SUDDENLY, and without any warning, an ornate and incongruous watering-place called the Baths of Hercules rose from the depths of the wild valley. The fin-de-siècle stucco might have come straight out of an icing-gun; there were terracotta balustrades, palmetto-palms, spiked agaves in waisted urns, egg-shaped cupolas, leaden scales ending in stickleback ridges, and glimpses through the glass double-doors of hydrangeas banked up ornate staircases that wandered away into kursaals where taps and fountains gushed with healing waters. Sovereign against a rogues’ gallery of external and internal ills, these had made the place famous in Roman times; legates, centurions and military tribunes had wallowed and sipped here while Hercules and half a dozen minor gods presided over them, and the Victorian statue of the lion-pelted and muscle-bound bruiser, which dominated the centre of the town, showed that the ancient glory had returned. The ailing burghers of Eastern Europe, in crinolines and stovepipe hats, sabretaches and czapkas, or mutton-chop sleeves and boaters had been haunting the resurrected site for over a century.
In its provincial way, the place was everything that the words ‘spa,’ casino’ and ‘villeggiatura’ conjure up. Circular and heart-shaped beds of cannas and begonias burst out of the gravel like an industrial carpet; yellow, scarlet, orange, purple, pale blue and brick-red were so blindingly juxtaposed that the flowers could have all been artificial and the grass viridian drugget. A more knowing traveller might have caught a whiff of Offenbach and Meyerbeer, a hint of Schnitzler, an echo of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at its farthest edge, elaborated more recently by stout white plaster columns with alternating spirals, heavily moulded arches and wide eaves: this was a Rumanian neo-Byzantine style derived from the monasteries of Moldavia and seventeenth-century palaces in the reign of Constantine Brancovan of Wallachia.
It was the hour of the post-siesta promenade. A band was playing in a frilled bandstand and a slowly strolling throng from Bucharest and Craiova was meandering along the main street, through the gardens, over the Cerna bridge and slowly back again. Murmurous with gossip and detonating with holiday recognitions and greetings, the promenaders were dressed to kill: heels of dizzy height, heady scent and dazzling make-up were escorted by post-Rudolf Valentino patent-leather hair and co-respondent shoes. A scattering of officers in tall boots and jingling spurs—from Turnu Severin, I think—added their bright cap-bands and tunic-facings to the many-coloured scene.
Dusty, travel-stained and probably reeking of sheepfolds, I might have been pitchforked into Babylon, Lampsacus or fifth-century Corinth and as I picked my way through the smart promenaders, bewilderment was further compounded by an onrush of bumpkin anxiety. Thank God, the antler was disguised in the twisted greatcoat on my rucksack!
Gritting my teeth, I charged through the revolving glass doors of an hotel and asked the hall-porter if I could telephone. Heinz Schramm, a schoolfellow of István’s who lived a few miles away, was summoned to the other end; it had all been fixed by telephone from Lapușnic before I set out. The porter told me to wait in the hall and in a quarter of an hour István’s cheerful and rubicund schoolmate was jumping out of a gleaming Mercedes and we were soon spinning out of the town and down the valley; it was restored, once the town was out of sight, to the inviolate beauty of woods and apricot-coloured rocks with flaring magnesium shadows and falling twilight. There was the glimpse of a Turkish aqueduct, then arrival by lamplight at a large and comfortable house, quickly followed by sybaritic immersion. How incongruous my stuff looked, scattered about the spotless bathroom beyond the clouds of steam! Dusty boots, dog-eared papers, a jumble of books, broken pencils, dirty linen, a confusion of puttees, crumbs, tangled string, an empty flask, an antler, and a forgotten apple which had been going rotten at the bottom of my rucksack; but on a chair lay a jacket and trousers that weren’t too badly crumpled, a clean shirt and gym shoes at last, instead of hobnails. Using a toe, I let in more hot water and wallowed in transports of luxury.
