A Race For Life

Stoker goes into great (and amusing) detail on the roads one must take to get from here to there, occasionally. It’s amusing in Chapter One, like asking your old man how he’s doing and getting back a description of traffic conditions. It’s less amusing in Chapter 30, where our heroes ride from the unnamed location of their adventure, just over the border from Derbyshire to Macclesfield “thence to Congleton” and Rancorn (Runcorn?) and finally to Liverpool. They’re racing against the clock! They make it just in time.

Let me skip the Rancorn part and just show you the main route:

Do you see the problem?

That’s NINETY MILES! In a car, at top speed, it would be a grueling hour to two hour ride (depending on traffic). In a horse-drawn-carriage, it’s probably twelve hours. If we travel directly (which I imagine one couldn’t, or why would Stoker describe this circuitous route?) that brings the journey down to 76 miles, and we could say that they start from, oh, ten miles to the west, just because they’re not exactly in Derbyshire.

Actually, I added back in the stop at Runcorn, because they’ll have to change horses.

This seems like a huge freakin’ deal Mr Stoker glosses over.

They’re being chased the whole time by the snake. Which, by the way, how fast does a snake travel?

Which raises another interesting question: How big is this snake? I’ve been throwing around “sixty feet” but I don’t know where I got that. While 60′ is long for a snake, it isn’t like the equivalent of, say, scaling a man to 60 feet. The Internet is being the opposite of helpful here, in terms of how it’s representing a titanoboa, a genuine gigantic snake. This purports to be a 50′ long reproduction:

But unless the guy on the ladder is three-and-a-half feet tall and the snake ends immediately at the end of the picture, that’s way more than 50 feet long.

I had to go to the authoritative source, Guinness, for some real answers. Here’s a real python, the longest in captivity:

—————–Here’s border 1 because WP has YouTube videos overlap subsequent text———–

—————–Here’s border 2 because WP has YouTube videos overlap subsequent text———–

—————–Here’s border 3 because WP has YouTube videos overlap subsequent text———–

—————–Here’s border 4 because WP has YouTube videos overlap subsequent text———–

Its length is formidable. Its circumference is not. I mean, sure, it could kill you, but it could also easily hide.

Stoker references 80-100 foot long snakes and says imagine what it would be like to have one of those in England. The ever pragmatic Adam wonders how it could escape notice. But of course, it didn’t escape notice, hence the legend of the Lambton Worm.

And, the thing is, even a 100 foot snake wouldn’t even need much of a lair. It could hide pretty damn well under a (sizeable) rock. The nature of snakes.

So I think our eponymous character is going to have to be a bit longer and lot thicker than my words were describing in order for the images I was imagining to make sense. Or the ones Stoker describes: Remember the snake is mistaken for a whale at this point.

Whales are 50-100 feet long, depending on species, but they are hella thicc.

More interesting revelations to, uh, be revealed.