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Places

Page history last edited by Doctor J 16 years, 6 months ago

Places

 

Jess Nevins book Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana is out of print and inaccessible to me. His geocities site contains the draft of the book, but access to it is sometimes limited because it is geocities. I've got saved copies of the entire site on my Mac, but there's one part I thought I needed to share.

 

Virtually every paragraph here would be an adventure or three, and perhaps they can be considered by our grid-builders.


 

Places. In some cases a locale described within a work is of far more interest than the work itself. It might be that the author's invention was wholly devoted to describing the city or country, with little left over for minor things like plot or characterization, or it could be that despite the author's best efforts everything within a story or novel was dull with the exception of the place. Which is why the following is a set of descriptions of places, with the emphasis being on the description of that place, rather than the plot of the story in which it appears, or the biographical information of the author who created the place.

 

Abaton, from Sir Thomas Bulfinch's My Heart's in the Highlands (1892), is a Scots town of variable location, somewhere between Glasgow and Troon. It isn't exactly inaccessible, but somehow no one has yet been able to actually get there. Travelers who've tried to reach Abaton have been known to wander for years and decades without so much as a glimpse of the town. Some rare few men and women have seen it, however, usually at sunrise or sunset, rising slightly above the horizon. The sight of the town affects those who see it most strongly, sometimes bringing great joy and other times great sorrow. No one has ever seen the inside of the town and described it, but the exterior of Abaton is said to be walls and towers of blue, white, fiery red, or yellow, and it is said that a distant and faint music similar to a harpsichord's can be heard coming from the town.

 

Agartha, from Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's Mission to India from Europe (1885), is an ancient kingdom in either Sri Lanka or Tibet (travelers are not sure which, for reasons which are explained below). The kingdom, which may be mythical, would seem to have a strange effect on outsiders: they either do not notice it as they travel through it, or they forget about it once they have seen it. There are many rumors about Agartha, however. It is said that its capital, Paradesa, holds the University of Knowledge, where the occult and spiritual treasures of mankind are guarded. The capital also is home to an enormous gilded throne which is said to be decorated with the figures of two million gods, and it is further rumored that their combined good spirits are what hold the world together; if they are angered by a mortal, their wrath will descend upon the world, drying the seas and smashing the mountains into deserts. Finally, it is said that Agartha holds the world's largest library of stone books, and that strange fauna inhabit the kingdom, including sharp-toothed birds and six-footed turtles as well as the natives, who are born with forked tongues. The guardians of Agartha are the Templars of Agartha, a small but powerful army.

 

Amazonian Republic is a city on the plains near the Ucayali and Maranon Rivers in the Amazon jungle of Peru. (Though the maps say that no such plains exist, our correspondents surely cannot be wrong when they write of the Republic's existence). The Republic was first mentioned in The Amazonian Republic. Recently Discovered in the Interior of Peru (1842) by "Timothy Savage," a pseudonym. The Republic is a city laid out on geometric plans very similar to Washington, D.C.'s. The Republic is in fact made up of Amazons, a culture native to the area which has existed there, in isolation, for centuries, outliving the many other "civilized tribes" who formerly inhabited the plains. (Part of the reason for their secrecy is their isolated location; part of the reason is that the Republic is surrounded by hostile tribes of cannibalistic Indians; and the remainder of the reason is that the Amazons execute strangers who enter their land) The Amazons are matriarchal, with large, strong, aggressive and dominant women and small, weak, and submissive men. The Amazons have a strong military anchored around their infantry and archers. They believe in a benevolent creator goddess and an evil goddess more powerful than the good one and who must be propitiated with sacrifice. Despite their civilization, which includes modern agriculture, complex architecture, a written language and an advanced democratic organization, their society is similar to that of the United States, with long-winded and incompetent politicians and corrupt and irresponsible political journalists.

