Victor Fet wrote:
To add to Alexey's flavitous flow (may be also useful for Ada 2:2 comments?):
(1) "across desertorum or agricultural drearies it attained seventy, ninety-seven night-nine..."
This clearly indicates one moving across the North American continent on a fast vehicle.
Note Latin "desertorum", a species epithet given in Linnean nomenclature to many desert animals and plants and meaning "of deserts" (plural genitive),
I had the same impressions.
There, back in the 1950s (e.g. in Texas) one still cound find a.... (2)
(2) ...Canis rufus -- a Red Wolf (literal translation from latin: Red Dog) - an enigmatic, now extinct species of North American canids, which is closer to coyote than to gray wolf; see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Wolf
It's not extinct, fortunately, though it's very rare, and there was a period in the 1980s when the only surviving individuals were in captivity.
(It's not red, either.)
I've occasionally wondered whether the "stuffed fox or coyote" Kinbote thinks he remembers from Shade's house is supposed to be this species.
- not to be confused with .....(3)
(3) ...a wild Asian species, Cuon alpinus, or Dhole - called in English "red dog", but in Russian "krasnyi volk" (red wolf), - see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhole --
those should have followed Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev's caravans in Tibet and Tien Shan, where.... (4)
Which is taken from a Wikipedia article!
Sorry to get pedantic, but the word "Taigan" is apparently the name of a Kyrgyz breed of hunting dog (Wikipedia again), and not the same as the Kyrgyz names for the dhole, which are chue and nyar (according to that authoritative-looking link above).
which brings us back to floramors?...
And dogs.