Jules Verne Read Free

borders with its
grand frontier of mountains.
    It is now five o'clock. I have no time to deliver myself in a
remunerative torrent of descriptive phrases. Let us hurry off to the
railway station.
    There is a crowd of Armenians, Georgians, Mingrelians, Tartars, Kurds,
Israelites, Russians, from the shores of the Caspian, some taking their
tickets—Oh! the Oriental color—direct for Baku, some for intermediate
stations.
    This time I was completely in order. Neither the clerk with the
gendarme's face, nor the gendarmes themselves could hinder my departure.
    I take a ticket for Baku, first class. I go down on the platform to the
carriages. According to my custom, I install myself in a comfortable
corner. A few travelers follow me while the cosmopolitan populace
invade the second and third-class carriages. The doors are shut after
the visit of the ticket inspector. A last scream of the whistle
announces that the train is about to start.
    Suddenly there is a shout—a shout in which anger is mingled with
despair, and I catch these words in German:
    "Stop! Stop!"
    I put down the window and look out.
    A fat man, bag in hand, traveling cap on head, his legs embarrassed in
the skirts of a huge overcoat, short and breathless. He is late.
    The porters try to stop him. Try to stop a bomb in the middle of its
trajectory! Once again has right to give place to might.
    The Teuton bomb describes a well-calculated curve, and has just fallen
into the compartment next to ours, through the door a traveler had
obligingly left open.
    The train begins to move at the same instant, the engine wheels begin
to slip on the rails, then the speed increases.
    We are off.

Chapter II
*
    We were three minutes late in starting; it is well to be precise. A
special correspondent who is not precise is a geometer who neglects to
run out his calculations to the tenth decimal. This delay of three
minutes made the German our traveling companion. I have an idea that
this good man will furnish me with some copy, but it is only a
presentiment.
    It is still daylight at six o'clock in the evening in this latitude. I
have bought a time-table and I consult it. The map which accompanies it
shows me station by station the course of the line between Tiflis and
Baku. Not to know the direction taken by the engine, to be ignorant if
the train is going northeast or southeast, would be insupportable to
me, all the more as when night comes, I shall see nothing, for I cannot
see in the dark as if I were an owl or a cat.
    My time-table shows me that the railway skirts for a little distance
the carriage road between Tiflis and the Caspian, running through
Saganlong, Poily, Elisabethpol, Karascal, Aliat, to Baku, along the
valley of the Koura. We cannot tolerate a railway which winds about; it
must keep to a straight line as much as possible. And that is what the
Transgeorgian does.
    Among the stations there is one I would have gladly stopped at if I had
had time, Elisabethpol. Before I received the telegram from the
Twentieth Century
, I had intended to stay there a week. I had read
such attractive descriptions of it, and I had but a five minutes' stop
there, and that between two and three o'clock in the morning! Instead
of a town resplendent in the rays of the sun, I could only obtain a
view of a vague mass confusedly discoverable in the pale beams of the
moon!
    Having ended my careful examination of the time-table, I began to
examine my traveling companions. There were four of us, and I need
scarcely say that we occupied the four corners of the compartment. I
had taken the farthest corner facing the engine. At the two opposite
angles two travelers were seated facing each other. As soon as they got
in they had pulled their caps down on their eyes and wrapped themselves
up in their cloaks—evidently they were Georgians as far as I could
see. But they belonged to that special and privileged race who sleep on
the railway, and they did not wake up until we reached Baku. There was
nothing