Michael Strogoff: Moscow to Irkutsk

On the night of 15 July a fête at the New Palace is at its height when a dispatch arrives: the telegraph wire is cut beyond Tomsk. Below the windows lie the Moskowa and the Kremlin. The Czar entrusts a letter to Michael Strogoff, a courier from Omsk, on which "depends the safety of all Siberia" and his brother's life. Michael's answer is short: "I shall pass, or they shall kill me." The Kremlin still holds five palaces and four cathedrals inside its wall.

Location precision: The novel invents the New Palace and names only the Kremlin; the pin marks the Kremlin.

The road to Irkutsk is 3,400 miles. The first stage ends at Nijni-Novgorod, swollen to over 300,000 people for the fair, which had moved there in 1817. His fellow travelers are merchants bound for it. The upper town stands on a steep rock, defended by a fort the Russians call a kreml. That Kremlin is a fortress in the historic center today, and the former military governor's house is now the Museum of Art.

Location precision: The novel describes the fair and the upper-town fort, not one scene inside the kremlin.

Beyond Perm lies the range that separates Europe from Siberia, and the tarantass has to cross it in a single night, "if no accident happened." Something does happen. A hurricane sweeps down the road, the tarantass is stopped at a turning, and Michael throws himself out of it to help the travellers in trouble. The Urals form part of the conventional boundary between Europe and Asia, and the pass where Verne sets the storm is not named.

Location precision: The novel names no pass; the pin marks the Europe-Asia border obelisk near Pervouralsk, on the road east from Perm.

Taken prisoner at Kolyvan, Michael is marched with the convoy to Tomsk, a town founded in 1604 near the heart of Siberia. On 16 August the Emir Feofar-Khan rides into its square to trumpets, and Michael is held before his throne with his hands bound. "Look while you may," the Emir tells him. The executioner draws a saber white-hot from the chafing dish and passes it before his eyes; his mother falls senseless, and Michael is blind. Only at the end does the book reveal that his tears saved his sight.

Location precision: The novel names only the town square; the pin marks the centre of Tomsk.

The kibitka reaches Krasnoyarsk at nightfall on 25 August, eight days after Tomsk. Michael fears every boat has been destroyed to slow the Tartars. His answer is to turn the light kibitka itself into a raft, floated on bottles of air, and drift across the Yenisei with Nadia and their guide. It passes the quays of Krasnoyarsk and keeps going downstream. The Yenisei is the fifth-longest river system in the world.

Location precision: The novel gives no exact launch point; the pin marks Krasnoyarsk.

Lake Baikal, fed by more than three hundred rivers, has a single outlet: the Angara, which flows on past Irkutsk. That river is Michael and Nadia's last road. Exhausted, the blind man and the girl are led to a little point on the shore where a raft is moored, and they set off downstream with them towards the besieged city. Baikal is the deepest lake in the world.

Location precision: The novel does not name the shore point; the pin marks the lake's middle.

Irkutsk, capital of Eastern Siberia, stands on the Angara, and the governor-general's palace at the end of Bolchaia Street overlooks the river. On the night of 5 October the Tartars set the naphtha on the water alight, and the drifting ice is seized by the burning liquid. Michael and Nadia walk in through the palace's open doors. Over a dead man he tells the Grand Duke: "That man, your Highness, is not a courier of the Czar! He is Ivan Ogareff!"

Location precision: The palace is the novel's invention; the pin marks the city of Irkutsk.