MALEK, a fine chestnut with a flowing mane and tail, one white sock, a blaze and more than a touch of Arab to his brow, was waiting by a clump of acacias on the Cegléd road. The boy who had ridden him over told Berta he had been newly shod and he would be no trouble except for a short stretch near his stable. We stowed my things in the saddle-bags and tied my rolled greatcoat across the pommel. Berta drove off with Micky and Tim to drop the boy home and I hadn’t trotted more than half-an-hour along the same road before they were back. We picnicked under an oak then set off in opposite directions, they for Pest, I for Constantinople, looking back and waving until we were all out of sight.
It was the thirteenth of April. The few clouds in the clear, wide sky were so nearly motionless they might have been anchored to their shadows. The Great Hungarian Plain—the Alföld, in Magyar—is the westernmost steppe in Europe, a last outpost of the Pontic and Caspian wastes. Influenced by pictures of the wilder Hortobágy a hundred miles further east, I was disappointed at first to see ploughland and fields green with young wheat and a taller crop with pointed pale green leaves which turned out to be Indian corn; there were rows of tobacco plants, then orchards and farms set about with trees, and the plain between these tracts of husbandry was dotted with herds. Sheep and swine and troops of cattle grazed across the middle distance, with a village every few miles. The one I had been warned about was Alberti-Irsa;[1] this was the difficult stretch. Malek tried to turn down a track which led to a gateway and outbuildings and barns, with a glimpse beyond them of a château half-hidden among trees, where his own stable beckoned. When I insisted on going straight on, there were aggrieved backward glances; I knew other horses were at grass there but his passionate whinny went unanswered—perhaps the groom had led them out of earshot—and after a brief tug of wills we were clip-clopping along as briskly as before.
Carts drawn by horses and oxen easily outnumbered the motor-cars. Gypsies were on the move in long, jolting waggons that made all their gear clatter. Branching off the road to the left, I followed lesser tracks where the farmsteads and cottages soon began to scatter the country more thinly. A few, thatched with reed and maize-trash and fenced about with woven sticks, had a dishevelled look, but most were clean and trim with thick walls newly whitewashed, for Easter perhaps, and painted all round with coloured dados. A handily planted tree like a prehistoric dresser had pots and pans stuck on its lopped branches and a family of white hens and a speckled cock roosted in another. Shallow platforms lifted the houses above the plain and women busy with household tasks sat there and gossiped. On one of them a length of cloth, with a red and white pattern suddenly dividing in two, stretched over a long loom and a kerchiefed crone sent a shuttle flying through the taut warps; shifting them through each other with a clack of the treadle, she beat the new weft home with the comb-like reed, and stopped and looked up at my greeting and answered with “Isten áldjs” (God bless you). Understanding I was a foreigner, she asked “Német?” (German?). My answer “Angol” induced a look of polite vagueness: an Angle meant as little to her as a Magyar might in the middle of Dartmoor. As the other side of the house was noisy with mooing, she shouted through the windows and in a minute a grand-daughter brought a foaming glass of milk: they both smiled as they watched me drink it. I sipped it slowly and thought: I’m drinking this glass of milk on a chestnut horse on the Great Hungarian Plain.
By the approach of evening, all trace of the capital and the western hills had vanished. We were in the middle of a limitless space, scattered with woods, and pronged here and there with the solitary and, at first, enigmatic perpendiculars of sweep-wells. These primordial devices (called shadoofs in the Egyptian desert) have two posts erected side by side crossed by a bar six feet up—or the branches of a tree lopped until only a fork remains—which is pivot for a cross-beam several yards long. Weights—usually boulders—are lashed to the short end, until the yards of beam beyond the pivot tilt upright; from this lofty tip hangs a pole—or, if necessary, two linked together—from which a bucket hangs. This is sent down the well-shaft by hauling hand over hand while the weighted end of the beam swings aloft: hold is then loosened and the weight sinks, lifting a full bucket to the surface, ready for pouring into a cattle-trough like a dug-out canoe. These lonely uprights give an air of desolation to the plain: they resemble derelict siege-engines by day and the failing light turns them into gibbets or those wheel-topped stakes in pictures by Hieronymus Bosch where vultures wrangle over skeletons spreadeagled in mid-air.
The evening was full of the see-saw creak of their timbers. At one of them, by a ruined farmhouse with a stork’s nest in the rafters, two dismounted drovers were toiling; their wide, white linen trousers, worn loose outside black knee-boots, came half-way down the calves of their legs. They had finished watering a large herd of remarkable pale cattle with nearly straight horns of enormous span that filled the air with trampling and lowing and dust. When the drovers had remounted, I waved a greeting. They lifted their black hats with ceremony and wheeled their horses round, then, abetted by rough-coated white dogs, they spurred after the herd, trotting or cantering on the outskirts and whirling long goads to keep strays from wandering. The declining sun outlined all their silhouettes. Haloed in dust and trailing long shadows, they moved westward with a noise of harsh cries, dogs and a jangle of horns and bells. A stork joined its mate in the rafters, probably after swallowing a last frog captured at some quieter oasis and I trotted east towards the darker end of the plain. The clouds had flushed an astounding pink.
But this was not to be compared with the sky behind. The flatness of the Alföld leaves a stage for cloud-events at sunset that are dangerous to describe: levitated armies in deadlock and riderless squadrons descending in slow motion to smouldering and sulphurous lagoons where barbicans gradually collapse and fleets of burning triremes turn dark before sinking. These are black vesper’s pageants...the least said the better.
* * *
Whenever he got a chance, Malek broke into a canter, and one of these bursts turned into a long twilight gallop; he may have thought we were far from home and ought to get a move on; and when we had settled to a milder gait, falling dark gave lustre to a thin new moon. A distant string of lights, which I knew must be the town of Cegléd, was behind us to the right, and, here and there as it grew darker, lights of farmsteads showed across the flatness like ships. I had planned to seek shelter at one of them but suddenly there were none, and by the time night had really fallen only a single glow was left. It was hard to tell the distance but the nearer we got the less it resembled a farm, except for the barking of half a dozen dogs that finally rushed forward in a frenzy.
Three camp-fires, spreading spokes of light through the tree-trunks, lit up the canvas of tents and shapes of men and horses. A party of Gypsies had settled for the night by yet another sweep-well, and our arrival caused bewilderment. Except for the fires, there was no glimmer in any direction and I saw, half with excitement and half with a touch of fright, that we would have to spend the night there. I had heard many hair-raising stories about Gypsies recently and I was chiefly scared about Malek. When I dismounted they crowded about him and patted and stroked his neck and his flanks and scanned his points with eyes like shrewd blackberries. Shaggy and unkempt, they were the darkest Gypsies I had ever seen. Some of the men wore loose white Hungarian trousers, the others were in ordinary town clothes and black hats, all in the last stage of decay. Snotty mites and lithe tar-babies wore vests that came to their middles and some had nothing on at all, except one or two insecurely hatted in cast-off trilbies so loose they swivelled as they walked. Beautiful girls, flounced and bedraggled in green and yellow and magenta, stared with effulgent eyes. Beyond the fires there was a munching of unyoked oxen; horses were hobbled under the branches and a couple of mares grazed loose with tall foals beside them. Dogs bickered and snarled and the poultry, loosed from their travelling coop, pecked about the dust. Black and brown tents were stretched over crossed poles and the ramshackle style and the jumbled scattering of household stuff gave no hint of a thousand or two thousand years’ practice in pitching camp; except for the reeds and withies and the half-woven baskets on which brown hands were already busy, the whole tribe might have fled half-an-hour ago from a burning slum. I think they were heading for the banks of the Tisza to cut a new stock.
I escaped the hubbub for ten minutes by walking Malek up and down before watering him at the trough, where a man called György helped with the bucket. I had been wondering whether to tether Malek to a tree; there were some oats and a headstall in the saddle-bag, but the halter was far too short for him to graze. Best to hobble him as the Gypsies had done with theirs, but I had no idea how to set about it. György showed me, linking Malek’s forelegs with a neat figure of eight. I was anxious about this: Malek couldn’t have been used to it; but he behaved with great forbearance. I gave him some of his feed and some hay from the Gypsy, then took the saddle and tack and settled with the rest of them by the fire.
Thank heavens, their informal supper was over! Apart from hedge-hogs, delicious by hearsay, the untoothsomeness and even danger of their usual food were famous. There was a sound of rattling metal: a dog was licking out a cooking-pot by the fire. Seeing my worried look, a girl of ten, who had just begged for a cigarette, hurled an accurate stone at the dog, which scuttled off with a surprised yelp; then, tossing up the vessel so that it caught on a convenient twig, she coiled to the ground again with an indulgent smile as she let the smoke stream lazily from her nostrils. The chief item of Berta’s supplies was a salami nearly a yard long, ribboned half-way down with the national colours. I made a good impression by cutting off a third and handing it over; it was the signal for a brief uproar of grabs and curses and blows. Then thirty pairs of eyes, accompanied by a soft chorus of whispers, watched raptly as I ate a sandwich and an apple. I took three fast gigantic gulps out of my wine-bottle before surrendering it. They seemed half-fascinated; also, and I couldn’t make out why, half-alarmed by my presence: perhaps all strangers, except as prey, boded ill. We were incommunicado at first; but I had been alerted by what the oldest man had said to György before he helped me give Malek a drink: the mumbled sentence had ended, I thought, with the word pani—immediately recognisable, to anyone at all in touch with Anglo-India, as the Hindi for water. When I pointed questioningly at the water-jar and asked what was inside, they said “Víz,” using the Magyar word; I cunningly answered, “Nem [not] víz! Pani.” There was a sensation! Bewilderment and wonder were written on their firelit features.[2] When I held up the fingers of my hand and said “Panch!”—the word for five in both Hindi and Romany (öt, in Magyar), the wonder grew. I tried the only other words I could remember from Lavengro, pointing to my tongue and saying “Lav?”; but drew a blank; tchib was their word for it. I drew another blank with “penning dukkerin,” Borrow’s—or rather Mr. Petulengro’s—word for ‘fortune-telling.’ But I had better luck with the word petulengro itself, at least with the first half. The whole word (‘horseshoe-master’ in Borrow, i.e. blacksmith) caused no reaction, but when I cut it down to petul, and pointed to the anvil, a small boy dashed into the dark and came back holding up a horseshoe in triumph.[3]
As soon as they got the hang of it, each time I pointed at something with a questioning look, back came the Gypsy word. Most of them laughed but one or two looked worried, as though tribal secrets were being revealed. A finger pointing to Heaven, and “Isten?” (the Magyar word for God), at once evoked the cry of “Devel!,” which sounds odd at first; until one thinks of Deva in Hindi and its probable Sanskrit ancestor. An eager light had come into those swart faces. Lustrous hair, dark eyes, chestnut skin and, among the women, the sinuous walk and brittle flexibility of wrist and ankle—all these encouraged the notion that they could have changed hardly at all since they had left Baluchistan or Sinde or the banks of the Indus. I had recently read, or been told, two hostile legends connected with their skill as metal-workers: not only had they cast the Golden Calf for the Israelites, but a Gypsy smith is supposed to have forged the nails for the Crucifixion, in punishment for which a similar nail had been hammered into his behind by a turncoat demon.
