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Around the World in Eighty Days
Chapter 27. IN WHICH PASSEPARTOUT UNDERGOES, AT A SPEED OF TWENTY MILES AN HOUR, A COURSE OF MORMON HISTORY
During the night of the 5th of December, the train ran south-east for about fifty miles.
Then it went about the same distance north-east, toward the Great Salt Lake.
Passepartout, at about nine o'clock, went out on the platform to get some air.
The weather was cold and the sky was grey, but it wasn't snowing.
The sun, made larger by the mist, looked like a big ring of gold.
Passepartout tried to work out how much sun was worth in pounds when a strange man appeared and broke his thoughts.
This man, who had taken the train at Elko, was tall and dark.
He had a black moustache, black stockings, a black silk hat, a black waistcoat, black trousers, a white cravat, and dogskin gloves.
He looked like a clergyman, with his black clothes and serious, calm face.
He walked from one end of the train to the other, and put a notice by the door of each car.
Passepartout went closer and read one of the notices.
It said that Elder William Hitch, Mormon missionary on train No. 48, would give a talk on Mormonism in car No. 117.
The talk would be from eleven to twelve o'clock.
He invited anyone who wanted to learn about the religion of the "Latter Day Saints" to come.
"I'll go," Passepartout said to himself.
He knew nothing of Mormonism except that polygamy was part of it.
The news soon spread through the train, which had about one hundred passengers.
Thirty at most, who were attracted by the notice, took seats in car No. 117.
Passepartout sat in one of the front seats.
Neither Mr. Fogg nor Fix wanted to go.
At the time set, Elder William Hitch stood up and spoke in an angry voice as if he had already been argued with.
He said, "I tell you that Joe Smith is a martyr, that his brother Hiram is a martyr."
He added, "The United States government treating the prophets badly will make a martyr of Brigham Young." Who dares say otherwise?
No one tried to argue with the missionary, whose excited tone was strange with his calm face.
No doubt his anger came from the hard treatment the Mormons had really had.
The government had just managed, with some trouble, to bring these independent fanatics under its rule.
It had taken control of Utah and put the territory under Union laws after putting Brigham Young in prison for rebellion and polygamy.
The prophet's followers had since tried harder and had at least spoken against Congress.
Elder Hitch was trying to make new followers on the railway trains.
Then, using a loud voice and many gestures, he told the history of the Mormons from Biblical times.
He said that in Israel a Mormon prophet of Joseph's tribe wrote the new religion's history for his son Mormon.
He said that many centuries later a copy of this book written in Egyptian was translated.
He added that Joseph Smith junior, a Vermont farmer, showed himself as a prophet in 1825.
He said that a heavenly messenger appeared to him in a bright wood and gave him the Lord's annals.
Several people in the audience, not very interested, left the car then, but Elder Hitch kept speaking.
He told how Smith junior, with his father, two brothers, and a few followers, started the church of the "Latter Day Saints."
He said it grew not only in America but in England, Norway, Sweden, and Germany, and had many craftsmen and some professionals among its members.
He said they set up a colony in Ohio, built a temple there for two hundred thousand dollars, and founded Kirkland.
He said Smith became a bold banker and got, from a simple mummy showman, a papyrus scroll written by Abraham and other famous Egyptians.
The Elder's story grew a little dull, and his audience slowly got smaller until only twenty passengers stayed.
This did not stop the enthusiast, who told of Joseph Smith's 1837 ruin and how his creditors tarred and feathered him.
He told how Smith came back years later, more respected, at Independence, Missouri, as leader of a colony of three thousand.
He told how angry Gentiles chased him away and he moved to the Far West.
Only ten people were left now, including honest Passepartout, who was listening very closely.
He learned that after long persecutions, Smith reappeared in Illinois and in 1839 started a community at Nauvoo on the Mississippi with twenty-five thousand people.
Smith became mayor, chief judge, and general.
He said he'd run for President in 1843.
Finally, Smith was lured into a trap at Carthage, thrown into prison, and killed by a group of men wearing masks.
Passepartout was now the only person left in the car.
The Elder looked him straight in the face and told him this.
