"Wayfarers" by Algernon Blackwood

0:00:00 Prologue? Preface? Intro? Chapter 0? It's an unlabelled passage, so call it whatever you want
0:24:33 Chapter I
0:51:48 Chapter II

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Evian, today Évian-les-Bains, a commune in eastern France on the border with Switzerland.

Haute-Savoie: a department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of Southeastern France, bordering both Switzerland and Italy

motor: Not being pre-WW1 British, I'm not entirely sure if this is meant to be a car (presumably a taxi) or a bus (motorcoach) or something else, but obviously some sort of motorised transport.

bondelle: a freshwater fish of the whitefish genus, apparently specific to the Lakes Constance and Neuchâtel. I've certainly never heard of it before, and I am a bit of an angler, but here in North America, which is why bondelle has never entered my lexicon before now. Since we're in the French speaking part of Switzerland, they must be on the shore of Lake Neuchâtel (a.k.a. Neuenburgersee for you German speakers).

50 meters - the metric system could be argued to have been created in 1788 by French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, but to be sure by 1795 it was adopted into French law, so it was settled enough by that point. The setting of this chapter is clearly 1813 since we were informed at the end of last chapter that Napoleon had just begun his retreat from Moscow. And we know that the French Revolutionaries were big time into the metric system. So the use of meters here is indeed appropriate. I don't know if the author actually considered that, but regardless, it worked out.

Hesperides: nymphs of evening and golden light of sunsets, who were the "Daughters of the Evening" or "Nymphs of the West".

Chaldea: A country in Mesopotamia from the 19th to 6th centuries BC, ultimately absorbed into Babylonia.

Alcinous: Alcinous ruled an island visited by Jason and the Argonauts, and also Odysseus as described in the Odyssey. His garden is described as an ideal of rustic aesthetics and abundant fertility. I couldn't find any authoritative English pronunciation for this name and what the examples I did find were inconsistent, so I resorted to the Greek pronunciation.

gardens of Adonis are more interesting, however: small pots containing fast-growing plants, which they would set on top of their houses in the hot sun. The plants would sprout, but soon wither and die. Then the women would mourn the death of Adonis, tearing their clothes and beating their breasts in a public display of grief. But that seems unlikely in this context. There is a different story of the Garden of Adonis that comes to us in the 16th century in Edmund Spenser's poem "The Faerie Queene", which is likely what is intended here.

Semiramis: Lydian-Babylonian wife of Onnes and of Ninus, who succeeded the latter on the throne of Assyria. Many traditions have her being quite the builder of all manner of things, no doubt many towers included. In at least on tradition, she is the mother of Nimrod, the builder of the Tower of Babel.

Sardis: the capital of the Kingdom of Lydia (c.1200 BC to 546BC), in present day Turkey

The pictures used are:

Chapter 0: "Les Houches and mountains in France" by Tiia Monto, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en). It's Haute Savoie!

Chapter 1: "Wallpaper Essence of Two Lovers" by hypnoeros, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

Chapter 2: Lake Neuchatel by Markusmountainbike, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en).

To follow along: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/43816/pg43816-images.html#V