Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 7.djvu/285

 this thought tore his hair. Ah! if Fix ever fell into his hands, what a settlement of accounts there would be!

Finally, after the first moment of bewilderment, Passepartout recovered his coolness and studied the situation. It was not enviable. The Frenchman was on the road to Japan. Certain of arriving there, how was he to get away? His pocket was empty. Not a shilling, not a penny in it! However, his passage and meals on board were paid in advance. He had then five or six days to come to a decision. It could not be described how he ate and drank during the voyage. He ate for his master, for Aouda, and for himself. He ate as if Japan, where he was going to land, was a desert country, bare of every eatable substance.

At high tide on the morning of the 13th, the Carnatic entered the port of Yokohama. This place is an important stopping point in the Pacific, where all the mail and passenger steamers between North America, China, Japan, and the Malay Islands put in. Yokohama is situated on the Bay of Yeddo, at a short distance from that immense city, the second capital of the Japanese empire, formerly the residence of the Tycoon, at the time that civil emperor existed, and the rival of Miako, the largest city in which the Mikado, the ecclesiastical emperor, the descendant of the gods, lives.

The Carnatic came alongside the wharf at Yokohama near the jetties of the port and the custom house, in the midst of the numerous vessels belonging to all nations. Passepartout set foot, without any enthusiasm, on this so curious soil of the Sons of the Sun. He had nothing better to do than to take chance for his guide, and to go at a venture through the streets of the city.

He found himself at first in an absolutely European city, with its low front houses, ornamented with verandas, under which showed elegant peristyles. This city, covered with its streets, its squares, its docks, its warehouses, the entire space comprised between "Treaty Promontory" and the river. There, as at Hong Kong, and as at Calcutta, there was a confused swarm of people of all races, Americans, English, Chinese, Dutch, merchants ready to sell everything and to buy everything, in the midst of whom the Frenchman found himself as strange as if he had been cast into the Hottentot country.