atdtda: 31 - pg 871

[Bekah]

A few interesting annotations for page 871 - there's more at the  
links provided:

871: 4-8  -   Cyprian realizes that Theign has grown   "intimate  
"with the military Chancellery of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, who  
from the Belvedere in Vienna directed a web of intrigue aimed at  
refashioning the map of Europe, by way of proteges such as the  
current foreign minister Aerenthal, architect of the annexation of  
Bosnia."

The Belvedere - Vienna:   A palace complex

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/vienna/jpgs/ 
vienna_buildings_mintorr0107_9.jpg

**
And from:   http://www.btinternet.com/~J.Pasteur/Army.html
"With his new position Franz Ferdinand was accorded a secretariat to  
administer day-to-day running of affairs. However, this was situated  
in the Hofburg in central Vienna where both it and Franz Ferdinand  
were, and felt, very much scrutinised by the senior command. So when  
most of the renovations and improvements to the palace were  
completed, on 15th May, 1899, Franz Ferdinand moved himself and his  
secretariat to the Unteres Belvedere (which nowadays houses the  
Museum of Austrian Baroque Art) where he immediately set about  
developing it into a Militärkanzlerei, a military chancellery, which,  
in effect, was to be the future government that could implement Franz  
Ferdinand's reforms. "

**

as well as:   http://www.btinternet.com/~J.Pasteur/Politician.html    
(There's really quite a lot of info there) -  more:

"Franz Ferdinand regarded the annexation of Bosnia-Herçegovina as an  
act of irresponsible folly. Aerenthal may have admitted that the  
annexation was "to deal a death blow at Serb irredentism," but Serb  
irredentism refused to die. On the contrary, it became stronger.

"The actual annexation was the result of questionable behind-the- 
scenes political plundering by two foreign ministers: Austria- 
Hungary's Alois Baron Aerenthal and Russia's Alexander Izvolski, both  
men of humble background feeling they had 'something to prove' to  
their respective monarchs. The deal: Russia would permit Austria- 
Hungary's annexation of Bosnia and Herçegovina (by supporting  
Serbia's inevitable protestations only vocally) and Austria-Hungary  
would not object to opening the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits to  
Russian warships, an advantage that had been denied to Russia since  
1841. The annexation was carried out both prematurely and  
unilaterally as details had been leaked by the Austro-Hungarian  
embassy in Paris. Amidst the uproar this caused Russia lost the  
opportunity to act, and Aerenthal subsequently refused to support  
Izvolski's parallel campaign over the Straits. Austria-Hungary had  
hereby staged the prelude to the Great War."

**

871: 10 -   Cyprian:  " 'that Theign must have known about the  
annexation long, long before the step itself was taken yet he  
pretended to be as surprised as any of us.  Effectively, it was the  
first phase of their damned general European war, an dhe sent me into  
the thickest of it, where I could take no action that would not lead  
to my destruction .  I say, I must kill this evil bastard  
immediately,  really,  I must.

**
871:18  Ballhausplatz    a square in Vienna
  http://aeiou.iicm.tugraz.at/aeiou.encyclop.data.image.b/b077330a.jpg

Macedonian question - a temporary suspension of English -Russian  
hostilities in order to get Macedonia out of the hands of the Turks  
(Theign was able to cover his activities by pleading the Macedonian  
question.   (see http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/boshtml/ 
bos131.htm   )

871:27  Entente - the Anglo-Russian Entente signed by Russia and  
Britain in 1907.  This was followed by the Triple Entente in which  
France joined Russia and  Britain in a counter-weight to the Triple  
Alliance of  Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary which was joined by  
the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.  The Triple Entente had various  
alliances with the US, Spain and Japan.  (But Italy had signed an  
agreement with France which essentially just nullified the Italian  
role.)  And with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the alliances  
tightened up and WWI commenced.

Nice little map of what transpired:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
Image:Europe_1914.jpg
Cute little poster:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
Image:Triple_Entente.jpg


871:33   "Viennese cuisine"
http://www.aboutvienna.org/recipes/recipes.htm

871:35  Castello   "He went out to Castello, and sat at caffes..."
?

  bacari  - a little wine bar
http://www.hotelsaturnia.it/the_venetian_bacari_tour.html

871:37   "Cyprian recited the appropriate formulæ and  became  
invisible."

