Philip Jose Farmer by The Other Log of Phileas Fogg Page B

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