The Special Correspondent

Jules Verne sends his reporter Claudius Bombarnac across Central Asia by rail, and the journey itself is the story. Hired to file dispatches for a Paris newspaper, Bombarnac boards the Grand Transasiatic line running from the Caspian to Beijing and sizes up his fellow travelers, hoping one of them will hand him a headline. He gets several. A stowaway hides in a packing crate to reach the woman he loves, a fortune in gold rides in a sealed car, and bandits are waiting somewhere down the track. The book is light, comic, and full of the geography Verne loved to catalogue. It first appeared in 1892 as Claudius Bombarnac. This free PDF and EPUB edition carries the complete English translation.