 From The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells  (1897) - Chapter 19  (the  
formula for invisibility concerns refraction and light):

"But I went to work -- like a slave. And I had hardly worked and  
thought about the matter six months before light came through one of  
the meshes suddenly -- blindingly! I found a general principle of  
pigments and refraction, -- a formula, a geometrical expression  
involving four dimensions. Fools, common men, even common  
mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression  
may mean to the student of molecular physics. In the books -- the  
books that Tramp has hidden -- there are marvels, miracles! But this  
was not a method, it was an idea, that might lead to a method by  
which it would be possible, without changing any other property of  
matter, -- except, in some instances, colours, -- to lower the  
refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air --  
so far as all practical purposes are concerned.


Phew!" said Kemp. "That's odd! But still I don't see quite -- I can  
understand that thereby you could spoil a valuable stone, but  
personal invisibility is a far cry."

"Precisely," said Griffin. "But consider: Visibility depends on the  
action of the visible bodies on light. Either a body absorbs light,  
or it reflects or refracts it, or does all these things. If it  
neither reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself  
be visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because the  
colour absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest, all the red  
part of the light, to you. If it did not absorb any particular part  
of the light, but reflected in all, then it would be a shining white  
box. Silver! A diamond box would neither absorb much of the light nor  
reflect much from the general surface, but just here and there where  
the surfaces were favourable the light would be reflected and  
refracted, so that you would get a brilliant appearance of flashing  
reflections and translucencies, -- a sort of skeleton of light. A  
glass box would not be so brilliant, not so clearly visible, as a  
diamond box, because there would be less refraction and reflection.  
See that? From certain points of view you would see quite clearly  
through it. Some kinds of glass would be more visible than others, a  
box of flint glass would be brighter than a box of ordinary window  
glass. A box of very thin common glass would be hard to see in a bad  
light, because it would absorb hardly any light and refract and  
reflect very little. And if you put a sheet of common white glass in  
water, still more if you put it in some denser liquid than water, it  
would vanish almost altogether, because light passing from water to  
glass is only slightly refracted or reflected or indeed affected in  
any way. It is almost as invisible as a jet of coal gas or hydrogen  
is in air. And for precisely the same reason!"

"Yes," said Kemp, "that is pretty plain sailing."

"And here is another fact you will know to be true. If a sheet of  
glass is smashed, Kemp, and beaten into a powder, it becomes much  
more visible while it is in the air; it becomes at last an opaque  
white powder. This is because the powdering multiplies the surfaces  
of the glass at which refraction and reflection occur. In the sheet  
of glass there are only two surfaces; in the powder the light is  
reflected or refracted by each grain it passes through, and very  
little gets right through the powder. But if the white powdered glass  
is put into water, it forthwith vanishes. The powdered glass and  
water have much the same refractive index; that is, the light  
undergoes very little refraction or reflection in passing from one to  
the other.

"You make the glass invisible by putting it into a liquid of nearly  
the same refractive index; a transparent thing becomes invisible if  
it is put in any medium of almost the same refractive index. And it  
you will consider only a second, you will see also that the powder of  
glass might be made to vanish in air, if its refractive index could  
be made the same as that of air; for then there would be no  
refraction or reflection as the light passed from glass to air."

"Yes, yes," said Kemp. "But a man's not powdered glass!"

"No," said Griffin. "He's more transparent!"

"Nonsense!"

"That from a doctor! How one forgets! Have you already forgotten your  
physics, in ten years? Just think of all the things that are  
transparent and seem not to be so. Paper, for instance, is made up of  
transparent fibres, and it is white and opaque only for the same  
reason that a powder of glass is white and opaque. Oil white paper,  
fill up the interstices between the particles with oil so that there  
is no longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, and it  
becomes as transparent as glass. And not only paper, but cotton  
fibre, linen fibre, wool fibre, woody fibre, and bone, Kemp, flesh,  
Kemp, hair, Kemp, nails and nerves, Kemp, in fact the whole fabric of  
a man except the red of his blood and the black pigment of hair, are  
all made up of transparent, colourless tissue. So little suffices to  
make us visible one to the other. For the most part the fibres of a  
living creature are no more opaque than water."

http://www.readprint.com/chapter-10225/H-G--Wells

But Cyprian is in Venice thinking these things and waiting for Theign  
to show up.

Bekah

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