The steam house
The steam house (also Der Stahlelefant or In the Elefantenlokomobile through North India ) is a novel by the French author Jules Verne . The novel was first published in 1880 by the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel in two volumes under the French title La Maison à Vapeur . Volume I appeared on July 5, 1880 and Volume II on November 11, 1880. The first German-language edition appeared in 1881 under the title Das Dampfhaus .
In this book, Jules Verne anticipates the caravan . Like many similar novels by Jules Verne, the novel consists of dramatic and comic sections.
action
The novel begins with the English engineer Banks building a steel elephant that makes walking movements and is able to pull two rolling bungalows on behalf of an Indian maharajah . The elephant is powered by a steam engine, the chimney is in the trunk . Thanks to a closed floor structure , the colossus is also buoyant and its legs can be used for propulsion in the water like paddle wheels . Since the two trailers are also designed as amphibious vehicles , the vehicle can also cross rivers.
After the Maharajah's death, Banks doesn't know what to do with the vehicle - so he invites three of his friends to travel with him through India in the vehicle: the French Maucler, first-person narrator of the novel, the hunting-obsessed Captain Hod and Colonel Munro, who only makes the trip to get revenge on his mortal enemy Nana Sahib for the murder of his wife Laurence during the Sepoy uprising in 1857.
The first volume describes the journey to the north, on which the travelers first visit some cities and memorials for the Sepoy Uprising. The author also describes in detail the events during the Sepoy uprising. Then they experience some hunting adventures in the jungle. Among other things, Captain Hod, who gets lost in the hunting fever, is saved from the burning jungle by the elephant, the reader also gets to know Nana Sahib and learns of his plan to incite the Indians to a renewed uprising against the English colonial rulers.
The second volume describes the travelers' encounter with the animal hunter Matthias van Guitt , various hunting adventures in the forests at the foot of the Himalayas , the destruction of the bungalows by real elephants and the confrontation of Colonel Munro with his mortal enemy, who ties him to a cannon.
Rating
The book lives from its eccentrics like Captain Hod, who absolutely wants to kill 50 tigers in order to show off in his club, or Matthias van Guitt, who catches predators in the forests of the Himalayas and sells them to zoos in Europe. One of the funniest scenes takes place in Matthias van Guitt's camp: the captured predators have broken out of their cages, so that Maucler and Captain Hod, who visit the camp, are forced to escape from the free roaming tigers and panthers in the cages .
In contrast to earlier works, Verne is unusually cautious in describing the technology, here in the form of the "steel elephant". For example, it is never clear whether the tractor is being propelled by moving legs or hidden wheels. Sometimes the author even contradicts himself from one chapter to another. The steel elephant itself only plays a subordinate role, however, since the actual theme of the story is the exploration of India in a "rolling house".
literature
- Heinrich Pleticha (ed.): Jules Verne manual . Deutscher Bücherbund / Bertelsmann, Stuttgart and Munich 1992.
- Volker Dehs and Ralf Junkerjürgen: Jules Verne . Voices and interpretations of his work. Fantastic Library Wetzlar, Wetzlar 2005.
- Volker Dehs: Jules Verne . Jules Verne. A critical biography. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf 2005. ISBN 3-538-07208-6
Web links
- "Das Dampfhaus" as an e-book in HTML on zeno.org
- The steel elephant in Andreas Fehrmann's Jules Verne Collection