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5 by 3 and 2, square 5. Redouble the number of points, square 10, Les Indes Noires. Met by Zvi. Pay a single fine and go back to start.
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5 by 4 and 1, square 5. Redouble the number of points, square 10, Les Indes Noires. Meeting with Andrew, who pays a single fine and goes back to start.
Nell’s grandfather had one of the most dangerous jobs in the mining industry: his task was to detect the toxic and explosive mine gas by crawling trough the mines with a small flame in a lantern.
Find information on this profession, and find out if it is still practised today.
Remark: This profession is named “penitent” by Jules Verne. It was translated “monk” in English (title of chapter XX of the novel).
I couldn’t find any information about this profession. Two Internet sites are describing how the prblem of detecting the methane (“grisou” in French) is solved today:
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The French coal mines in Saint-Etienne:
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The american coal mine in Chicago: The safety room
The answer to the second question is obviously that this profession does not exist any more.
The last site is Zvi’s site where Michel Tournier’s preface to my edition of Le Mariage de M. Anselme des Tilleuls is available. In his preface, Michel Tournier has a long paragraph about Nell and the role of Silfax’s character.
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7 by 6 and 1, square 17, Famille-sans-Nom. Meeting with Zvi, who pays a single fine and goes back to square 10.
The first chapter of this novel is all about the early history of Canada, and how it was fought over by French and English.
Find out how the domination of Canada passed from the French to the English.
Do you want the "point de vue du Quebec" or the british oriented history?
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I found first a french-speaking adult learning programm, very modular and well structured under the title "Histoire du Quebec et du Canada". It’s a page from where you can download 90 pages in .pdf format to be displayed with Acrobat.
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If you want something more politically oriented, go to the “Canadian Unity” homepage, from where you will find two pointers to The Road to Confederation, and A Brief History of New France, where the history of the “good” British and the “bad” French is also summarized.
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8 by 6 and 2, square 25, Seconde Patrie.
The island of the Swiss Robinson family is called New-Switzerland, but it is an English colony.
Did Switzerland ever have any colonies, and if so, where?
Switzerland never had any colonies. But, in the 1840s, a Swiss named Sutter went to California with the dream to offer some territorial part of the West Coast as colony to his home country. He didn’t succeed, because the Gold Rush wiped out his land and his fortune. There was a Fort Sutter referenced by several historians. And in the Napa Valley, there is a vineyard called "Sutter Home".
Now to some URLs:
Of course, you could add the swiss guards at the Vatican, but is it a colony?
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8 by 6 and 2, square 33, L’Etonnante Aventure de la mission Barsac.
Marcel Camaret transforms a piece of desert into fertile land by making rain.
Can rain be made artificially, and if so, how?
Surprisingly there are many Internet sites where you can find explanation about artificial rain. Two types of sites:
- Research and laboratories studying and developing techniques to use artificial rain,
- Agricultural offices and ministeries where artificial rain is used to help the farmers.
Here are examples of such sites:
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Ministery of Agriculture in Chile:
The Ministry is investing approximately US$97,000 this year in in artificial rain induction, a process in which airplanes bombard clouds with iodized silver.
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University of Cincinatti (Ohio):
This artificial rain technique is used by jet engine manufacturers to better understand how large jet engines cope with ingestion of large amounts of water, similar to what would be seen in a thunderstorm.