Dear List,
 
I read Jules Verne's "Voyage to the Centre of the Earth" as a young child and cannot easily  get a copy of it, either in the original or in English. 
I was watching a dubbed movie-trailer about a new rendering of this novel and right at its begining the word "muscovita" came up. I remembered past discussions in the List about Pale Fire's "muskovy" and Ada's "verglas". I don't know what word Jules Verne employed to describe the frail ground on which the explorers trod and, after it broke down, were hurtled into the earth's center. Glass factories and "Cartesian devils" are mentioned in PF and also in ADA.
 
I'm only returning to "verglass" ( and, who knows, Jules Verne?) because I'd been long interested in certain passages from Kinbote's commentaries about Shade's "pools in the basement". They seemed to be a reference to Mircea Eliade's novel that deals with the hidden world behind everyday reality, as in Pe Strada Mantuleasa (1968, The Old Man and the Bureaucrats), where a schoolteacher detained for questioning by Communist authorities beguiles his captors with stories, as in The Arabian Nights.
 
Eliade wrote about religion and tantric practices. I was familiar with Eliade only from the Mantuleasa Street novel, and his  1945-49 writings about "The Myth of the Eternal Return" and "The Sacred and the Profane" but I suspect, after reading a short note on Eliade's life, that VN would not have felt very sympathetic towards him ( inspite of a religious or philosophic theme they might have shared).  
 
Eliade's novel describes a puddle in a basement through which the adventurers were able to access a hidden subterranean world. The fall through the "muskovy glass" in Verne's "Voyage to the Centre of the Earth" also leads us to a "subterranean" ( in this case, a still terrestrial) world.  
 
From an old posting at the VN-List (Dec.15,2006 exchange with CHW and SES):
Bend Sinister: " the glass of the puddle is bright mauve ( ch.1) and Pale Fire: "a puddle reflected his scarlet silhouette" (135, King Charles)
Puddles seem to be important in both novels, although emphasized chiefly in "Bend Sinister" and strangely "spatulate", sometimes reminiscent of Munch's screaming mouth. The puddle in the basement, in PF, reminded me of a novel written by Mircea Eliade (rue Mantuleasa), where it linked two distinct worlds.
 
Basement puddle in Pale Fire:
John Shade: "And our school chum killed in a distant war/Is not surprised to see us at his door,/ And in a blend of jauntiness and gloom/ Points at the puddles in his basement room (...)/ Under the stage direction of some goon/   600   Political, some uniformed baboon?."

Kinbote

1. (note to Line 596: Points at the puddle in his basement room): We all know those dreams in which something Stygian soaks through and Lethe leaks in the dreary terms of defective plumbing. Following this line, there is a false start preserved in the draft — and I hope the reader will feel something of the chill that ran down my long and supple spine when I discovered this variant

2. (note to line 130) for here and there magic apertures and penetrations, so narrow and deep as to drive one insane, could be deduced from a pool of sweet, foul ditch water, bespeaking a moat, or from a dusky odor of earth and turf, marking the proximity of a glacis slope overhead; and at one point, where the passage crept through the basement of a huge ducal villa, with hothouses famous for their collections of desert flora, a light spread of sand momentarily changed the sound of one’s tread.

 

Verglas in "ADA"

‘When I was a kid,’ said Van, ‘and stayed for the first — or rather, second — time in Switzerland, I thought that "Verglas" on roadway signs stood for some magical town, always around the corner, at the bottom of every snowy slope, never seen, but biding its time. I got your cable in the Engadine where there are real magical places, such as Alraun or Alruna — which means a tiny Arabian demon in a German wizard’s mirror. By the way, we have the old apartment upstairs with an additional bedroom, number five-zero-eight.

 

Muskovy glass in Pale Fire

Kinbote: Medical care was spreading to the confines of the state: less and less often, on his tour of the country, every autumn, when the rowans hung coral-heavy, and the puddles tinkled with Muscovy glass, the friendly and eloquent monarch would be interrupted by a pertussal "backdraucht" in a crowd of schoolchildren.

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Mircea Eliade ( internet source):
Romanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in this century. Eliade was an intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction [...] He earned international fame with LE MYTHE DE L'ÉTERNAL RETOUR (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery. Eliade was much interested in the world of the unconscious. The central theme in his novels was erotic love.
"In archaic and traditional societies, the surrounding world is conceived as a microcosms. At the limits of this closed world begins the domain of the unknown, of the formless. On this side there is ordered - because of inhabited and organized - space; on the other, outside this familiar space, there is the unknown and dangerous region of the demons, the ghosts, and the dead and foreigners - in a world, chaos or death or night. This image of an inhabited microcosm, surrounded by desert regions as a chaos or a kingdom of the dead, has survived even in highly evolved civilizations such as those of China, Mesopotamia and Egypt." (from Images and Symbols, 1952) [...]
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