Juggernaut

i.e. Puri, not so far from where teh Consul was born. Juggernaut, in Hindu mythology, is a title of Krishna; also specifically the uncouth idol of this deity at Puri in Orissa, annually dragging in procession on an enormous car, under the wheels of which many devotees are said formerly to have thrown themselves to be crushed.

Hotel Casino de la Selva

Selva means wood. Lowry says: "This strikes the opening chord of Dante's Inferno...this chord being struck again in in VI, the end of VII, and resolved in XI".

But they have gone

Lowry frequently uses broken Mexican-English to convey additional meaning.

Dore Paradise

i.e., like the hills in Gustave Dore's illustrations for the Paradise section of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Indoor Marxman

Laruelle's pun conveys his earlier opinion of Hugh as a pseudo-Marxist (Hugh is, as we discover later, a communist).

Love which came too late

Shakespeare, All's Well That End Well, V, iii.

Maximilian's Palace

The summer residence of Carlotta and Archduke Maximilian of Austria, brother of Kaiser Franz Joseph and Emperor of Mexico 1864-67. Maximilian, who had been persuaded by NapoleonIII to become Emperor of Meximco (hence "France... in Austrian guise on 14), was executed by Benito Juarez's men in 1867. Carlotta returned to "that other fatal palace in Trieste" (pg 14), the Mirimar, where she suffered fits of insanity. Empress Elizabeth of Austria was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist in 1898. Archduke Ferdinand was assinated at Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914, starting WW I.

Moloch

"The name of a Canaanite idol, to whom children were sacrificed as burnt-offerings (Lev. xviii). Hence applied to an object to which horrible sacrifices are made."

House of Usher

Punning reference to Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", another fallen glory.

Las Manos de Orlac

In Robert Wiene's Orlacs Hands with Conrad Veidt as Orlac, a pianist loses his hands in a railway accident. New hands are successfully grafted but he becomes obsessed by the idea that they belonged to a murderer. This deulsion changes his character and he becomes afraid of succumbing to their evil influence. He finally discovers that they were the hands of an innocent person. The remake, Mad Love (1935), directed by Karl Freund, introduced Peter Lorre to Hollwood as a psychopathic doctor who performs the grafting: here the hands are indeed those of a murderer. The name of the heroine of Mad Love is Yvonne. Robert Wiene also directecd the Student of Prague (1913), with Werner Krauss, which has a Faustian motif. Karl Grune, like Wiene, was a German, expressionist film director associated with "Ufa" (Universum Film-Aktiengesellschaft), a German film production company in Berlin with the best equipped studios in the world.

Trotsky

Trotsky lived in Mexico from 1936 until his assasination in 1940.

appoggiatura

(Ital) musical term, 'a slow grace-note which delays the performance of the main note'.

what, after all, was a Consul

Psalms, viii, 4: 'what is a man, that thou are mindful of him'.

Dfaz

General Porfirio Dfaz ruled Mexico as a military dictator 1877-80, 1884-1911.

"Lord Jim"

Hero of Joseph Conrad's novel (1900)

Then, will I...me!

from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

facless figurine...carrying a torch

i.e., Prometheus, the trademark of the Modern Library. The book is Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays.

sortes Shakespeare

The use of literature (generally Virgil or Homer or the Bible) to foretell the future by opening a book at hazard and reading the first passage lit on.

Cut is the branch...fall:

From the epilogue of Doctor Faustus, spoken by the Chorus

As Blake well knew

i.e., William Blake, e.g. his letter to Thomas Butts, 4/25/1803: "I will go on in the strength of the Lord; through Hell will I sing forth his Praises, that the Dragon of the Deep my praise him..."

The Knight of Sorry Aspect

Don Quixote

Lift up your eyes unto the hills

Psalms

dolente...delore

The inscription above the entrance to Hell in Dante's Divine Commedia:
'THROUGH ME THE ROAD TO THE CITY OF DESOLATION,
THROUGH ME THE ROAD TO SORROWS DIUTURNAL'.

definition of diuturnal: Of long continuance; lasting.

the luminous wheel

Lowry: "This wheel is of course the Ferris wheel in the square, but it is, if you like, also many other things: it is Buddha's wheel of the law..., it is eternity, it is the instrument of eternal recurrence, the eternal return, and it is the form of the book; of superficially it can be seen simply in an obvious movie sense as the wheel of time whirling backwards until we have reached the year before and Chapter 2 and in this sense, if we like we can look at the rest of the book through Laruelle's eyes, as if it were his creation."