* * *
Heinz Schramm had inherited a family timber business and obviously made a go of it. (I wondered if the Szatmár logging team had anything to do with him, but forgot to ask.) Lumberjacks felled in the forests and enormous tree-trunks were continually arriving at sheds and saw-mills along the valley; there, with the clang of circular saws and the rhythmic fall of planks, they were sliced up by spectres toiling in clouds of sawdust. As Heinz’s family were offshoots of the eighteenth-century Swabian settlers in the Banat, conversation was in German, except with Heinz’s father, a retired admiral in the old k. und k. Navy, whose fluent and marvellously antiquated English was of an even earlier vintage than Count Jenö’s. He was a lean, keen-eyed widower who had grown up when English was a sort of naval lingua franca all over the world. At the mention of Admiral Horthy, he said, “We were snotties together! A decent sort of chap, though, mind you, I never thought he had much in the top storey.” He recalled balls in Fiume—“learning the bunny-hug and the cake-walk from visiting flappers”—and happy anchorages in Tokyo and Saigon, “We had a whale of a time and were very upset when we had to skedaddle.” Happy reminiscences would unfold in the evening on a terrace looking down the valley. A great admirer of the Royal Navy, he had been seconded to it for a time in some sort of semi-diplomatic capacity; he liked the general style as well as the seamanship and he could never forget seeing the Fleet dressed overall for Edward VII’s birthday in the roads of Pola or Trieste. He had especially fond memories of Lord Charles Beresford when he was Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet: “You could tell the cut of his jib a mile off!” (The name of this stormy petrel always cropped up when Triestinos recalled pre-war days. Berta, my hostess in Budapest, had remembered being dandled on his knee as a small girl in Fiume, when her father was Governor.)
Heinz was full of stories about István at school. He had been a general hero and favourite in spite, or because of, his countless scrapes—breaking out and painting Vienna red and so on. Heinz called him by a school sobriquet abridged from his surname. “‘Globus’ was a marvellous fellow!” he said. “He had only one fault: he was a bit too proud of his five-pointed coronet.” (“Er war ein bisschen zu stolz auf seine fünfzackige Krone.”) I laughed and said, “I bet he was!” and suddenly missed him acutely. “You may laugh,” Heinz went on, “but guess how many there were in my year at the Theresianum who were not noble? Two!” In Magyar, the equivalent of the German ‘von’ was indicated linguistically in a way I never quite grasped; but when a westward-moving Hungarian noble crossed the Leitha into Austria and reversed his Christian and surname from their Magyar back-to-front order, he immediately interposed the Teutonic prefix, later replacing it with ‘de’ when crossing the Rhine into France. But nobility meant much more than heraldic baubles and forms of address: it signified membership of a legally separate order with a whole array of privileges. These inequities had long ago been removed but a chasm yawned still and much of the ancient aloofness and awe hovered about the descendants of country dynasts and their heraldic emblems were seldom out of sight. Untitled noblemen like István had circlets with five pearls, barons seven and counts nine—except for the Károlys, who for some reason had eleven—and princes had handsome closed crowns turned up with ermine; they were scattered over houses, carriages, liveries, harness, linen and cigarette-cases with uninhibited profusion. The disasters of war, fallen fortunes, change of sovereignty and loss of estates had left the ascendancy, sometimes with resentment and sometimes with affection, improbably intact, and my balloonist and frogman course between four-posters and cowsheds had given a fair idea of the old status quo, especially in the country and not only in Austria, Hungary and Transylvania. I think it had been more or less the same in Bohemia, Moravia, Prussia, Poland and Russia, and, indeed, in pre- and post-war Rumania as well.
