〜ヒント〜
9月4日出題分 その１
あまりなじみの無い単語・熟語をちょっと解説。
Seven Years in Tibet :
Internment-1By the end of August 1939, we had completed our reconnaissance. We had actually found a new way up the mountain and were now waiting in Karachi for freighter that was to take us back to Europe. Our ship was long overdue, and the war clouds were growing even denser. Chicken, Lobenhoffer, and I accordingly made up our minds to extricate ourselves from the net that the secret police had already begun to lay for us and to slip away-wherever we found an opening. Only Aufschnaiter was for staying in Karachi. He had fought in the First World War and could not believe in a second.
The rest of us planned to break through to Persia and find our way home from there. We had no difficulty in shaking off the man who was shadowing us, and after crossing a few hundred miles of desert in our ramshackle car, we managed to reach Las Bela, a little principality to the northwest of Karachi. But there fate overtook us, and we suddenly found ourselves taken in charge by eight soldiers, on the grounds that we needed personal protection. We were, in fact, under arrest, although Germany and the British Commonwealth were not yet at war.
Soon we were back with our trusty escort in Karachi, where we found Peter Aufshnaiter. Two days later, England did declare war on Germany. After that, everything went like clockwork. A few minutes after the declaration of war, twenty-five Indian soldiers armed to the teeth marched into a restaurant garden where we were sitting, to fetch us away. We drove in a police car to an already prepared prison camp fenced with barbed wire. But that turned out to be merely a transit camp, and fortnight later we were transferred to the great internment camp at Ahmednagar, near Bombay. There we were quartered in crowded tents and huts in the midst of a babel of conflicting opinions and excited talk. No, I thought, this atmosphere is too different from the sunlit, lonely heights of the Himalayas. This is no life for freedom-loving men. So I began to get busy looking for ways and means of escape.
reconnaissance：偵察（この場合は、ヒマラヤ登頂のための踏査行）
freighter：（貨物）輸送機（輸送船）
Karachi・Las Bela・Ahmednagar・Bombay：いずれも地名
overdue：遅れた、期限の過ぎた
Chicken・ Lobenhoffer・（Peter）Aufschnaiter：いずれも人名
extricate：脱出する
slip away：そっと通り抜ける
ramshackle：がたがたの、おんぼろの
principality：公国
fate：運命、運
taken in charge：保護されて
grounds：（この場合）根拠、理由
Commonwealth：連邦
trusty escort：護衛
declare war：宣戦布告する
armed to the teeth：完全武装した
marched into：〜に踏み込んで来た
fetch us away：我々を連れ去る
barbed wire：鉄条網
transit：（この場合は）一時的な、仮の
were quartered： 宿舎をあてがわれる
babel：がやがや（話し声）、言語の混乱
sunlit：太陽で照らされた