* * *
Malek was grazing under the tree where I had left him, a dozen yards from the fire. The hobble seemed secure and comfortable and, with saddle and saddle-bag for pillow, I lay and smoked but couldn’t sleep for a long time. When I did, the well-being generated by those hasty swallows of wine and the cheerful session by the fire had worn off. How could I have been so insane as to bring a borrowed horse into such a den of hazards? Later, between waking and sleeping I had nightmare visions of the Gypsies making off with that beautiful Szapáry horse; then (as they were said to do) painting him a different colour before selling him to a cruel stranger; eating him outright, perhaps; or, even worse, getting him secretly turned into salami, the whispered fate of old donkeys, after the hasty despatch of both horse and rider. This last fate was the best solution: should the borrowed horse come to harm, better death than a lifetime of disgrace. When I woke from these dreadful fancies, the new moon had set; but there was Malek, lit by stars under the branches and he was still there when daybreak routed the phantoms of the night. The sun lifted itself out of the wilderness like a blood-red disc and the crowing of the Gypsies’ cock ran from one invisible farmyard to another until the whole plain was stirring.
I had brought plenty of sugar-lumps and after gratefully giving Malek a couple I fed him some solider stuff and wandered off to see what was going on. A reversal of last night’s shadows striped the plain; smoke was rising and fingers were already threading, plaiting and splicing among the heaped-up reeds. Apart from the dazzling frippery of the girls, I had been disappointed the night before by the tameness of this little company. Not a glimpse of a musical instrument, not a note or a twang; not even a dancing bear. But I was wrong. In the lee of a cart, a huge brown Carpathian beast, his cheek resting on folded paws, lay fast asleep; and even as I watched he began to stir. Sitting up, he yawned long and wide, rubbed his eyes, then dropped his paws in his lap and peered about with bleary goodwill, while his companion, blowing on embers, prepared breakfast for two. I rejoined Malek, and as we both munched, I noticed that our sheltering tree, tall as a medium-sized oak, belonged to a kind I had never seen. The bark was darker, oval leaves the colour of verdigris grew in symmetrical sprays and leathery pods dangled among them like dark runner-beans. It was a carob-tree. (Its blackish pods, with the faint, dull, haunting taste of fossil chocolate, are like teak to chew. A few years later I sometimes used to stem hunger with them on the southern rocks of Crete, unconsciously imitating the Prodigal Son: they are the husks which he and the swine did eat, and they are still fed to pigs. ‘Locust-beans’ is an alternative name and some rashly think it was these, with wild honey, that kept St. John the Baptist alive in the desert.)
I saddled Malek, and said goodbye. We headed east.
It was time, and perhaps it is again, to see where we were, and to glance at the past of this extraordinary region. Since the centuries of Rome’s frontier along the Danube, the logical way from Buda—Strigonium—to the Levant lay due south along the river to its confluence with the Sava, where the huge and crucial fortress of Belgrade was later to spring up: then through the Balkan passes, across the future kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria to Adrianople and over Thrace to the Imperial City, or to the Hellespont, where Asia began. This was the overland link between the Kings of Hungary and the Byzantine Emperors; it was the path of Barbarossa and his crusaders on the journey which ended with the Emperor’s death in the chill flow of the Calycadnus. But the last crusading army but one—the Hungarians of King Sigismund, with his French, German, Burgundian and Wallachian allies and even, some say, a thousand English—kept on recklessly downstream until Bajazet the Thunderbolt, striking at Nicopolis, utterly destroyed them. (More later of this.) A final Crusade in the next generation was smashed to bits on the Black Sea; then Constantinople itself was lost. The same route in reverse had carried the Turks by fatal stages into the heart of Europe. They had subjugated the Balkans in the late Middle Ages and by Tudor times they were advancing upstream. Suleiman the Magnificent defeated King Louis II,[4] then he captured and burnt Buda; but in 1529 he laid unsuccessful siege to Vienna, and when the second attempt on Vienna failed at the end of the next century, the Ottoman tide began to turn. Charles of Lorraine, and then Prince Eugene stemmed their advance and harried them downstream along the same watery thoroughfare; and the Austrian army, awfully arrayed, boldly, by battery, besieged Belgrade. The Stadt und Festung fell and the time-honoured path became the itinerary for all Western travellers; in particular, for Ambassadors travelling to the Sublime Porte. Strings of carriages with outriders and escorts of musketeers, or ribboned houseboats with many oarsmen wended majestically downstream. (One must imagine Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu during a halt, half-furred and half-flimsy in Turkish dress, reading Pope’s Homer under a poplar tree.)
Kinglake followed in the next century, but, infuriatingly, his narrative skips Hungary and only begins with the author mimicking the sound and the action of a steam-engine to edify the Pasha of Belgrade; for the coveted citadel was once again Turkish. The railway which eventually linked it to the West and to Constantinople has played a great part in novels of espionage and adventure.
(Years after the present journey, I followed in all these ancient footsteps. If the river before Esztergom had suggested a liquid Champs Elysées, the resemblance on this southward reach is more striking still. A wide ochre flood dwindles across Europe to infinity between symmetrical fringes of willows and poplars with nothing in sight but a heron rising from the flag-leaves or an occasional fisherman’s canoe suspended in the haze like a boat in a Chinese painting. I stayed the night in a bargeman’s tavern at Mohács in order to see the battlefield where Suleiman had overthrown King Lajos: one of history’s most dark and shattering landmarks: a defeat as fatal to Hungary as Kossovo to the Serbs and Constantinople to the Greeks.)
So much for the Danube way to the South, but it was not the one I had taken. Malek and I had abandoned it for the less trodden route across the Great Plain to Transylvania and were trotting south-east steadily further and further from the great river. Later, searching through travellers’ tales, I could find only a few who passed this way.
On the fringe of allegory, dimly perceived through legendary mist and the dust of chronicles, these strangers have an outsize quality about them; something of giants and something of ogres, Goyaesque beings towering like a Panic amid the swarms that follow one after the other across this wilderness and vanish. No historical detail can breathe much life into the Gepids, kinsmen of the Goths who had left the Baltic and settled the region in Roman times; and the Lombards only begin to seem real when they move into Italy. Otherwise, all assailants came from the East, with the Huns as their dread vanguard. Radiating from the Great Plain, sacking and enslaving half Europe, they made the whole Roman Empire tremble. Paris was saved by a miracle and they were only halted and headed backwards near the Marne. When Attila died in reckless bridebed after a heavy banquet somewhere close to the Tisza and perhaps not many miles from my present path, the Huns galloped round and round his burial tent in a stampede of lamentation. The state fell to bits, and ploughmen still dream of turning up his hoard of jewels and ingots and gold-plated bows. The shadowy Gepids survived until the Avars scattered them and moved in themselves for nearly three centuries. Like most of these invaders, of Mongol stock and akin to the Turks (they were Turanians all), these hordes of long-plaited savages and their hectoring khans came close to carrying Byzantium by storm. A permanent nuisance to the West, their newly-invented stirrup made them more formidable still: a firm seat in the saddle ousted the bow as the horseman’s chief weapon and replaced it with the spear, and then the lance which in its turn led to the heavily armoured knights of the Middle Ages and, in dim barbaric fashion, foreshadowed the tank. When Charlemagne destroyed their enigmatic sevenfold rings of fortification and put an end to them, all Europe heaved a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, spreading like damp, the Slavs had been quietly expanding eastwards and southwards and into the Balkans, giving birth to the insubstantial Kingdom of Great Moravia on the way. Then the state of the newly-arrived Bulgars stretched a north-western wing into the void the Avars had left. (What figure could seem more remote than Swiatopluk, Kral of the brittle Moravian realm? And who could be further from heart’s desire than Krum, the early khan of the Bulgars? He and his boyars used to drink out of the skull of the captured Emperor Nicephorus, halved and lined with silver.)