* * *
August was an excuse for picnics. We feasted in ruins and meadows and stalactitic caves in the Banat mountains and by the woods that lined the Cerna and its tributary the Bela—the black river, and the white—and one evening we drove to the Baths of Hercules for a gala night at the casino.[1]
The little town seemed utterly different now. It had the comic and engaging charm of an operetta: colour and vivacity stamped its denizens and the crowded tables, the dance band and the dancers filled the dining-room of the Casino with brio and Schwung. Helped by tzuika and wine and dancing, the evening spun itself into a golden haze. A flamboyant and slightly theatrical aura radiated from a large table next door and it was soon clear why. During a break in the dancing, the Gypsies had begun to move from table to table, halting in an attentive swarm to play ‘at the diners’ ears,’ as it is called; it was rather discreet and muted; but when they reached our neighbours, a sudden challenging crescendo sailed aloft and set the drops of the chandeliers tinkling. A florid and handsome man of about thirty had put down his knife and fork and let fly in a tremendous baritone; everyone stopped talking; then the others at the table answered him on cue in a very professional way until the place rang. Heinz said they were the Bucharest opera company on a summer tour, but the outburst was spontaneous; they had launched themselves into the arias and choruses of The Barber of Seville out of pure high spirits, and their final tutti was hailed by clapping and cries of bravo! and encore! When all requests had been granted, dancing began again, and our tables were soon companionably mingled.
I found myself dancing—to the tune of Couchés dans le foin, then Vous qui passez sans me voir—with a girl who was studying English in Bucharest; not that one could hear a word in the press of the dancing. When we sat down again she said, “I love English books very much. Wells, Galsworthy, Morgan, Warwick Deeping, Dickens. And Byron’s poetry, if...” she stopped, smiling thoughtfully. I waited, wondering what reservations were coming, and after a few seconds’ silence, ventured to say, “If what?” “If,” she said, “you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.”
* * *
Running about in gym shoes next day, my foot landed on an inch of nail sticking out of a plank in a dismantled woodshed and it went clean through. There was little pain and not much blood but it hurt to walk on, so I lay reading in a deck-chair under a tree, then hobbled about with a stick. It healed in three days and on the fourth I set off.
The Maros had dominated the last months. Now the Cerna had taken its place and a few days earlier, just before dawn, I had ridden back upstream for a last look. The fleece of leaves soared to the watershed; underneath, the valley lay brooding and still in the half-light; it was a wilderness of green moss and grey creepers with ivy-clad watermills rotting along the banks and streams tumbling through the shadows; then shafts of lemon-coloured light struck down through the trunks into the vapour coiling along the stream-bed and into the branches. I might have been trotting through a world emerging from primordial chaos.
But today I was following a lower reach. Leaving its chasm and heading south, it joined a wide trough climbing north between two great massifs which narrowed steadily until the road reached the pass; then, many leagues away, it dropped the other side into the valley of the Timis, and still further along it lay the point from which I had launched my private attack on the Carpathians two weeks earlier.
Striking south, I pursued a sheep-track in the lee of the woods, wondering how much the valley might have changed since Roman times and, looking up at the eagles and the beetling forests, thought: hardly at all.
The winding osier-bed shared the valley with a road and a railway and every now and then the loose triple plait would unravel and then nonchalantly assemble again. Buffaloes floundered in the reeds, a breath of wind tilted the threads of the Gypsies’ fires and their horses, ranging loose among the flocks, grazed to the edge of the forest. There were fields of stubble and hundreds of sunflowers flaring yellow round their dark hearts; and the pale green sheaths of the Indian corn had withered long ago to a papery grey. Strings of waggons were returning empty upstream or labouring south loaded with tree-trunks to be lashed together and floated down the Danube; and when two of them crossed, ropes of dust lengthened in both directions and wrapped the road and its passengers in a cloud; it settled on the fruit trees that sometimes lined the road for furlongs on end, heavy with blue plums nobody picked that scattered the roadside in wasp-haunted rings.