 

Animas, Monte de Las (Mountain of the Spirits), a mountain near Soria (Spain, in Castile) were first mentioned in Gustavo Adolfo Becquer's "The Mountain of the Spirits" in the magazine Leyendas, in 1871. Sometime during the Middle Ages, after the city of Soria was recaptured by the Knights Templar from the Arabs, the King of Spain gave the mountain to the Knights, asking them to act as protectors as Soria. The lords of Castile took great offense to this invitation, and held a hunt on the mountain in defiance of the Templars' order that none should trespass on their ground. The ensuing battle left both the Templars and the Castilian nobles dead. The King of Spain declared the mountain to be cursed and ordered that the mountain be left abandoned from that point forward; the corpses of the Templars and the Castilians were buried together in a Templar chapel. Forever after, on the night of All Saints, a ghostly bell is heard tolling in the fog (and it is always foggy on All Saints' night) and the dead rise from their tombs, wearing their rent and bloody shrouds. They engage in a ghost hunt, looking for phantom stags and riding on spirit horses. All across the mountain the living quake, wolves and deer and snakes cowering in terror as the sounds of galloping hooves ring across the mountainside. The morning afterwards the brave visitor who dares to go to the peak will see many tracks in the snow. Sometimes another ghost is seen--that of a pale, disheveled, and quite beautiful young maiden, clutching a blue scarf and fleeing from the hunt on bloody feet. It is said she was a noblewoman who asked her lover to go to the mountain on the night of All Saints to retrieve a scarf she had dropped; the morning after the battle his body was found half-eaten by wolves, while the noblewoman found her scarf, soaked in her lover's blood, on her nightstand when she woke that morning.

 

The Black Jungle. (From The Mystery of the Black Jungle (1895) by Emilio Salgari) Found on the island of Raymangal, in the Ganges delta, the Black Jungle is a fearsome expanse of greenery so closely packed together that no light can penetrate to its floor. But the Jungle is "black" for another reason; it is the home of the Thugs, the sacred stranglers of the Dark Earth Mother Kali. Their central temple is an enormous pagoda sixty feet high and forty feet wide, ringed by mammoth columns. The dome of the temple is a rearing serpent with a woman's head. Inside the temple is a statue of the Dark Earth Mother herself, and at its foot is a small white basin full of goldfish through which Kali is said to communicate with the faithful. Beneath the temple is a maze of tunnels and rooms, filled with cobras, furry spiders, poisonous centipedes, and multicolored scorpions. Near the temple is a large banyan tree, beneath which is an underground passage leading to a large cavern. The tunnel is filled with sharp, poison-tipped spears. The cavern itself, supported by twenty-four elephant-headed columns, is where the Thugs sacrifice virgins to the greater glory of Kali.

 

Cagayan Sulu is a small, volcanic island in the Sulu Archipelago, near the southern Philippines. First described in Andrew Lang's The Disentanglers (1902), Cagayan Sulu is an island of two extremes. The natives along the coast are mostly Muslim, well-armed but essentially peaceful. Those in the interior are quite a different story. The interior natives are of the Berbanang tribe, and are widely feared and despised by other Philippine peoples. The Berbanangs are cannibals who possess the ability to place themselves in a trance and project their astral bodies over distances. This projections is accompanied by a loud, almost deafening noise, and causes men and animals to die of fear. This form of death toughens the meat of the victims' bodies, something the Berbanang find tasty. For reasons of their own the Berbanangs will not, however, attack anyone wearing a coconut pearl necklace.

 

Double Island, located in the Indian Ocean, was first described in George Maspero's Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt (1899). The island is capable of submerging at will. It is the home to three-hundred-foot-long gold and blue serpents, each with six-foot long beards. The snakes are sentient and benevolent, and have been known to take care of shipwrecked sailors. Moreover, the snakes have the power of prediction and can see the future.

 

Elisee Reclus Island, a long island in the north Pacific near the Arctic Circle, is crisscrossed by a 2400 foot high mountain chain which has a number of hot springs and geysers. The Island, first described in Alphonse Brown's A City of Glass (1891), was simultaneously discovered by American and French expeditions. Each, naturally, claimed it for their own country. The French team stayed where they were while the Americans moved to the north of the island, where they were forced to spend the winter. The Americans created a city of igloos which they called Maurel City. In the mountains beyond Maurel City they established a subterranean town which they named New Maurel City; there they discovered a gold seam. The Americans created a telephone system to communicate with each there. The French, for their part, stayed near the highest peak on the island, the Schrader Volcano, and used its minerals and heat to create a large glass dome on lava columns which they called Cristallopolis. Inside the dome are a number of smaller houses which make use of a geyser and a natural lagoon. Cristallopolis is heated by steam drawn from the hot springs and makes use of steam-powered dynamos to create electricity.