At last the Magyars came. Fen and tundra people originally, they too were akin to earlier and later invaders, but they had strayed away from their Ugro-Finnic relations centuries earlier; they must have rubbed shoulders with the Persians on their wanderings; almost certainly loitered for a Turkic century or two on the Pontic Steppes to the north of the Caspian and the Black Sea, where lay the vast, mysterious and deeply interesting Empire of the Khazars... Leaving the Ural river behind them, and then the Volga and the Don and the Dnieper, they reached the delta of the Danube and halted just north of it in Bessarabia. The Byzantine Emperor, fiercely harassed by the Bulgars, persuaded the godsent Magyars to cross to the south of the Danube and attack them. To counter this, Simeon, the Bulgars’ leader (soon to be Tzar) called into play the terrible race of the Pechenegs. These, the fiercest, the cruellest and the most perfidious of all the steppe nomads, were already chafing in the halted queue of Asiatic invaders directly behind the Magyars. While the Magyars were busy assaulting the Bulgars, they moved forward and ravaged and then occupied the Magyars’ temporarily evacuated Bessarabian stamping ground.
A fateful chain of events was set in motion. Deprived of Bessarabia, the Magyars struck out towards the sunset; some of them went south-west along the Danube, through the Iron Gates, and then sharp right; but the main body headed north-west through the Carpathian passes, and then sharp left until all the tribes were congregated on the Great Plain, which became Hungary at last. They were already organised in a war-like hierarchy; Arpád had been hoisted on a shield by the other chieftains; and his subjects, expert horsemen, javelin-throwers and archers to a man, had saddles and stirrups that enabled them to twist like corkscrews and loose off in all directions at full gallop. The campaign gathered momentum. All rivals were subjugated or swept from the Plain; the whole of Slovakia was taken; Transylvania was occupied; the Great Moravian Kingdom was trampled in pieces and the Slavs of the North and the South were sundered for ever.
No wonder old chroniclers mixed up the Magyars and the Huns! Their origins and conquests and their behaviour in earlier decades were on exactly the same lines. Like them, they became the terror of Europe; they bargained with the Roman Emperor under the walls of Constantinople, rode roughshod through Italy as far as Otranto, crossed the Rhine and ravaged Lorraine and Burgundy until at last, near Augsburg, the Emperor Otto almost annihilated them; they straggled home chastened to their huge captured territory by the Danube. Then everything began to change. In a few more decades, as we have seen, Arpád’s descendant, Stephen, was king of a great Christian state; he died a saint; and the frontiers of Hungary, except for expanding later on to take in the kingdom of Croatia and then being fragmented for a century or two by the invading Turks, remained unchanged for nine hundred years. St. Stephen’s momentous coronation at Esztergom in AD 1000—like Charlemagne’s coronation in St. Peter’s on Christmas Day 800—is one of those lucky key-dates which help to give us our bearings in this chaos.
But the Nomad procession had still not dried up. We have seen what happened with the Mongols in 1241, and how King Béla’s kingdom was laid in ashes. To re-people the desert, he summoned yet another horde from the steppes, the Cumans,[5] and the Cumans were even worse than the Pechenegs. Vast numbers settled on the Plain; hoping to tame them, Béla married his son to a Cuman princess but the barbarians’ power increased until the country was on the point of relapsing into heathen barbarism; finally the brave and clever dynasty of the Arpáds began to fail. When the last one died in 1301, the Anjous of Naples, their legal heirs, succeeded, and an able line of Angevin kings, culminating in Louis, or Lajos, the Great, resurrected the country; rebuilding began, and for a while generations of house-martins could return to the same eaves each year, and storks to their chimneys, without finding everything in ruins. But offstage, the Turks were already fidgeting in the wings.
* * *
When I had unfolded my map under the carob tree, the Tisza river, flowing south-east to join the Danube, uncoiled straight ahead of my path; I was struck by the place-names scattered beyond the east bank: Kúncsorba, Kúnszentmartón, Kúnvegytöke, and so on. The first syllable, it seemed, meant ‘Cuman’ and the region was still known as Nagykunság or Great Cumania. On my side of the river, a slightly different profusion spread southwards: Kiskúnhalas, Kiskúnfélegyháza, Kiskúndorozsma. ‘Kis’ means ‘little’: they belonged to the region of Kiskunság or Little Cumania.
So this was where the Cumans had ended up! And, even closer to my route, lay a still more peculiar paper-chase of place-names. Jászboldogháza, for instance, only a few miles north; and a bit farther afield, Jászladány, Jászapáti, Jászalsószentgyörgy, and many more... Here the first syllable recalled a more unexpected and still hoarier race of settlers. In the third century BC, the Jazyges, an Iranian speaking branch of the Sarmatians mentioned by Herodotus, were first observed in Scythian regions near the Sea of Azov, and some of them made their way to the west. They were allies of Mithridates—Ovid speaks of them in his Black Sea exile—and, between the Danube and the Tisza, exactly where their descendants finally settled, the Romans had much trouble with them. We know just what these Jazyges looked like from the column of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza Colonna. The bas-relief warriors—and their horses, right down to their fetlocks—are sheathed in scale-armour like pangolins. Javelins lost, and shooting backwards in the famous Parthian style, they canter with bent bows up the spiral.
Had they left any other traces in the Plain? Any dim, unexplained custom, twist of feature, scrap of language, or lingering turn of phrase? A few sparse reminders of the Pechenegs and the Cumans still flicker about the Balkans; but this entire nation seems to have vanished like will o’ the wisps and only these place-names mark the points of their evaporation. There had been a time when they scattered the hemisphere all the way from the Danube’s banks to the fogs of the Oxus and the hushed Chorasmian waste.
* * *
It was several days before I heard of these wild people, but I can’t resist introducing them while we are in their haunts. I learnt, too, that Jászberény, an old town due north, and one of the possible sites for Attila’s capital, still contained an old ivory horn carved from a tusk. Although it is really Byzantine work, it was once revered as the oliphant of Lehel, chief of one of the earliest Magyar tribes; his horn is as famous in Hungary as Roland’s in the West. I already knew about Charlemagne’s conquest of the Avars and I realised rather sadly that these miles on horseback were the last stretch of my itinerary still linked with the great Emperor: he had seemed to preside over the whole of the journey so far. I cursed the ignorance which had allowed me to pass Aachen without knowing it was Aix-la-Chapelle! A fully historical figure, with Alcuin of York and his court of scholars and his dates, wars, sayings and laws intact, including his strange names for the months—‘Hornung,’ ‘Ostarmonath’ and the rest—he has been touched and then transformed by a cloud of fable. Fireside mutterings, legends, centuries of bards and the lays of minnesingers have set him afloat somewhere between Alexander and King Arthur, where he looms, mural-crowned, enormous, voluminously bearded, overgrown with ivy and mistletoe, announced by eagles and ravens, dogged by wolf-hounds, accompanied by angels and oriflammes and escorted by a host of prelates and monks and paladins; confused with Odin, and, like Adonis, akin to the seasons, he is ushered on his way by earthquakes and eclipses of the sun and the moon and celebrated by falling stars and lightning; horns and harps waft him across the plains; they carry him through canyons and forests and up to steep mountain-tops until his halo is caught up in the seven stars of his Wain.
In ad 802 (I had just learnt) Harun-al-Rashid had sent Charlemagne the gift of an elephant. He was called Abulahaz, Father of the Valiant, and the Emperor kept him in his park at Aachen until he was killed in a battle against the Danes. There is no mention of his route: could it have been the old Danube highway? Or Brindisi and the Appian Way? Venice or Grado, then the Adige and the Brenner—well east of Hannibal’s path, this time—and finally the Rhine? Or could the Caliph have sent him via the Hellespont or the Bosphorus? He might have; though peril lurked in the Balkans: Krum and his boyars might have spotted the elephant and eaten him... But the Great Plain, still largely fenland and timber and cleared of Avars eight years before, was perfect elephant-country. He had probably come from the foothills of the Himalayas, or perhaps the swamps and sal-forests of Azufghur... With no effort at all now, I could see Abulahaz and his mahout and his grooms and a troop of bedouin lancers treading through the glades and plains while Slav backwoodsmen and perhaps some stray surviving Dacian gaped from their rough abodes. He might even have halted a few miles further along my track, dipped his trunk in the Tisza and deluged himself with cool jets among the shady reed-beds there.
* * *
Meanwhile, traversed by the shadows of flat-bottomed clouds, the level country was variegated still with wheatfields and lines of poplars and orchards; once a faraway windmill broke the flatness, there were sweep-wells everywhere and wide expanses of grass for the pale cattle to graze on. Some of the drovers, leaning on long tomahawk-like staves among their flocks, still wore cloaks of matted fleece; others, felt-like homespun with complex yokes of embroidery about the shoulders. At the entrance to farmsteads and hamlets, geese scuttled out of their ponds and across the path with a hissing and craning of necks that always turned into hostile beating of wings as Malek minced carefully by; if on dry land, they rushed at the ponds and splashed in. The women were aproned, embroidered, smocked and pleated in many pretty and unexpected ways and their hair was coifed and caught up in head-kerchiefs. Many of them had distaffs stuck in bright sashes of braid. Damping thumb and forefinger with their tongues, they pulled and twisted strands from the hanks of raw wool that clouded their distaff-prongs, and with the other hand set them spinning with twirls of their float-like spindles. These rose and fell like slow-motion yoyos, gathering thicker and still thicker coils of thread; later on, stretched on their elongated looms, they went to the weaving of those dense and unpliant capes. A girl on a stool among the hollyhocks outside her cottage trod and twirled at a spinning-wheel, a beautifully carved instrument polished by generations of toil, the only one I have ever seen in use.
Those long un-desert-like stretches have left a memory of dew and new grass and Malek’s hoofs trotting through woods and flowers while the climbing sun showed so clearly through leaves and petals and grass-blades that they seemed alight. The woods flickered with red-starts and wheatears, newly arrived after amazing journeys, their giveaway rumps darting through the tree-trunks among birds with their nests already built, and in the open, crested larks flew up from the grass at our approach and sang as though they were suspended about the sky on threads. There was not a single way in which life could be improved. Malek’s alert and good-tempered ears, his tireless and untiring gait and the well-being he radiated, meant that we infected each other’s mood, as horse and rider often do.
