Round The World In A Motor Car In The Early 1900s PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 edition. Excerpt: ... from Paris to Havre. There are no ditches, no hills, no bumps; it is level, wide, straight, between two uninterrupted hedges of low houses and naked children. It is a friend that we have found again rather than a road; a friend whom we never expected to see again until Asia was a cloud of dust behind our backs. We joyfully saluted the white milestones set rigidly one beside the other in perfect alignment, all at the same distance. We saluted also the streamlets in which a mere thread of water bubbles amidst the moss, and the tiny stone bridges and all the little well-known things of the road which we have not seen for months. The car also seems to be glad at finding a road once more beneath its wheels and at being able to advance for twenty or fifty or a hundred miles without a shock. It travels with a sharp whirring of the engine, which is once more free to devote all its strength to the wheels. We pass through little villages, filling the houses which are open to the road with noise and smoke; pass under the eyes of the wondering mousme's, who modestly raise to their bosoms the hem of the wandering kimono; rousing from their domestic repose the men of Nippon, who, clad in garments which are something more than scanty, are forgetting the fatigues of the war.... Naked children and dogs run after us, shouting and barking when they have overcome their terror. The great stone gods, crowned with ribbons and flowers, alone watch us indifferently as we pass the threshold of their granite temples. At midday we are at Nagoya. At three o'clock at Watanabe, forty miles further on. We have never had such an orgy of speed. May it only last! But it does not last. For at three-thirty the beautiful road, faithless like all friends, suddenly turns...