 

Halcyon. Halcyon was introduced in "Fred Thorpe"'s "The Boy in Black; or, Strange Adventures in the Land of Mystery," which was published in Brave and the Bold 233, June 8 1907. Halcyon is a city located inside of Lone Star Mountain in Wyoming. The mountain happens to be hollow, with entrance to Halcyon gained via slabs of hillside that rotate open. Those inside the city enjoy advanced technology--artificial lighting, moving stone platforms, electricity-based weaponry, and the implication of artificial (i.e., robotic) guards--and the natives of Halcyon dress in togas and have Roman-styled architecture and customs, but their form of government is an absolute monarchy, and their rules are on the strange side, to say the least: if a prime minister dies and no one has been appointed to the role, the first adult to arrive in Halcyon assumes the ministership. Those who arrive after the first adult are condemned to death, as are those who wear black clothing. Halcyon is an unstable land because of earthquakes and volcanoes, and it is the latter that finally destroys Halcyon.

 

The Invisible City. The Invisible City was introduced by Frank Lillie Pollock in an eponymous short story in the September 1901 issue of The Black Cat. A Polish scientist and revolutionary named Paul Zphanoff discovered, while experimenting with "vibrations," a mechanical method for creating mind control and hypnosis. To further his political aims he traveled to the desert of the American southwest and established a secret city there. He surrounded it with "hypnosis machines" which made the city seem like a lake; these machines were so powerful as to fool both humans and animals. Zphanoff began bringing people to the city, which eventually contained 10,000 people, all controlled by Zphanoff. From the city he sent out squads of assassins to kill the leaders of the governments of the world, so as to bring about (wait for it) The Revolution. Unfortunately for Zphanoff's sake, he fell in love and decided to abandon The Cause. So he killed all of the inhabitants of the city, turned off the machines, and went to NYC, where he collapsed and died of an unknown cause.

 

Limanora. Introduced in John MacMillan Brown's Limanora. The Island of Progress (1903). An island in the archipelago of Rialloa, southeast of Oceania, Limanora is almost a perfect island. The inhabitants have incredibly advanced technology at their disposal, and thanks to selective breeding and eugenics, started centuries before, they have rid themselves of human failings and are ethically perfect. They are in exceedingly good shape, light but very muscular, and they have lifespans that exceed a millennia. When one stranger washed ashore on Limanora they undertook a program of improvement on him (at the stranger's consent, of course), improving both his physical and his emotional and spiritual sides. The Limanorans educate their children, viewing mass education as a path to savagery, and their education concentrates on futurity. Once a child has been fully educated she or he is allowed to enter the Fialume, a valley devoted to Limanora's past in which the bodies of past Limanorans have been transformed into statues of irelium, a wonder metal behind much of Limanora's technology. Limanoran society is set up in guild-like "families," each one concentrating on one area of knowledge that will help improve the Limanorans. This, combined with their science, makes Limanora a perfect place to live, except for the unstable volcanoes in the area, which have been reported to have numerous eruptions in the near past. (Despite its flaws, Limanora is one of the greatest of all Utopian novels, and unjustly forgotten).

 

Malacovia was first described in Amedeo Tosetti's Pedals of the Black Sea (1884). Malacovia is a small city/fortress built of iron and located on the St. George delta of the Danube river. Malacovia was built in 1870 by gastarbeiters specially imported from France and England; the workers did not know where they were working (they thought they were in Russia, on the banks of the Dnieper river) and once their work was done they were returned to their home countries. The reason for the secrecy was the martial aims of the city's founder, a rich and "eccentric" Nogai prince who wanted to rebuild the Nogai empire. He'd emigrated to Europe from Crimea but still dreamed of conquering the coastal cities of Russia and of destroying the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Being raised and educated in Petersburg, the prince had a much greater education and understanding of the world than his companions, and knew of mechanics, and so was quite taken with a new invention, which he thought was the key to the return of the Nogai empire: the bicycle.