I had taken too northerly a path in the dark and the unseen town of Cegléd lay to the south-west. We stopped and ate in the shade by the Zagyva river. Later, a change in the cultivation, a sudden increase in the trees and the number of wagtails told of the closeness of another river; and soon, through the willows and the enormous spreading poplars, there it was: the wide Tisza, the second river in Hungary, flowing sedately south between low banks and a flutter of reeds. Some rough boats were beached under the trees and a fisherman near the other bank toiled with a throw-net, gathering it into the boat again and again and casting it over the current in a sequence of momentary clouds.
I had been thinking about the Caliph’s elephant as we trotted downstream; then, among the feathery calamus rushes, loomed a vision as unexpected and almost as arresting. Just visible above the surface of a backwater, a wide, black, porous-looking snout emerged, its flaring nostrils weighted with a heavy ring. Sweeping back from a matted clump on the brow grew enormous, crinkled and flattened horns. Dark, liquid eyes gazed with torpid resentment straight into mine. Not far off, another huge and ungainly creature, similarly equipped and plastered with mud, was lazily swishing a tasselled tail. I had passed many ox-carts on the road, but nobody had mentioned water-buffaloes and they were an awe-inspiring surprise. I saw them often after that, especially in Transylvania, wallowing in slime or yoked two and two and drawing heavy loads with unbelievable slowness and ill-will.
Stopping at a bridge that would have taken us on to Törökszentmiklos—the name commemorated the Turks, for a change, and St. Michael as well—we followed the right bank, heading for Szolnok. Soon the carts and the cattle and a pony-trap and a couple of men on horseback coming in the opposite direction hinted that a market-day was ending. Then we were in the dusty outskirts of a town and I soon found the house I was after.
Dr. Imre Hunyor, a rubicund and cheerful man, had been warned of the invasion. We headed at once for a neighbour with a stable and a paddock—the vet, I am almost sure—and put Malek in his kind hands. When we left, two red setters followed us with an eager look. A dachshund joined them. Two sheepdogs arrived. When a whole litter of nearly full-grown puppies came bounding clumsily with an expectant air, the doctor and I halted and exchanged puzzled glances. Meanwhile, two nondescript animals were coming along the lane with alert and friendly mien, and then three more, and they all gazed up as though awaiting a sign. “I wonder,” Dr. Hunyor said, “if it could be that?” He was pointing at the saddle-bags on my arm. Still too big to fit inside, the salami with its red, white and green girdle had been sticking out under the sun all day and the evening breeze wafted its message over the puszta, until even I, inured as I was by gradual degrees, began to notice something. The dogs were wagging their tails; one or two started to bound in the air with fitful barks. Resigned to loss, I was about to toss the sausage in their midst when the doctor stayed my hand. “Nein, nein!” he said. “Es würde einen Bürgerkrieg lancieren!” It would start a civil war! So I got out my knife, sliced it into fragrant discs and set them spinning. The dogs scattered in delirium and in a moment it was all over.
* * *
The first volume of this story tells of a thick green manuscript book I bought in Bratislava and used as a notebook and a journal and finally, five years later, at the outbreak of war, left behind by mistake in a friend’s country-house in Rumania where I was living.[6] A few years ago, after decades of separation, I miraculously got it back, with its green binding a bit frayed and faded, but intact. The pencilled journal in it is a great help, but not the unintermittent stand-by it should be. I started it in Slovakia with a long entry for each day; but in towns, thanks to morning headaches perhaps, it was sometimes neglected: and it didn’t always pick up at once when the journey was resumed. The same happened in Budapest and the earlier parts of the ensuing travels. Szolnok, for instance, just has the names of the town and the cheery doctor who put me up: the delicious, boiling hot, scarlet and orange carp soup bursting with paprika we had for dinner is remembered but unrecorded; the rest has gone. Next day mentions ‘Baron Schossberger’ and ‘Pusztatenyö,’ a small place about a dozen miles to the south-east. Szolnok itself has left only a shadowy recollection. I remember trotting across the Tisza bridge because I halted half-way over to watch a string of rafts coming downstream between great crowds of poplars that grew tall enough along the banks to give the illusion of a pale flickering forest. The rafts disappeared under the bridge, emerged the other side, then dwindled along the current with their burdens of timber, heading for the Danube. Soon after, I reached a low country-house (where kind Dr. Hunyor had already telephoned) and saw Malek put in a loose-box during luncheon. The place belonged to a friend of Tibor v. Thuroczy, brother-in-law of Pips Schey, who had been so kind to me in Slovakia; Baron Schossberger came of a Jewish banking family in Budapest. Tall, brisk and piercing-eyed, he was a passionate farmer and he proudly stroked a newly-arrived threshing-machine as we headed for the house.
Later, as Malek and I tittuped past a sleepy railway-halt called Pusztapo, the scene clears a bit; its name has stuck only because of its oddity. Hamlets like this were hardly more than a row of thatched cottages on either side of the dusty way. Sometimes I would stop and buy some oats; when the word kocsma over a door or painted in white on a window-pane indicated a tavern, I would dismount and sit on the bench among the budding hollyhocks over a small glass of a fierce country schnapps called seprü, or cseresznye, when made of cherries. Sometimes, blinking in the sun and the dust, a waggoner or two might be on the same bench and, though we were incommunicado, I was among friends at once because of the prevalent sympathy for horses: Malek’s fine looks won all hearts, and everyone stroked him. “Nagyon szép!” they would murmur, “Very beautiful” or “Az egy szép ló,” “He’s a fine horse...” (Sketchy vocabularies are jotted in the journal here and there: zab, oats; ló, horse; lovagolok, I ride; lovagolni fogok, I will ride; lovagolni fogok holnap Mezötúrra, I will ride to Mezötúr tomorrow. Gyönyörü! excellent or first class, it continues, and Rettenetes!, terrible! and so on.) Sitting with the reins loose in my hands under the transparent leaves of the acacias, I felt like a lone cowboy venturing among little-known tribes and the Gypsies and the shepherds with their tomahawk-staves supplied corroborative detail.
When a village fell behind, we were alone once more in a flat and now familiar landscape, half desert and half sown, with its flocks and its herdsmen and its solitary sweep-wells and its cloud-processions along the horizon. In the late afternoon we were picking our way through another enormous herd of cattle with those long straight horns. Soon Gypsy hovels appeared and a straggle of kilns and sheds and thousands of bricks set out to dry and a rambling overgrown churchyard; then solider houses multiplied and we were on the outskirts of the substantial country-town of Mezötúr.
Smaller than Szolnok, it was a place of some consequence nevertheless. (Between two coffee-houses in the main street with kávéház helpfully inscribed across their fronts, another shop-window full of cosmetics and lotions and pictures of women with lowered lids stroking their soft complexions had a mysterious superscription: Szépség Szálón. After a few seconds’ delay, like the working of a slow calculating machine, ‘Beauty Parlour’ came to the surface...) Many of the shops had Jewish names, German in origin but spelt in the Hungarian way. Others were simple Hungarian words—Kis, Nagy, Fehér, Fekete—which may have been translations of Klein, Gross, Weiss and Schwarz, changed during Magyarising drives in the past.[7] A grocer called Csillag—Stern?—set me on the right track for stabling. There were plenty of horses about and many country carts; old and battered four-wheelers with their hoods down waited patiently under the leaves or trundled about in the dusty evening light. Down a back lane at the stables I fell in with an ex-student called Miklos Lederer. He had just been apprenticed to a chemist; when Malek had been watered and fed, he helped me carry all the tack to a room in the house where he had taken digs. Half Hungarian and half Swabian, he too spoke German. Like everyone else at this time of the day, we strolled about the town, while busy swallows whisked by; there was something indefinably oriental in the atmosphere of the place. (I only discovered later on that south of varying parallels of latitude the corso—this universal evening promenade—was a phenomenon that stretched all the way from Portugal to the Great Wall of China.) We shared a paprika chicken in an eating-house and had coffee out of doors. Then noise and music enticed us into a much humbler vendéglö full of shepherds and drovers. They were tough, tousled and weather-beaten fellows in knee-boots or raw-hide moccasins lashed on with thongs, and they wore small black hats and smoked queer-looking pipes with lidded metal bowls and six-inch stems of reed or bamboo; the collars of the smarter ones, worn with no tie, were buttoned with apoplectic tightness. The instruments of the Gypsies were a violin, a ’cello, a double-bass, a czembalom and, most improbably, an ornate harp, chipped and gilded and six feet high between the knees of a very dark harpist; his sweeps across the strings added a liquid ripple to the languor and the sudden fury of the tunes. Some of the customers were groggy already: spilt liquor, glassy eyes and benign smiles abounded. Like all country people venturing into towns, new arrivals were shy and awkward at first, but this soon dissolved. One rowdy tableful, riotously calling for wilder music and for stronger wine, was close to collapse. “They will be in tears soon,” Miklos said with a smile, and he was right. But they were not tears of sorrow; it was a sort of ecstasy that damped those wrinkled eye-sockets. I learnt about mulatság for the first time—the high spirits, that is, the rapture and the melancholy and sometimes the breakage that the stringed instruments of Gypsies, abetted by constant fluid intake, can bring about. I loved this despised music too, and when we got up to go after a couple of hours, felt touched by the same maudlin delectation. A lot of wine had passed our lips.
I wonder how much Cuman and how much Jazygian blood mingled with Hungarian in the veins of all these revellers?