Dipping to the river, the path crossed it again and again on wooden bridges. The sun splintered down through a colander of leaves and every so often, minor rapids twirled through the red and green rocks while mermaid-like water-weed streamed along the current. (Without knowing it, I must have stored up an almost photographic memory of this beautiful valley for when I travelled along it twenty years later, by the little train this time, forgotten landmarks kept recurring until I would begin to remember a stretch of flag-leaves, an islet with a clump of willows, a spinney, an oak tree struck by lightning or a solitary chapel a minute or two before they actually re-appeared; for suddenly, with an obliging loop of the river, there they were, drowned twenty years deep but surfacing one by one in a chain of rescued visions like lost property restored.)
An old man under a mulberry tree asked me where I was going. When I said “Constantinopol,” he nodded mildly and asked no more, as though I had said the next village. A spectacular bird I had never seen before, about the size of a crow and of a brilliant light blue while it was in the air, flew to a nearby branch. “Dumbrăveancă,” the old man called it: “the one who loves oak-woods.” (It was a roller.) Hoping to catch another glimpse of its wonderful colours I clapped my hands and it flew into the air from its new perch like a Maeterlinckian figment.
The old man picked up a fallen mulberry from the grass, and, in dumb show, crooked a forefinger as though embedding a hook and then made a feint at casting a line over the river. Did he mean they used mulberries for bait? Surely not for trout? “No, no.” He shook his head and said another name, his gesture indicating a much larger fish until his hands were as far apart as a concertina player’s at full stretch. A sterlet, from the Danube, perhaps. It was not far.
It was much closer than I thought, for all at once the sides of the valley fell apart and revealed the towers and trees of Orșova, then the troubled yellow and blue-grey waters of the Danube and the palisade of the Serbian mountains beyond. The vision was dramatic and sudden. The wide sweep of the river came on stage, as it were, through a precipitous overlap to the west; then, after dividing with a flutter round a feathery island and joining again, it pressed on to a scarcely less striking exit downstream.
* * *
Hastening into the town, I rushed to collect a clutch of letters from the poste-restante—and only just in time. I settled with them at a café table on the quay. One, full of geological advice, was from my father, posted two months before in Simla: ‘Everyone has moved here for the Hot Weather,’ he wrote. ‘I can see the western part of the Central Himalayan Chain from my window, and many of the snow-peaks of Tibet. It is a wonderful change from Calcutta...’
My mother’s was in answer to what I had hoped was an amusing description of my parasitic summer; I sent her progress reports every week or so, half to amuse, and half to reinforce my diary later on.[2] ‘...I see what you mean about Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour,’ she wrote. ‘Are you going to follow the Danube? You’ll come to a place called Rustchuk—I’ve just looked it up in the Atlas,’ she went on. ‘Guess who was born there!’ It was Michael Arlen. (Also, though I hadn’t yet heard of him, Elias Canetti.) She was full of information like this, often not accurate but always interesting. She had a passion for cutting bits out of newspapers and a mass of clippings, full of London doings, soon covered the table.
There were several other letters and a canvas envelope crossed with blue chalk held last month’s four pound notes; just in time, once more! But the letter I tore open first and with most excitement was written in French in Angéla’s wild hand and posted the morning after she reached Budapest. All our schemes and subterfuges had been successful! The drift of the thick sheets was affectionate and funny and steeped in the delights of our triple fugue. I pushed the letters and clippings and books on one side and wrote back at once; then to London and Simla, and by the time I had finished the sun had set and left the river a pale zinc colour. A new moon showed wanly for an hour then dipped under the hills opposite.
I read and re-read Angéla’s letter. Our feelings—mine, anyhow—had run deeper than we had admitted, and for as long as it lasted, involvement was total: affection and excitement had been showered with lavish hands; no wonder we had walked on air: high spirits and feelings of adventure and comedy had pitched everything in a lighthearted key and I felt sure that it was to fend off later sorrow that Angéla had skilfully kept it there. Our short time together had been filled with unclouded delight—separation had been the fault of neither of us and there were no grounds for anything but thanks and perhaps we had been even luckier than we knew. But the exhilaration of Angéla’s news was followed by a sharp fit of depression.