 

Malacovia is shaped like a giant iron egg, bristling with cannon, capable of submerging into a large granite platform beneath the surface of the marshes in which it lay; this mechanism was powered by bicycles pedaled by fifty Nogai Tatars. Malacovia was used as a base/launching pad by the Nogai for bicycle-born attacks on Russian settlements; consequently the Russians came to greatly fear the sight of a cycling Tatar. The Russian government could not deal with these Tatar terrorists and was about to ask a foreign government to bring peace to the Black Sea by destroying Malacovia when, in 1873, the humidity of the Danube delta rusted the cogs and those inside were forced to flee, abandoning the city.

 

Oudemon. Introduced in Henry S. Shipman's In Oudemon: Reminiscences of an Unknown People (1900). Oudemon, located in the Andes in northwest Argentina, is a century-old colony of approximately 500,000 (the novel is set ~1860). They are the descendants of British and American settlers who wanted to begin a new type of society. They are overtly Christian, socialist (with no government except for an "advisory board"), telepathic, and technologically advanced. They also avoid contact with the outside world, which they fear. They are not prey to the usual Victorian mores, and there's a scandalous hint of (no!) free love as well as (horrors!) communal ownership of land and property. Their technology is much advanced; they conduct blood tests which indicate personality types, they have hydrogen-filled flying suits, automobiles powered by compressed gas, and advanced medicine. Their telepathy is not powerful, but they are capable of clairaudience and clairvoyance over long distances.

 

The Polar Bear Kingdom, an area somewhere in Franz Josef's Land (the Nansen Archipelago) in the Arctic Circle, was first written about by Mór Jókai (1825-1904) (see Ichor) in 20,000 Lieues Sous Les Glaces (1876). The Kingdom is inhabited by a group of sentient polar bears, and beneath an enormous range is a huge maze of ice caverns and underground caves full of geological oddities, including giant crystals and liquid basalt. Littered about the caves are large numbers of frozen dinosaurs, on which the bears subsist. Further into the caves is an enormous cavern with a huge lake of "copper vitriol."

 

Present Land, near the South Pole, was discovered by Mr. Arthur Gordon Pym (of Nantucket) in 1928; his narrative, eponymously titled, was conveyed to us by Edgar Allan Poe in 1838. Present Land, covered by a thick mist, is a "phosphorescent plateau" of steep mountains whose broken slopes are filled with caves and water-filled craters. The flora of the the land is strange, with bushes of plants similar to white, glowing coral and tall trees like spun glass. The natives of the Present Land are androgynous, semi-transparent humanoids. They are gentle and graceful and have large eyes with short hair. They communicate in a musical language and worship a white figure which is "shrouded" and "very far larger in his proportions than any dweller among men;" they worship this being with cries of "tekeli-li." The Present Land puts out what seems to be some sort of radiation which erases the memory and produces complete contentment.

 

Quiquendone. A small town in Flanders (Pop. 2393) about a quarter kilometer southeast of Bruges, Quiquendone was first described in Jules Verne's A Fantasy of Doctor Ox (1874). Quiquendone is an extremely peaceful town that was founded in 1197 and never knew a moment of unpleasantness--even the animals were pleasant to each other--until one day in 187 when an unscrupulous, and perhaps even evil chemical engineer named Dr. Ox chose Quiquendone to be the subject of an experiment. Dr. Ox pretended to supply Quiquendone with a modern lighting system, and built a network of pipes to distribute the lighting gas, but did not use the usual carbonated hydrogen, but instead "oxhydric gas," a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, a substance created by Dr. Ox himself by "decomposing water" with the help of a battery he made. Dr. Ox would separate water into its components, guide them through a maze of tubes, and finally combine them, which produced a brilliant flame.