* * *
Next day the clouds that usually lingered on the skyline looked like closing overhead. A menacing canopy formed and I felt a drop on my neck; Malek quivered and his ears twitched inquisitively and the dark stars that sprang up all round in the dust soon spread and cohered in a wet pockmarked stippling as the rain swept down. It didn’t last long. The sun broke through and a rainbow hooped the middle distance. The clouds scattered again, Malek’s glistening coat and my shirt were soon dry, and a cool, damp breath of wind and fresh rainy hues transformed the fields and the trees. I wish I had seen the fatamorgana which haunts the Great Plain in the summer months; but beyond the thin wet-looking lines that bright sunlight sometimes lays across distant surfaces, there was no sign of it. I had read and heard of the Alföld dust-devils. Maelstroms of dust and straw and dead leaves twirl in the wind and climb to enormous heights and then revolve across the plain at great speed, seeming to mop and mow like rushing phantoms as they go; but autumn is the time for them and I only saw these portents much later, on the Baragan, that desolate expanse of steppe across the river from the Dobrudja in the Danube’s penultimate loop.
A wood lay ahead and, all of a sudden, out of the silence a cuckoo began calling. It grew louder as we approached and so clear that the horse’s ears twitched again. The strange flat scene, the rainbow and the sudden cuckoo—a sound, like the nightingale, which everyone considers their private property—brought on an abrupt and unexpected onslaught of homesickness. Why was I ranging this beautiful landscape instead of familiar woods and hills in England, a thousand miles west? When we got under the branches, a collusion of tree-trunks stressed and expanded this mood: the place might have been an English spinney. Hazel, elder, dog-roses and cow-parsley grew in a clearing and raindrops lay in the hollows of leaves. There were old man’s beard and deadly nightshade and brambles that another couple of months would cover with blackberries; a blackbird, pecking in the dead leaves, flew up and perched among branches aslant with sunbeams. There were two goldfinches, a thrush and a blackcap. Taken unawares, I sat under a tree and ate bread and cheese sprinkled with paprika and then an apple and smoked cigarette after cigarette listening to the cuckoo, the blackbird’s song and the thrush’s encore while Malek cropped the grass a yard away. The birds were all dominated by the cuckoo; it sounded as though he were perched just overhead, and I could still hear him when the wood was far behind.
Poppies scattered the green crops, the smell of hay, clover and lucerne floated in the air, and tawny-maned horses grazed. I wished the journey would never end. But the next halt, beyond another green line of trees, was the last, and in spite of dawdling over this final equestrian stage, too short a ride. Following a railway line, I was soon crossing a bridge over a fast-flowing river and then riding into Gyoma. The agent of Malek’s owner had a friend there to whom I was to surrender him. I thought that the return journey to that leafy, half-glimpsed château near Budapest might be a difficult business; but when I said so, the friend brushed the suggestion aside. Nothing would be easier; he would put Malek in charge of someone going to the capital next day—according to a signpost, it was only 166 kilometres to Budapest—and he would be home in a few hours. I handed him over with a heavy heart.
Dr. vitéz Haviar Gyula was tall, dark and slightly eastern-looking with heavy-lidded eyes, a swooping nose, high narrow temples and a rather sad smile. I wondered if he could have been of Armenian descent: numbers of these, respected for their nimble wits and teased for their prominent noses, were scattered about the country like little gatherings of toucans. But it wasn’t an Armenian name, nor yet Hungarian. Rumanian names originating in a profession—equivalent of ‘Potter’ or ‘Tyler’—sometimes ended in -ar, but not here, I think: well-known engravings of Kossuth and Déak hung in his drawing room and apart from the not very fluent German in which we conversed, Magyar was his only language. I had dinner with him and his family in a restaurant in the main street under a new moon and a trellis heavy with lilac (orgona in Magyar; the word has suddenly surfaced in my mind after nearly half a century). The air was motionless after the shower and it was suddenly very hot. The little town was full of evening strollers and many of them halted at our table for a chat; I had a mental glimpse of what towns on the Great Plain must be like in August. Dinner, and then bed appeared as though pre-ordained. Raven-fed like Elijah, I was no longer surprised; but never stopped rejoicing.
I emptied the saddle-bag on a chair next day to re-pack my rucksack and when some sketches dropped out Mrs. Haviar gathered them up. They weren’t very good but she asked me to do a drawing of her daughter, Erszi, an amazing and pretty little girl of about ten. I had often done sketches in Germany and Austria as a kind of thank-offering to hosts—no one seemed to mind their inexpertness—so I jumped at the suggestion and Erszi ran off excitedly to tidy her hair. When she was still not back after ten minutes, they gave her a shout and she arrived looking extraordinary in a cloche hat of her mother’s, long ear-rings and a fox stole; she had covered her face with powder and had turned her lips into a sticky Cupid’s bow. Perching on a tuffet, she crooked a bangled wrist on her hip while her other hand flourished a twelve-inch cigarette-holder and tapped off the ash with vampish languor. It was convincing and rather eerie, an advanced case of lamb dressed up as mutton. “Isn’t she silly?” her mother said fondly. I’m not sure the sketch did her justice.
Later, back in her ordinary clothes, she and her father and I set off for Malek’s quarters. I was armed with some valedictory lumps of sugar and steeled for an Arab’s farewell to his steed. We found Malek fooling about with some ponies at the far end of a paddock but when I called him he cantered over with a gratifying flutter of mane and tail and I patted the blaze on his brow and stroked his beautiful arched neck for the last time. I said goodbye and set off. My sitter, still elated by her recent avatar, kept waving and jumping up and down and shouting “Viszontlátásra!” until we were all out of earshot.
* * *
The Körös kept me company the whole day. The river was banked against flooding and all of it was wooded, so branches dappled the path and the river’s edge with shadows all the way. Thistledown fluff from the willow-herb span across the water and diving frogs marked almost every step. Reeds and tall clumps of bullrushes sheltered families of moorhens, and purple dragonflies hovered and settled among the yellow flags. When I sat down for a smoke, an abrupt movement gave away an otter; he looked about, then ran along the root of a willow and slipped in with a plop which stirred the backwater with spreading rings. There was plenty of food for him: fish gleamed in the clear water and, a little further upstream, two boys were busy with long reeds and cork floats. Their catch was strung through the gills inside a hollow tree and we had scarcely exchanged greetings when there was a silver flash and another was whisked leaping out of the current. When I said “Eljen!”—Bravo! I hoped—they offered to give it to me but I felt shy about turning up at my next halt like Tobias. Cattle gathered under the branches and waded knee-deep while flocks, filling every inch of shade in the fields, hid from the noonday as still as fossils.
An abrupt swarm of Gypsies made me look among the tents and the carts in case they were my friends from north of Cegléd, but in vain. Men with bill-hooks carried long sheaves of reeds on their heads that bounced up and down as they walked. Women were thigh-deep in the water, washing and wringing out their rags and their tattered finery, and then festooning them over the undergrowth and branches, while troops of boys, like the ones on the Slovak shore at Easter, scoured the banks for the lairs of their just-edible quarry—voles, weasels, water-rats and so on. They left the serious work to their little sisters, who trotted tirelessly alongside their only prospect of the day, calling out “Bácsi! Bácsi!”—for the masculine prey of small Gypsies are all honorary uncles; and their shrill uncle-uncle cries continued for about a furlong. When the reproachful diminuendo had died away I was alone again with nothing but swallows curvetting through the shadows or the occasional blue-green flash of a kingfisher to ruffle the stillness of leaves and water.
Early in the afternoon, the river branched and I went upstream beside the Sebes (swift) Körös, until a red-shingled steeple told me I had reached the old village of Körösladány.
The look of the Magyar word kastély—which is rather perversely pronounced ‘koshtay,’ or very nearly—suggests, like Schloss, a fortified and castellated building, but the nearest English equivalent to most of those I saw in Hungary and Transylvania would be a manor house and the term leaps to mind when I try to conjure up the memory, blurred at the edges a little by the intervening decades, of the kastély at Körösladány. Single-storeyed like a ranch but with none of the ad hoc feeling the word suggests, it was a long ochre-coloured late eighteenth-century building with convoluted and rounded baroque pediments over great gates, faded tiles and house-martins’ nests and louvred shutters hooked back to let in the late afternoon light. Leaving my things under the antlers in the hall, I was led through the open doors of several connecting rooms, meeting my hostess at the middle of a shadowy enfilade. She was charming and good-looking with straight, bobbed fair hair—I think it must have been parted in the middle for it was this, a few years later, that reminded me of her when I met Iris Tree. She wore a white linen dress and espadrilles and had a cigarette-case and a lit cigarette in her hand. “So here’s the traveller,” she said in a kind, slightly husky voice and took me through a french window to where the rest of her family, except her husband, who was due back from Budapest next day, were assembled round tea things under tall chestnut trees whose pink and white steeples were stickily bursting out. I can see them gathered like a conversation piece by Copley or Vuillard, and can almost catch their reflection in the china and silver. They were Countess Ilona Meran, just described, a son and daughter called Hansi and Marcsi, about thirteen and fourteen, and a much smaller girl called Helli, all three of them very good-looking and nice-mannered and a little grave. There was a friend, perhaps a relation, with horn-rimmed spectacles, called Christine Esterházy, and an Austrian governess. All except the last spoke English; but I can’t remember a word that was uttered—only their appearance and the scene under the wide leaves and the charm of the hour. We sat talking until it was lighting-up time, and indoors pools of lamplight were being kindled with spills along the succession of lavender-smelling rooms. It lit the backs of bindings, pictures, furniture which had reached exactly the right pitch of faded country-house shabbiness, curtains laundered hundreds of times over and music open above the keys of a piano. What music? I can’t remember; but suddenly, sailing into my mind after all these years, there is a bowl on the piano full of enormous white and red peonies and a few petals have dropped on the polished floor.