There was another minor source of distress: no more castles the other side of the Danube. These refuges had scattered my path intermittently ever since the Austrian border. Their inhabitants seemed doubly precious now, and I brooded with homesickness on feasts and libraries and stables and the endless talk by lamp- and candle-light; and all this led to a return of my earlier mood after our brief rush through the arcades and gables of Hermannstadt.[3] It had been a last outpost of the architecture of the West. I thought how romanesque, after branching into lancets and spires and flying buttresses, had given rise to these stalwart Carpathian bastions of the Reform; and, finally, to the splendour and hyperbole of the Counter-Reformation. It would be the last of the Jesuits too, and all their works: heroes, villains and saints by turns. They were at the heart of all the conflicts and the triumphs I had been reading about, daemons of the Counter-Reformation in Central Europe and harbingers of the Thirty Years’ War. I had never met any, but even now some of the dark glamour remains: these were the men, I thought to myself, who had rifled the air with spiralling saints, twirled columns, broken pediments, groined cupolas and tilted thousands of heads backwards under the trompe-l’oeil pageants of a hundred baroque ceilings.
What a stamp they had left! (Or so I thought.) Sint ut sunt aut non sint! Even in this little riverside town, the note of the bell striking the hour, the scrolls and volutes and the tired ochre walls would have been a little different if the Society had never existed.[4]
* * *
For some vanished reason, instead of simply plunging into the Yugoslavian mountains opposite, I had planned to take the river-steamer round two small loops of the Danube to the Bulgarian town of Vidin.
Rather surprisingly, I had never met anyone who had been to Bulgaria. If the Hungarians were loth to cross the Carpathians into old Rumania, Bulgaria was even further from their minds; and the Rumanians, for all their earlier ties with Constantinople, were just as reluctant. Both countries looked westward to Vienna, Berlin, London and Paris and the benighted regions of the Balkans remained terra incognita. All they knew was that Bulgaria had been a province of the Ottoman Empire until sixty years earlier, and that the yoke had not been finally and formally shed until 1911. As we know, Hungary had been subjected to a long Turkish occupation, but that was nearly three centuries ago and it had left no trace beyond the smoking of long-stemmed pipes; Transylvania and the Rumanian principalities had been vassals of the Turks, but not occupied by them; their historical continuity had remained intact, and this was what counted. Bulgaria had a different past, a Balkan past; it was the first state the Turks enslaved and almost the last to get rid of them, after an occupation lasting five centuries, and in the eyes of everyone living north of the river, it seemed the darkest, most backward and least inviting country in Europe except Albania—unjustly, as I was soon to learn.
For half a millennium then, the country had been a northern province of an empire stretching deep into Asia. Constantinople had been its beacon and lodestar; the Bulgarians still called it ‘Tzarigrad,’ ‘the City of the Emperors,’ though the Roman-Greek Orthodox Emperors, and not the Turkish Sultans who replaced them in 1453, were the sovereigns the name commemorated. The word also recalled, by association, early Bulgarian splendours, when these wild invaders from the Pontic steppes had ransacked the Balkans and established their dominion from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. Tsars of their own ruled over it—sovereigns who, at times, were almost rivals to the East Roman Emperors themselves. The aura of the country had acted as a magnet ever since I had set out, but my depression at saying goodbye to Central Europe had, for a moment, weakened this lure.
I was looking dejectedly at my old Austrian map of the region, when a voice said: “Können wir Ihnen helfen? Est-ce qu’on peut vous aider?” The speaker was a friendly land-surveyor from Bucharest. I told him I planned to cross to the other side the next day, after a look at the Iron Gates. He said, “Don’t worry about the Iron Gates, the Kazan is much more important. But you’ll never manage to see it in the time.” Two friends joined him and they all advised me to put off my departure and catch the Austrian river-steamer the day after. They were a topographical survey team on their way upstream to do some work at a place called Moldova Veche, beyond the defile of the Kazan, and if I really wanted to see this extraordinary region, they could drop me at a suitable place for it, and I could make my own way back downstream. They began to discuss arrangements, each offering a new suggestion, until the first speaker said something which made the others laugh: a proverb which is the Rumanian equivalent of ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’—“A child with too many midwives remains with his navel-string uncut.” (Copilul cu mai multe moas, e rămână cu buricul netaiat.)
