Didja Notice?

 

Indy finds a moray eel in the underwater cleft where he needs to recover an artifact. As he attempts to remove the eel first, he reflects that morays are notorious for biting and not letting go. This is true, once a moray eel bites down, it's difficult to pull away the bitten body part.

 

Page 2 reveals that Indy's underwater rebreather is a Le Prieur diving rig. Yves Le Prieur (1885-1963) was a French Navy officer and inventor who invented several different diving rigs from 1926-1946.

 

On pages 3-4, Captain Belgrade and his men use the following Spanish words: señor=sir, nada=nothing, sí=yes, capitan=captain, un anguila="an eel".

 

When Captain Belgrade implies that Indy may be stealing gemstones from his country's waters, Indy says the symmetrical rock formations below the surface are said by some to be indications of the sunken continent of Atlantis, and he is merely a scientist looking for evidence. Atlantis is a mythological land mass, once harboring an advanced civilization, that later suffered a severe cataclysm that sank the land beneath the ocean.

 

Short Round comes to Indy's rescue on page 5. Shorty was, of course, Indy's youngster pal in 1935 in The Temple of Doom. He still wears his New York Giants baseball cap. The New York Giants were a major league baseball team of the time, since moved to California to become the San Francisco Giants.

 

Page 6 reveals that Shorty is being made to attend boarding school in the U.S. when he's not adventuring with Indy.

 

Elizabeth Cody, claiming to be the granddaughter of William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody, comes to Indy for help in searching for a stolen pair of gold-plated, pearl-handled revolvers that had been given to her grandfather by the Czar of Russia many decades ago and which had been stolen from the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming a couple days ago. Buffalo Bill (1846-1917) was an American soldier, bison hunter, and showman, famed for the embellished stories of his adventures by Ned Buntline and published in New York Weekly and in the novel Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen. Elizabeth Cody does not appear to have been an actual granddaughter of Buffalo Bill in the real world. The golden guns are a fictitious embellishment to the Buffalo Bill legend for this story. The "Buffalo Bill Museum" mentioned here is now known as the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming (another museum going by the name of "Buffalo Bill Museum" now exists in LeClaire, Iowa since 1957). The Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World show mentioned by Elizabeth was Bill's final version of his show, travelling the world from 1893-1906.

 

Decker tells Indy that, in addition to searching for the golden guns in Russia, as a member of the state department of the United States, they would like him to sound out the political climate there, particularly the Bolshevik rulers' relationship with the Nazi government of Germany. The Bolsheviks were a radical Marxist faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, who had become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the October Revolution of 1917 and now ruled that country.

 

Taking a train through southern Ukraine, Elizabeth asks Indy if he's been in Russia before, to which he responds in the affirmative, telling her the last time was a couple years ago at some excavations in the Nalevo region where they made some interesting discoveries about a group of Chalcolithic Kurgans. "Chalcolithic" refers to the Copper Age, between the Neolithic and Bronze ages. The Kurgans were a prehistoric culture that lived in southeastern Europe from the fifth to third millennium BC. The word "kurgan" means "mound builder", just as Indy says here. I've been unable to identify a region called "Nalevo". Indy also visited Russia a few times as a youth and in The Genesis Deluge.

 

The train is ambushed and stopped by Cossacks. Cossacks are members of various ethnic groups living in the Great Eurasian Steppe, mostly within the regions of modern day southern Russia and the Ukraine. Indy dealt with Cossacks previously in his youth in "Swore and Peace" and "Revolution!".

 

On page 10, the engineer says da when a Cossack tells him to stop the train or die. Da is Russian for "yes".

 

When Indy is knocked to the floor of the train car without a weapon and confronted by a Cossack about to swipe with a sword, he reflects in his thoughts, In India I had my whip to protect me from guys with swords! And in Cairo, I had my revolver! Here...it looks like my luck's run out! This refers to confrontations in The Temple of Doom and Raiders of the Lost Ark. But, Indy's luck is still with him here, as Elizabeth grabs up the fallen rifle from the Cossack Indy had tackled and shatters his assailants sword with a well-placed shot (though she remarks she prefers a lever-throw Winchester to the turn-bolt action dropped by the Cossack).

 

On page 13, Indy refers to their captor, Peter Rostoff, as "Ivan". This is a common slang nickname for a Russian by foreigners.

 

On page 16, Indy, Beth, and the Cossacks flee from the Red Cavalry on horseback across the Dnieper River. The Dnieper is a major river that flows through Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. 

 

At the Cossack camp on page 17, Indy and Beth are greeted by the lilting ring of balalaikas, singing, and shouting. A balalaika is a Russian stringed musical instrument with a triangular wooden body.

 

    On page 18, Beth is pulled off her horse by Ilya Pugachev, who says, "Come, douschka! The ataman can have the other one--Ilya Pugachev will entertain you!" Douschka is Russian for "darling" and ataman is a Cossack leadership title, usually denoting a military leader.

    Indy comes to Beth's defense, telling Ilya, "I know the Cossack code says that women exist to serve men--but this woman isn't Cossack!" I have not been able to find any written evidence of such a code among Cossacks, and they seem to have had more of a separate-but-equal principle at work.

 

Ilya angrily refers to Indy as "Amerikanski". This is a slightly derogatory term for an American that may be used by a Russian.

 

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