While getting tidy for dinner, and later, before going to bed, I looked at the pictures on the walls of my room. There was a Schloss Glanegg poised on a precipitous rock and many Almásy kinsmen of Countess Ilona and several Wenckheims in furred and scimitared glory; and there was an early nineteenth-century colour print that I was very taken by. It showed a dashing post-Regency buck—I think he was called Zichy—with twirling beard and whiskers, a blue bird’s-eye stock and an English scarlet hunting coat. He was one of those tremendous Hungarian centaurs who became famous in the Shires for the intrepid way they rode to hounds. Lounging about the lawn meet at Badminton, or in Ackermann prints of calamities at cut-and-laid fences, hounds in full cry, drawing Ranksborough Gorse, leaping the Whissendine Brook, chasing across green parishes from spire to spire, there they are; and, most notably, in those evening celebrations round laden tables, where bang-up Corinthians in evening pink, jumping to their feet among scattered napkins and wine-coolers and empty bottles, flourish glasses in boisterous unison. The outline-keys in the corner, among the Osbaldestones and the Assheton-Smiths, often bear the names of one or two of these Nimrods from the Great Plain.[8]
In the library the following day, while lessons went on next door, I found out as much as I could about the Alföld, until it was time to set off for a picnic. A kind of victoria bowled up to the front on twinkling spokes, and everyone piled in. I was very struck by the hat which went with the coachman’s black-frogged livery. It was a sort of black felt pork-pie—or could it have been velvet?—with a brim turned up perpendicular and a black ostrich feather across the crown, fixed in a semicircle from front to back while two black ribands ending in fishtails fluttered behind. Was it a legacy of the Turkish spahis or the janissaries; or could it have survived from the early invading Magyars? (Such were the themes I brooded on these days.) There were many flourished hats and greetings on the way out and when we had driven about half a mile a quavering hail came from the wayside. Countess Ilona stopped the carriage, jumped down, and in a moment was being embraced by an old crone in a head-kerchief, and after cries of recognition and much talk and laughter—some tears, I think, and more embraces—she climbed in again, obviously moved: she kept waving back till we were out of sight. She was the mother of somebody from the village who had migrated to America fifteen years before and grown homesick. She had only been back two days.
We settled on a grassy bank under some willows at a bend in the Körös and feasted there while the horses munched and swished their tails in the shade a little way off. A heron glided through the branches and subsided among the flag-leaves on a midstream shoal. We were on the edge of a large wood. It was full of birds, and in the hushed afternoon hour when talk had languished, three roe deer, with antlers beginning to spring, stole down the river’s edge. There was some quiet singing on the way home, prompted by a song from the fields; Austrian and German and English and Hungarian. I was tongue-tied in the last, but they knew Érik a, érik a búza kalász, my favourite from Budapest. No song could have been more fitting: we were driving beside a wheat-field where swallows dipped and swerved above green ears that would soon be turning, just as the song described. It was the hour of jangling bells and lowing and bleating as flocks and cattle, all fiery in golden dust clouds, converged on the village, and our return to the kastély coincided with its owner’s arrival. Graf Johann—or Hansi—Meran was very tall with dark hair and moustache and fine aquiline looks that were marked by an expression of great kindness. His children dashed upon him and when he had disentangled himself he greeted the others by kissing first hands then cheeks in that simultaneously polite and affectionate way I had first seen in Upper Austria.
The charms of this place and its inhabitants sound unrelievedly and improbably perfect. I am aware of this, but I can only set it down as it struck me. Also the stay had another dimension, an unexpected one which gave sudden reality to whole fragments of European history of a century earlier and more. Once again, pictures in my room put me on the track. One of these showed Archduke Charles, flag in hand, charging the Napoleonic army through the reeds of Aspern. (His statue opposite Prince Eugene on the Heldenplatz in Vienna shows him at the same moment, on a frenetically rearing steed. How surprised he would have been! He had refused all statues and honours during his lifetime.) I had first become aware of him when I gazed across the Danube at the Marchfeld after leaving Vienna: it was there, a few miles from Wagram, that the battle, the first allied victory over Napoleon, was fiercely fought and won. The next print showed his brother, the subject of that endless song in deep Styrian dialect called the Erzherzog-Johanns-Lied: I had first heard it at an inn opposite Pöchlarn and often since. These brothers, two of many, were grandchildren of Maria Theresa, nephews of Marie Antoinette, and sons of Leopold II; and their elder brother, who succeeded as Francis II, was the last Holy Roman Emperor. (Lest Napoleon should attempt to usurp it, he gave up the stupendous honour and became Emperor of Austria, just over a thousand years after the crowning of Charlemagne.)
But Archduke Johann was the most interesting of them. He courageously led an army against Napoleon at the age of eighteen, governed provinces with wisdom and justice and was often called to high office at critical times. Intelligent, determined and steeped in the principles of Rousseau, he was a lifelong opponent of Metternich and his passion for the simplicities of life in the mountains made him a sort of uncrowned king of the Alps from Croatia to Switzerland. In the romantic picture in my room, made about 1830, he was leaning on an alpenstock among forested peaks, a fowling piece on his shoulder, and a broad-brimmed wideawake was thrust back from a thoughtful brow. What a relief to record the qualities of these Habsburg paragons! Courage, wisdom, capacity, imagination and a passion for justice led them in ways deeply at variance with the ill-starred fortunes of their dynasty, and this particular prince put the final touch to his abhorrence of the capital by a morganatic marriage to the daughter of a Styrian postmaster. She and their children were given a title from what was then Meran, in the South Tyrol, now Merano in the Alto Adige.
“Yes,” Countess Ilona said when I asked about him, “he was Hansi’s great-grandfather, and there,” pointing to a picture, “is the charming Anna. She was terrifically pleased when she thought their first child showed signs of a Habsburg lip, poor mite!” (There was not much sign of it in her husband and it seemed entirely to have vanished from their children.) She told me the whole tale with patience and humour, abetted now and then by Count Hansi, who was smoking and reading a paper in a nearby armchair. “I must say,” she continued with a laugh, “when there was all that fuss and talk a few years ago about who should be King, I couldn’t help thinking”—and here she nodded in the Count’s direction—“why not him?” Her husband said, “Now, now!” disapprovingly, and after a few seconds, laughed to himself and went on with his paper.
* * *
I half wished, when I set off, that my plans were leading me in another direction, for a couple of days’ march north-east would have brought me to the Hortobágy desert and its herds of wild horses and their fierce and famous herdsmen. (Rather surprisingly these spurred and whip-cracking gauchos were strict Protestants; Debrecen, their steppe capital, had been a Calvinist stronghold since the Reformation.) But I had been swayed by the old maps in the library the day before and there were satisfactory hints of remoteness and desolation in the south-eastern route I was actually taking. A hundred years ago much of this stretch of the Alföld resembled a vast bog relieved by a few oases of higher ground. Hamlets were grudgingly scattered and, unlike the old village of Körösladány, many of these were nineteenth-century settlements which had sprung up when the marsh was drained. The air of desolation was confirmed by those tall and catapult-like sweep-wells rearing their timbers into the emptiness. In the southern parts of the Cuman region celebrated by Petöfi—it is strange how the names of Hungarian poets cropped up the whole time in conversation and books!—heavy rains often marooned the villages on their small hills, until they formed little archipelagoes only to be reached in flat-bottomed boats. But, to redress the balance, there were regions near Szeged which July and August dried up into glittering tracts of soda crystals, and to unwary travellers, already perplexed by mirages and dust-devils, these crystalline acres must have completed the summer’s hallucinations. Shallow lakes had been known to dry up completely then fill once more until, after a short evolutionary gap, reeds grew again, fish swam, tadpoles followed and frogs began to croak. It was refreshing to think of the unchanging carp-filled lakes of the south-west and the teeming abundance of the Tisza; and what about the fish those boys had been whisking out of the swift Körös by the armful? When the forlorn woods that lay all about me were no-man’s-land still, betyárs infested them: affable highwaymen and brigands who held travellers to ransom, drove away flocks and herds and levied tribute from noblemen islanded in their castles. It was a region of hazards, legends and fierce deeds.
I hadn’t far to go. Virtuously shunning the offer of a lift in a ponytrap, I slogged on to Vesztö and reached it in the afternoon. Count Lajos—Louis that is, though he was always referred to by a nickname—was a cousin of my Körösladány friends. (In Central Europe, in those days, if you met one Count, you were likely, if you also came across his kith and kin, to run into a whole team of them. The polymath of the Wachau was very entertaining about this proliferation of prefixes, including his own. “Count and earl are more or less equated,” he said, “so if Tennyson’s Lady Clara Vere de Vere had been born in this part of the world, she could easily have been the grandmother of a hundred earls, instead of merely their daughter—with a bit of luck, of course. Ten sons, with another ten apiece. There’s a hundred for you—instead of only one, as in England.”)
I found him strolling in the avenue that led to the house. He must have been about thirty-five. He had a frail look, a slight tremor, and an expression of anguish—not only with me, I was relieved to see—which a rather sorrowful smile lit up. A natural tendency to speak slowly had been accentuated by a bad motor-crash brought about by falling asleep at the wheel. There was something touching and very nice about him, and as I write, I am looking at a couple of sketches in the back of my notebook; not good ones, but a bit of this quality emerges.
German was his only alternative to Magyar. He said, “Come and see my Trappen!” I didn’t understand the last word, but we strolled to the other side of the house where two enormous birds were standing under the trees. A first glance suggested a mixture of goose and turkey but they were bigger and nobler and heftier than either and, at a closer look, totally different; the larger bird was well over a yard from beak to tail. His neck was pale grey with a maroon collar, his back and his wings a speckled reddish buff and strange weeping whiskers swept backwards from his beak like a slipstream of pale yellow Dundrearies. Their gait was stately; when our advent sent them scuttling, Lajos made me hang back. He approached them and scattered grain and the larger bird allowed his head to be scratched. To Lajos’s distress, their wings had been clipped by the farmer who had found them the month before, but when the larger bird opened his, and then spread a fine fan-shaped tail like a turkey’s, he looked, for a moment, completely white, but turned dark again as he closed them. They were Great Bustards, rare and wild birds that people wrongly related to the ostrich. They love desolate places like the puszta and Lajos planned to keep them till their feathers had grown enough for them to fly away again. He loved birds and had a way with them, for these two followed him up the steps with a stately pace, then through the drawing room and the hall to the front door and, when he shut it, we could hear them tapping on it from time to time with their beaks.