Two years after Joseph Smith's murder his follower Brigham Young left Nauvoo for the banks of the Great Salt Lake.
There, in a rich region on the emigrant route to California, the colony, helped by Mormons' polygamy, had done well.
"And this," added Elder William Hitch.
"This is why Congress is jealous of us!"
"Why have the Union soldiers entered Utah, and why has Brigh"
The Elder went on, fixing his angry eyes on his one hearer, "will you not plant yours there too, under our flag?".
"No!" Passepartout answered bravely, as he left the car and left the Elder to speak to nobody.
During the talk the train ran along the line and around half-past twelve reached the northwest edge of the Great Salt Lake.
From there the passengers could see the wide stretch of this inland sea, also called the Dead Sea, into which an American Jordan flows.
It was a beautiful view, set between tall rocks in large layers, covered with white salt.
It was a great sheet of water that used to be larger, but its shores had moved back over time.
So it had become narrower and deeper.
The Salt Lake is seventy miles long and thirty-five miles wide and sits three miles and eight hundred feet above the sea.
Unlike Lake Asphaltite, which is twelve hundred feet below sea level, it has a lot of salt.
One quarter of the weight of its water is solid matter.
Its specific weight is 1.170 and after distilling it's 1.000.
Fish can't live in it, and those that come in from the Jordan, the Weber, and other streams soon die.
The land around the lake was well farmed, because the Mormons are mostly farmers.
There were ranches and animal pens, fields of wheat, corn, and other cereals, and rich grasslands.
Hedges of wild rose and groups of acacias and milk-wort would be seen more fully six months later.
Now the ground had only a thin layer of snow.
The train reached Ogden at two o'clock and stopped for six hours.
Mr. Fogg and his party had time to visit Salt Lake City, which is connected to Ogden by a branch road.
They spent two hours in this very American town, built like other Union cities, in a checkerboard pattern, "with the sombre sadness of right angles,"
As Victor Hugo says, the founder of the City of the Saints couldn't escape the taste for order that the Anglo-Saxons have.
In this strange land, where people aren't always ready for their own rules, everything is done "squarely" cities, houses, and follies.
At three o'clock the travelers walked the streets of the town between the Jordan and the slopes of the Wahsatch Range.
They saw few churches but the prophet's house, courthouse, and arsenal, blue-brick houses with verandas, porches and gardens of acacias, palms.
A clay and pebble wall, built in 1853, went around the town.
On the main street were the market and several hotels with pavilions.
The place didn't look very full of people.
The streets were almost empty except near the temple, which they only reached after crossing several areas with palisades.
There were many women, which came from the Mormons' "peculiar institution." But not all Mormons are polygamists.
They can marry or not as they like.
It's worth noting that many of Utah's women want to marry, because in the Mormon religion unmarried women aren't admitted to the highest joys.
These poor women didn't seem rich or happy.
Some, the better off, wore short, open, black silk dresses under a hood or a modest shawl.
Others were dressed in Indian style.
Passepartout couldn't look at these women without a kind of fright.
He felt sorry, above all, for the husband.
It seemed to him terrible to have to guide so many wives through the changes of life.
He'd have to lead them as a group to the Mormon paradise, with the chance of seeing them with the glorious Smith for all time.
He felt very much against such a job.
And he thought perhaps, though he might be wrong, that the Salt Lake women were looking at him with alarming eyes.
Luckily, his stay was short, lasting only about an hour in town.
At four the party was back at the station, took their seats in the train, and the whistle blew to start.
Just as the locomotive wheels began to move, cries of "Stop! stop!" were heard.
Trains, like time and tide, stop for no one.
The man who shouted was clearly a late Mormon.
He was out of breath from running.
Luckily the station had no gates or barriers.
He ran along the track, jumped on the rear platform of the train, and fell, tired, into one of the seats.
Passepartout, who had watched this amateur gymnast, went up to him and learned he had run away after an unpleasant family scene.
When the Mormon had his breath back, Passepartout politely asked him how many wives he had.
Passepartout thought the way he had run might make people think he had at least twenty.
"One, sir," the Mormon said, raising his arms to heaven, "one, and that was enough!"