on the Kani River, a branch of the great Ganges. The mahout steered Kiouni away from habitations for safety’s sake. Mr. Fogg agreed privately with this decision. The dead rajah’s men would be out looking for them. There was no reason to trouble the Parsi and the general with the story of last night, which, in any event, they would not have believed.

When Allahabad was twelve miles away, they stopped by some banana trees to refresh themselves and Kiouni. Around two, they plunged into another dense jungle. Passepartout was happy that they were so hidden in this but was apprehensive about their nearness to the capital city of Bundelcund. Two hours later, they were still in the dense forest, though the Parsi said that they would soon be out. Passepartout was about to ask him how soon was soon when the beast suddenly stopped.

“What the devil now?” Sir Francis said, sticking his head out of the howdah.

“I do not know, sir,” the Parsi said.

They heard voices, as of many people, coming through the jungle. After a few minutes, they could distinguish both voices and musical instruments of brass and wood. The Parsi descended, tied Kiouni to a tree, and wriggled away through the bush. In a moment, he returned.

“A procession of Brahmins approaches. We must hide.”

He untied the rope from the tree and led the animal with its riders into the green thickness. From their vantage, the three on Kiouni could see the procession. First came priests, then 
many men, women, and children. The crowd was singing a sad chant intermingled with the beat of tambourines and the clash of cymbals and the wailing of pipes and the strumming of various stringed instruments. After the crowd came a large car with huge wheels drawn by four zebus.

Sir Francis, seeing the hideous statue in the car, whispered to the others, “It’s Kali, the goddess of love and death.”

“Perhaps she is of death,” Passepartout said. “But of love? That old hag? Never!”

The Parsi gestured for silence.

A mob of long-bearded and naked old fakirs were dancing wildly around the idol and cutting themselves with knives.

After them came more Brahmins. They led a young woman who did not seem to be a voluntary member of the parade. Despite her dull expression and dragging steps, she was beautiful. Her hair was black, and her eyes were brown, but her skin was as free of pigment as any Yorkshireman’s. She wore a gold-edged tunic and a light muslin robe which clung to a splendid figure. Bracelets, rings, and earrings set with jewels of many kinds loaded her down.

Accompanying her were men evidently charged with seeing that she did not run away. These carried sabers and long decorated pistols. Four of them also carried a palanquin on which lay a richly dressed corpse.

Fogg said nothing. Passepartout hissed with astonishment. The body was that of the rajah of Bundelcund.

Behind it were musicians and more dancing bloodied fakirs.

Sir Francis, looking sorrowful, said, “It’s a suttee.”

When the parade had passed, Fogg said, “What is a suttee?”

This seems a strange thing for the highly knowledgeable Fogg to ask. Perhaps Verne inserted this question to give Sir Francis a chance to enlighten the reader.

“A suttee is a voluntary human sacrifice. The woman you’ve just seen will be burned at dawn tomorrow.”

“Oh, the scoundrels!” Passepartout cried.

“And the corpse?” Mr. Fogg asked.

“It is that of her husband, an independent rajah of Bundelcund.”

Fogg said, emotionlessly, “Is it possible that these barbarous customs still exist in India? Why haven’t we put a stop to them?”

“They have been terminated in most of India. But we have no power in the savage areas and especially in Bundelcund. The whole district north of the Vindhyas is the theater of unceasing murders and pillage.”

“The miserable woman!” Passepartout said. “Burned alive!”

Sir Francis explained that if a widow somehow got out of the sacrifice, she would be treated with utmost contempt by her relatives, indeed, by all who knew of her refusal to become ashes with her husband. She would have to shave her head and exist on the scantiest of food. She would be less than a pariah, because even a pariah had his own kind to associate with. Eventually, she would die of shame and heartbreak.

Sir Francis did not know that this was not exactly the case with this poor woman. If she could have escaped from Bundelcund, she would have gone to live with her relatives in far-off Bombay. These were Parsis who did not hold with suttee. This sect, descended from Persian fire worshippers whose prophet was Zoroaster, had customs as different from the Hindus as 
those of the Orthodox Jews from their Gentile neighbors.

The Parsi did not agree with Sir Francis.

“The sacrifice is not willing,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

“Everybody knows about this affair in Bundelcund.”

This statement is another of the many puzzlers in 
Around The World in Eighty Days. The
 Parsi lived only thirty miles from the borders of Bundelcund. Yet, what with the mountains, the jungle, and the isolation of his small village, he might as well have lived three hundred miles away. The Bundelcundians were hostile to his people and were not likely to exchange news with him through the so-called grapevine, even if it existed. And how would he know that the rajah had died? He had spoken to no one except the three Europeans since the journey started, and the rajah had died only the night before. Yet Verne says he knew all about it.

The truth seems to be that none of the travelers could possibly have known about the situation if Verne’s story were as he reported it. Fogg and Passepartout knew, of course, that the rajah was dead. But they could not say so, and Verne was unaware of what had really happened that night.

However, the Parsi did say that the rajah’s widow was drugged with fumes of hemp and opium. This would have indicated to him that she had been put into a state wherein she would not disgrace herself or the community by resisting.

This is what happened. Verne, like every good novelist, had inserted some remarks of a purely fictional character to inform the reader swiftly about what was going on.

Still, would the impulse to save the woman from this 
horrible rite have been strong enough for Fogg to act on it? Why should he have endangered his all-important mission and the wager to attempt a seemingly hopeless rescue? Was it just humanity that caused him to interfere? Perhaps it was. Perhaps there was also the fact, unrecorded by anyone, that Fogg fell in love at first sight with the beautiful woman. But the log reveals that there was another, and no doubt stronger, motive. An Eridanean had been planted in the heart of the rajah’s palace. This was the one who had slipped out a description of the domed room in which the rajah kept his distorter. She, for this Eridanean was female, had gotten as close to the rajah as it was possible for anyone to get. Her beauty and charm enabled her to attract the rajah’s attention easily, and from this to marriage was another easy step.

Fogg had been told all this a long time ago by Stuart via a whist game. This is why, just as the journey was about to be resumed, Fogg said, “Suppose we save this woman?”

Sir Francis exclaimed, “What, save this woman, Mr. Fogg?”

“I have twelve hours to spare. I can devote them to this.”

“Why,” Sir Francis said, “you 
are
 a man of heart!”

“Sometimes, when I have the time,” Fogg replied.

Sir Francis must have wondered about this man whose emotions could apparently be turned on or off as if they ran through a spigot. What he did not know, of course, was that Fogg could not decide whether or not he would have a certain emotion or not. The emotion came, willy-nilly, but he could shunt it aside, store it in neural circuit where the emotional charge ran around and around the track, like a current in today’s superconductive circuit. But he could not kill the emotion, because it would not 
die. Sooner or later, he had to pay for the storage, and he would pay double or treble the bill by the time he released it.

The two other Europeans were all for this idea. But what about the Parsi guide? He could not be expected to risk his life, but he might agree to stay behind and wait for them. Even this would be dangerous for him.

He answered that he was a Parsi and that the woman was a Parsi. He was in this with them all the way.