At dinner he talked of the spring and autumn migrations of cranes and wild geese. These sometimes travel in a wedge formation, at others beak to tail for miles on end; unlike storks which, as I had seen a couple of weeks ago, move in an endless, loose-knit mob as ragged as nomads in the Dark Ages. I knew he was an excellent shot. He had been talking about woodcock and, when I thought he had finished, he said, very slowly, “Their Latin name is Scolopax.” A long pause followed; then he said, “rusticola,” and finally, after an even longer pause, he added another “rusticola” as a trance-like afterthought.
His wife was away and during dinner and afterwards, as we sat and chatted by lamplight, the house had a lonely feeling (I suppose that is when the sketches were done; it looks like it by the shading) and when he asked me to stay on for a day or two, I felt it was not just from mere politeness; but I had to get on.
* * *
Breakfast was brought into a sunny room near his quarters. “I’m not much of an early bird,” he said, holding out his cup for some more coffee. He was still in slippers and a smocked old-fashioned nightshirt with the initials W.L.[9] on the breast under a discreet nine-pointed coronet and I felt sure, as I listened to the almost dreaming pace of his discourse, that a kind heart was beating underneath. Afterwards, people kept coming in and out for orders: some of them kissed hands and the room was soon full of slow gossip and laughter. There was a Molière touch about the mood of the hour, a hint of the petit lever du roi; and as he slowly dressed, taking each new bit of apparel from an attentive Jeeves-like figure, he answered his visitors and agents in hasteless and spell-bound tones and finally emerged in a plus-four suit and well polished brogues. He took some maize from a basket in the hall and we went to see the bustards.
“Don’t you carry a walking-stick?” Lajos asked in the hall, as I put on my rucksack, about to set off. I said mine was lost. He picked one out of the stand and rather solemnly gave it to me. “Here! A souvenir from Vesztö. My old shepherd used to make them, but he’s dead now.” It was a very handsome stick, beautifully balanced and intricately carved all over with a pattern of leaves, and embowered in them, a little way down the shaft, were the arms of Hungary: the fesses on the dexter side were the country’s rivers, while a triple hillock on the sinister, with a two-barred cross in the middle, symbolised the mountain ranges and the presiding faith, and over them both was the apostolic crown with its lop-sided cross. I was excited by such a present. It was a timely one too: my last one had gone astray a week earlier. Taking Malek’s stirrup-leathers up a hole, I had stuck my ash-plant in a bush and, once in the saddle, forgot about it. (Perhaps it’s still there. The ferrule had come off so it may have taken root and shot up fifty feet by now.)
I was due that evening, after an easy day’s walk, at yet another kinsman of his. “Yes,” he said, “there are lots of us, aber wir sind wie die Erdäpfel, der beste Teil unter der Erde”—“We are like potatoes, the best part is underground”—and I couldn’t make out whether this was very profound or the reverse. When we said goodbye, I looked back and saw him scattering grain to the huge advancing birds.
* * *
At one moment the plain looked empty for miles; and at another, soon after, you were among fields and water-meadows, or, as though it had suddenly risen from the puszta, walking across the yard of a moor-farm full of ducks and guinea fowl. (In reality, the opposite sometimes occurred: large buildings had been known to sink five or six feet into the soft soil.) I reached Doboz after dark and got a boisterous welcome from Lajos’s cousin Lászlo: word of the hazard moving across the south-east Alföld must have got about and thank God I shall never know whether it loomed as a threat or as a bit of a joke. It was treated as the latter by Graf Lászlo (or rather, gróf, in Hungary) and the moment we had settled down over drinks, I had to recount the journey to him and his fair-haired grófnö. He was rubicund and dashing and she—as I had been told but had forgotten—was English, indeed from London, “as you can tell,” she said cheerfully. She had been on the stage—“not in a very highbrow way, I believe,” someone had said—as a dancer or a singer, and though she was no longer a sylph, one could see how pretty she must have been, and how nice she was. Both of them radiated kindness. In Germany and Austria, after I had revealed what I was up to, the first question had invariably been: where were my mother and father? When I had said, “In India and England,” a second question always followed, “Und was denkt Ihre Frau Mama davon?”—“What does your Mamma think of it? She must miss you, wandering all over the place like this...” and so it was today. I told them all was well and that I wrote to her often.
They showed concern, too, about my crossing the frontier into Rumania. Neither of them had been there, but they were full of foreboding. “It’s a terrible place!” they said. “They are all robbers and crooks! You can’t trust them. They’ll take everything you’ve got, and”—voices sank collusively here—“whole valleys are riddled with VD, oh do beware!” I could see from their earnest looks that they really meant it and began to experience a touch of misgiving as well as excitement. My days on the Slovakian bank of the Danube, where most of the inhabitants were Hungarians, had given me the first hint of the strength of Hungarian irredentist convictions. The bias against the Slovaks was strong; but, since the loss of Transylvania at the Treaty of Trianon, the very mention of Rumania made them boil over, and I think the amputation was even more angrily and bitterly resented than the loss of Slovakia; far more than the cession of the southern part of pre-war Hungary to Yugoslavia. I shall have to go into this harrowing and insoluble problem later on. This was by no means the first time the subject had cropped up, so I knew how fiercely feelings ran.
Suddenly my hostess ran upstairs and came down holding a neat leather container that looked just too big for a pack of cards. “You must take care of yourself, dear,” she said. Gróf Lászlo nodded gravely. I wondered what it could contain. The thought flitted through my mind, but only for a wild second, that it might be some counter-charm to the insidious medical threat of those valleys. “One comes across all sorts of rum people on tours! This was given me years and years ago by an admirer of mine,” she went on. “It’s no use to me now so do please take it.” When the leather flap came out of its slot, it revealed a minute automatic pistol that could be described as ‘a lady’s weapon’; the butt was plated with mother-of-pearl and there was a box of rounds of a very small bore. It was the kind of thing women on the stage whisk out of reticules when their honour is at stake. I was rather thrilled and very touched. But their anxiety, which had no foundation as it turned out, was very real.
* * *
I was halted next day by the Körös. There was no bridge in sight, so I followed a bank teeming with rabbits until an old fisherman, pale as a ghost and dressed all in white, sculled me to the other side. The people in the inn looked different and I pricked my ears at the sound of a Slav language. They were Slovaks who had come here centuries ago, hundreds of miles from their old abode, to settle in the empty region when the Turks were driven out, devout Lutherans of the Augsburg Confession, unlike the Protestants of Debrecen who were Calvinists to a man.
The distance was getting longer than I had reckoned. For once, I sighed for a lift; I didn’t want to be late, and just as the wish took shape, a cloud of dust appeared on the path and then a governess-cart with a fleece-capped driver and two nuns. One of the sisters made room with a smile and a clatter of beads. We drove several miles and the town of Békéscsaba hovered far away to the right, with the twin steeples of the Catholic cathedral and the great tea-cosy of the Protestants’ green copper dome glimmering beyond the tall maize-stalks. Both had vanished again when they put me down at my turning. The nuns were rather impressed when I told them my destination, and so was I.
Lászlo’s elder brother Józsi (Joseph), head of that numerous family, and his wife Denise were the only two of all my benefactors on the Great Plain I had met before. It had been at a large, rather grand luncheon at their house on the slopes of Buda and when they had heard I was heading for the south-east, they had asked me to stay. Another brother, Pál, a diplomatist with the urbane and polished air of a Hungarian Norpois, said, “Do go! Józsi’s a great swell in those parts. It’s a strange house, but we’re very fond of it.”
Once through the great gates, I was lost for a moment. A forest of huge exotic trees mingled with the oaks and the limes and the chestnuts. Magnolias and tulip trees were on the point of breaking open, the branches of biblical cedars swept in low fans, all of them ringing with the songs of thrushes and blackbirds and positively slumbrous with the cooing of a thousand doves, and the house in the middle, when the trees fell back, looked more extraordinary with every step. It was a vast ochre-coloured pile, built, on the site of an older building perhaps, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Blois, Amboise and Azay-les-Rideaux (which I only knew from photographs) immediately floated into mind. There were pinnacles, pediments, baroque gables, ogees, lancets, mullions, steep slate roofs, towers with flags flying and flights of covered stairs ending in colonnades of flattened arches.
Great wings formed a courtyard and, from a terrace leading to a ceremonial door, branching and balustraded steps descended in a sweep. As I was crossing this place d’armes, several people were coming down the steps, and one of them was Count Józsi. Forewarned by Lászlo, he spotted me at once. He waved a greeting and cried, “You are just what we need! Come along!” I followed him and the others across the yard to a shed. “Have you ever played bike-polo?” he asked, catching me by the elbow. I had played a version of it at school with walking sticks and a tennis-ball on the hard tennis-courts; it was thought rather disreputable. But here they had real polo-sticks cut down to the right size and a proper polo ball and the shed was full of battered but sturdy machines. Józsi was my captain, and a famous player of the real game called Bethlen had the rival team; two other guests and two footmen and a groom were the rest of the players. The game was quick, reckless and full of collisions, but there was nothing to match the joy of hitting the ball properly: it made a loud smack and gave one a tempting glimmer of what the real thing might be like. I couldn’t make out why all shins weren’t barked to the bone; nor why, as one of the goals backed on the house, none of the windows were broken. The other side won but we scored four goals, and when the iron Maltese Cats were back in their stands, we limped back to the steps, where Countess Denise and her sister Cecile and some others had been leaning on the balustrade like ladies gazing down into the lists.
