Excerpt from Works of Jules Verne, Vol. 12: The Giant Raft: The Cryptogram; The Steam House: The Demon of Cawnpore; Tigers and Traitors As for the selection of India as the seat of the story, Verne himself explained that his purpose was to cover, one by one, each of the countries of the globe, more especially those little known, so as to make of his completed works a sort of universal geography. Traveling under his guidance, he meant that we should travel everywhere. The mechanical invention of the steam house itself is in no way impossible. Such a construction was rather beyond the skill of thirty years ago when the book was written; but almost any good engineering firm to-day would contract to build you such a steam-house if you cared to aford the expense. In fact our automobiles have already quite out done this somewhat clumsy giant steam-engine, both in power and in speed. Mainly then The Steam House, and more especially its second book, Tigers and Traitors, will be remembered as a thrilling hunting story. Big game incidents of the most exciting yet most natural character, such as the in vasian of the naturalist's kraal, throng its busy pages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.