 

This gas created lighting that was twenty times brighter than the light created by the usual carbonated hydrogen gas. However, the extra light began to affect the character of the natives of Quiquendone, erasing their usual calm temperaments and making them into irritable, aggressive thugs. Domestic animals were similarly affected. The flora of Quiquendone, however, were changed for the better, growing to greatly increased size, with some pumpkins growing to nine feet across. One strawberry would feed two people and a pear would be more than enough for four. One tulip was used as a nest to an entire family of robins; this tulip was given the new name of tulipa quiquendonia.

 

The health of the people of Quiquendone was negatively affected, with indigestion, gastritis, ulcers, and general nerve diseases doubling and trebling. When the Quiquendonians decided to attack the neighboring town of Virgamen on a pretext, they were almost at Virgamen when Dr. Ox's main gas reservoir exploded, destroying the experiment and, perhaps, Dr. Ox himself, and putting an end to the war.

 

Terror Island. Terror Island was introduced in "Maurice Douglas"' On Terror Island; or; The Plot To Hold Up The World (1906). Terror Island is a Caribbean Island that the Triumvirate (aka the Masters of the Sea) have fortified and which they use as their base. The Triumvirate consist of the American gangster Boss Jones, the Russian anarchist Count Stohlski, and the Italian genius inventor Signor Hurin; together they have built a fleet of warships armed with Hurin's weapons and use it to extort money from the world via threats to global shipping. They're also associated with the "world terrorist movement," but that's really secondary to their main goal, which is to make money; Boss Jones only pays lip service to the ideals of anarchism, running Terror Island as an total dictator and decapitating traitors with a scimitar. Terror Island is well-armed and protected by a strong fleet of ships, with weapons that turn metal brittle, momentarily rob men of their intelligence, super-powerful cannon, electric mine fields, and high powered explosives. Naturally a pair of stalwart British lads, Donald McKay and Warren Green, infiltrate the island, along with Thornton, an agent of the British secret service, and after a large number of commando raids, shoot-outs, and naval battles Terror Island is taken and destroyed by the British armed forces.

 

Trinquelage is a medieval castle on the slopes of Mount Ventoux, in Provence, France. Trinquelage was first described in Alphonse Daudet in his Letters from My Mill in 1866. Trinquelage, a massive stone fortress, was formerly the residence of the lords of Trinquelage, but is now haunted by a number of ghosts. At various times, but especially at Christmas, a strange and occult light will shine through the stones of the castle, and those people of Mount Ventoux on their way to Mass in the chapel of Trinquelage will see a ghostly figure moving around inside the chapel, which is lit by invisible candles. At midnight the castle courtyard will be filled with the spirits of beautiful ladies and handsome gentlemen, all dressed in the finery of centuries past. From a ghostly pulpit an old spirit will read from a book, but no one will be able to understand what he says. It is rumored that the old ghost is the spirit of a former chaplain of Trinquelage who is damned for all eternity for having shortened Mass and hurried to his Christmas dinner. Every day of the year a frigid wind blows through Trinquelage, and those of Mount Ventoux generally avoid the castle.

 

Wolf's Glen was first described in The Freeshooter by Carl Maria, Freiherr von Weber, and Johann Friedrich Kind in 1821. Wolf's Glen is in Bohemia. Hunters who brave the wilds of the mountains and reach Wolf's Glen can, on rare occasions, find Samiel, the wild huntsman, and get seven magic bullets from him in exchange for their souls. The first six bullets will hit what they are aimed at; the seventh will go wherever the hunter wants it to go. The Glen itself is filled with ghosts; those who go to the Glen will see the ghosts of their parents, who will try to warn their children away. Corpses and evil-looking animals crawl from the caves of the Glen, spitting flames and sparks.

 

Ys, a ruined city at the bottom of the Bay of Douarnenez, near Finistère, in France, was first described by Edouard Blau and Edouard Lalo in The King of Ys in 1888. Near the end of the 4th century the town of Ys was protected from the sea by a dam, the gates of which were hidden. Only the king of Ys had the key to the gates. A mysterious handsome stranger wooed and tempted the daughter of the king and asked her to give him the keys. Enamored of him, she agreed, and he opened the gates to the dam, drowning the city. Ever after it has been said that those on the shores of the Bay can hear the tolling of the bells of the churches of Ys, marking every hour.

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