What luck those nuns turning up, I thought a bit later, lapping down whisky and soda out of a heavy glass! Someone took me along a tall passage to my room and I found one of the young polo-playing footmen there, spick and span once more, but looking puzzled as he tried in vain to lay out the stuff from my rucksack in a convincing array. We were reciprocally tongue-tied, but I laughed and so did he: knocking one another off bicycles breaks down barriers. I got into a huge bath.
Countess Denise and Count Józsi were first cousins and earlier generations had been similarly related. “We are more intermarried than the Ptolemies,” she told me at dinner. “We all ought to be insane.” She and Cecile had dark hair and beautiful features and shared the rather sad expression of the rest of the family; but it likewise dissolved in friendly warmth when they smiled. Her husband’s distinguished face, under brushed-back greying hair, had the same characteristic. (In a fit of melancholy when he was very young he had fired a bullet through his breast, just missing his heart.) He looked very handsome in an old claret-coloured smoking jacket. Dürer’s family came from the neighbouring town of Gyula, the Countess said; the Hungarian Ajtós—‘doorkeeper’—was translated into the old German Thürer—then into Dürer when the family migrated and set up as gold- and silversmiths in Nuremberg. Afterwards in the drawing room, my footman friend approached Count Józsi carrying an amazing pipe with a cherry-wood stem over a yard long and an amber mouthpiece. The meerschaum bowl at the end was already alight, and, resting this comfortably on the crook of his ankle, the Count was soon embowered in smoke. Seeing that another guest and I were fascinated by it, he called for two more of these calumets and a few minutes later in they came, already glowing; before they were offered, the mouthpieces were dipped in water. The delicious smoke seemed the acme of oriental luxury, for these pipes were the direct and unique descendants of those long chibooks that all Levant travellers describe and all the old prints depict; the Turks of the Ottoman Empire used them as an alternative to the nargileh. (That sinuous affair, the Turkish hookah, still survived all over the Balkans and before summer was out I was puffing away at them, half-pasha and half-caterpillar, in many a Bulgarian khan. But Hungary was the only country in the world where the chibook still lingered. In Turkey itself, as I discovered that winter, it had vanished completely, like the khanjar and the yataghan.)
Ybl, the architect of the castle, had given himself free rein with armorial detail. Heraldic beasts abounded, casques, crowns and mantelling ran riot and the family’s emblazoned swords and eagles’ wings were echoed on flags and bed-curtains and counterpanes. The spirits of Sir Walter Scott and Dante Gabriel Rossetti seemed to preside over the place and as I had been steeped in both of them from my earliest years, anything to do with castles, sieges, scutcheons, tournaments and crusades still quickened the pulse, so the corroborative detail of the castle was close to heart’s desire.
Wheat-fields scattered with poppies enclosed the wooded gardens and the castle, and when we got back from a ride through them next morning, my hostess’s sister Cecile looked at her watch and cried out, “I’ll be late for Budapest!” We accompanied her to a field where a small aeroplane was waiting; she climbed in and waved, the pilot swung the propellor, the grass flattened like hair under a drier and they were gone. Then Szigi, the son of the house, took me up the tower and we looked out over an infinity of crops with shadows of clouds floating serenely across them. He was going to Ampleforth in a few terms, he said: what was it like? I told him I thought it was a very good school and that the monks umpired matches with white coats over their habits, and he seemed satisfied with these scant items. Exploring the library, I was fascinated by a remote shelf full of volumes of early nineteenth-century debates in the Hungarian Diet; not by the contents—humdrum stuff about land-tenure, irrigation, the extension or limitation of the franchise and so on—but because they were all in Latin, and I was amazed to learn that in Parliament until 1839, and even in the county courts, no other language was either spoken or written.
The bicycle polo after tea was even rougher than the day before. One chukka ended in a complete pile-up and as we were extricating ourselves, our hostess called from the balustrade.
A carriage with two horses and a coachman in a feathered and ribboned hat was drawing up at the foot of the steps. Dropping his stick, our host went over to help the single passenger out, and when he had alighted, bowed. This tall, slightly stooping newcomer, with white hair and beard of an Elizabethan or Edwardian cut, a green Alpine hat and a loden cape, was Archduke Joseph. Living on a nearby estate, he belonged to a branch of the Habsburgs which had become Hungarian and during the troubled period after Hungary’s defeat and revolution, he had briefly been Palatine of the kingdom—a sort of regent, that is—until the victorious Allies dislodged him. Our hostess had been coming down the stairs as the Archduke was slowly climbing them, calling in a quavering voice, “Kezeit csókólóm kedves Denise grófnö!”—“I kiss your hand, dear Countess Denise”;—and when he stooped to do so, she curtseyed, and, diagonally and simultaneously, they both sank about nine inches on the wide steps and recovered again as though in slow motion. When we had been led up steaming and dishevelled and presented, we leaped back into the saddle and pedalled and slashed away till it was too dark to see.
I was lent something more presentable than my canvas trousers and gym shoes for dinner. The Archduke joined in the chibook smoking afterwards and the memory of those aromatic fumes still enclouds the last night and the last house on the Great Plain.
* * *
Someone had said (though I don’t think it was exact) that the Rumanian authorities let no one over the frontier on foot: the actual crossing had to be made by train. So all next day I threaded my way through cornfields in the direction of Lökösháza, the last station before the frontier: an empty region with a few farms and innumerable skylarks, where crops alternated with grazing. A compass forgotten in a rucksack-pocket kept me on a south-easterly course along a loose skein of byways. There were spinneys of aspens and frequent swampy patches and the sound of curlews; goslings and ducklings followed their leaders along village paths. The only traffic was donkey-carts and long, high-slung waggons fitted with hooped canvas. Driven by tow-haired Slovaks, they tooled along briskly behind strong horses with fair manes and tails, harnessed three abreast like troikas. Crimson tassels decorated their harnesses and colts and fillies, tethered on either side, cantered along industriously to keep up. The plain rang with cuckoos.
I fetched up at a hay-rick at the approach of dusk. A wide ledge had been sliced two-thirds of the way up and a ladder conveniently left. I was soon up it, unwrapping the buttered rolls and smoked pork and pears they had given me at O’Kigyos. Then I finished off the wine I had broached at noon. The sudden solitude, and going to bed at the same time as the birds, seemed abit sad after this week of cheerful evenings; but this was counter-balanced by the fun of sleeping out for the fourth time, and the knowledge that I was near the beginning of a new chapter of the journey. Wrapped in my greatcoat and with my head on my rucksack, I lay and smoked—carefully, because of the combustibility of my sweet-smelling nest—and gave myself up to buoyant thoughts. It was like my first night-out by the Danube: I had the same almost ecstatic feeling that nobody knew where I was, not even a swineherd this time; and, except that I regretted leaving Hungary, all prospects glowed. Not that I had seen the last of the Hungarians, thank Heavens: pre-arranged stopping-places already sprinkled the western marches of Transylvania; but faint worry, coupled with a hint of guilt, hung in the air: I had meant to live like a tramp or a pilgrim or a wandering scholar, sleeping in ditches and ricks and only consorting with birds of the same feather. But recently I had been strolling from castle to castle, sipping Tokay out of cut-glass goblets and smoking pipes a yard long with archdukes instead of halving gaspers with tramps. These deviations could hardly be condemned as climbing: this suggests the dignity of toil, and these unplanned changes of level had come about with the effortlessness of ballooning. The twinges weren’t very severe. After all, in Aquitaine and Provence, wandering scholars often hung about châteaux; and, I continued to myself, a compensating swoop of social frogmanship nearly always came to the rescue.
* * *
Scattered with poppies, the golden-green waves of the cornfields faded. The red sun seemed to tip one end of a pair of scales below the horizon, and simultaneously to lift an orange moon at the other. Only two days off the full, it rose behind a wood, swiftly losing its flush as it floated up, until the wheat loomed out of the twilight like a metallic and prickly sea.
An owl woke in the wood, and a bit later, the sound of rustling brought me back from the brink of sleep. Stalks and wheat-ears swished together and two pale shapes scampered into the open, chased about the stubble, then halted, gazing at each other raptly. They were two hares. Looking much bigger than life-size, motionless and moon-struck, they were sitting bolt-upright with ears pricked.
[1] I can only find Irsa on my modern map, but names sometimes change, and this particular square of my old one, frayed and torn by too frequent folding and unfolding, dropped out long ago. But it is ‘Alberti-Irsa’ in my rough diary notes, so I shall stick to that and risk it.
[2] What makes it all the stranger is that the Hungarian and Rumanian Gypsy word for ‘water’ is pai; the ‘n’ has evaporated. And yet, that is how I heard it. I wonder if the vanished letter still hovers in the subconscious, like the atavistic and ghostly ‘s’ behind a French circumflex.
[3] Petáli or pétalo—but I didn’t know it then—is the modern Greek word for a horseshoe and it could have joined the Romany vocabulary during the century or two that the Gypsies must have halted in the Byzantine Empire. The Greek original means ‘a leaf’ whence both petal and horseshoe, for donkeys in Greece, and all through the Levant, are still shod with a thin leaf-like layer of steel. The modern hollow crescent shape for horses and mules must be a later refinement, for the old term has stuck for all.
[4] Lajos in Magyar, pronounced Lóyosh, more or less.
[5] They were called ‘Kipchaks’ beside their Siberian home-river, the Irtish, and ‘Polovtzi’ in South Russia, hence the danses polovtiennes in Prince Igor.
[6] The house was Baleni, in the Moldavian region of Covurlui, not far from the Prut.
[7] My friend R.F. has warned me about jumping to conclusions in this matter. Like many such things in Hungary, these are far more complex than they seem.
[8] Esterházy, perhaps or Count Sándor, Pauline Metternich’s father; and, later, though he was from Bohemia, the Grand-National-winning Kinsky.
[9] Surname and Christian name are reversed in Hungary.