* * *
I slept on a sofa in the house where they were lodging. We got up in the dark, and settling among the ropes, chains, tripods, theodolites and the bi-coloured ten-foot poles in their little truck, set off. In the jerky beam of the headlamps, the tortuous road above the river seemed both wonderful and mysterious. It had been prised and hacked out of the perpendicular flank of the mountains, built up sometimes over the flood on tall supporting walls and sometimes lifted on arches; sometimes it plunged under caves scooped through towering headlands. Grottos and galleries uncoiled through the dark for mile after mile like some thoroughfare driving into the heart of an obsessional dream. Shadowy mountain masses soared out of the glimmering water below, leaving only a narrowing band of starlight overhead, as though the two cliffs might join. Then after an abrupt bend the other shore would swing away into the distance with the stars spreading like a momentary chart of the heavens, only to shrink again as the two precipices looked once more about to collide. The marvellous road had been built in the 1830s; it was one of the most important of the tangible mementos of the great István Széchenyi.[5] Invisible mountains soared in the dark and dropped again, small villages huddled for a lamplit moment over dim assemblies of canoes and were gone, and the woods and clefts closed in. At last the sky in the west began to widen in a final array of stars; they were beginning to pale; a village was half awake, and a small faintly-lit river-steamer with its bows pointing downstream was hauling in its gang-plank. “Mama Dracului!” the driver shouted and honked his horn, letting loose a pandemonium of echoes. The gang-plank stopped half-way, hesitated, then reversed and touched the landing-stage and before it could change its mind again I was across it and waving back to my spectral friends as the boat swung out into the current.
* * *
While the ship straightens course, we must take our bearings.
A traveller sticking to the usual route would have followed the Danube south, clean across Hungary and into Yugoslavia, looping east to Belgrade and following the north bank of the river across the southernmost extremity of the Great Plain. Halting here, and looking east beyond the stacks of lopped reeds and the mirages, he would have seen mountains rising steeply out of the flat eastern horizon like a school of whales.
The northern half of these mountains, which drops to the left bank of the Danube, is the end of the Carpathians; and the southern half, which soars from the right bank, though considerably lower than the northern range, is the beginning of the Balkans:[6] a momentous juxtaposition. These two mountainous regions, seeming to grow in height and volume with every advancing step, look a solid mass; but, in reality, a deep invisible rift cleaves it from summit to base, delving a passage for the greatest river in Europe to rush through. I had reached this point from the other end; now I was in the western jaws of the rift and heading east again with dawn paling beyond the dark bends of the canyon and spreading rays of daybreak high overhead like the Japanese flag.
To starboard the dungeon-island of Babakai, where a pasha had chained up a runaway wife and starved her to death, was still drowned in shadow. Then the sun broke through spikes and brushwood high above, and caught the masonry of the Serbian castle of Golubac—a prison too, this time of an unnamed Roman empress—where battlemented walls looped a chain of broken cylinders and polygons up to the crest of a headland; and here, with the lift and the steepening tilt of the precipices, the twilight was renewed. Spaced out under the woods, Rumanian and Serbian fishing-hamlets followed one another while the mountain walls straightened and impended until the river was flowing along the bottom of a corridor.
The only other passenger, a well-read Rumanian doctor who had studied in Vienna, was bound for Turnu-Severin. Approaching the submerged cataracts he warned me that the Danube, unhindered by mountains since the Visegrad bend, undergoes violent changes here. The slimy bed hardens to a narrow trough crossed by sunk bars of quartz and granite and schist and between them deep chasms sink.
The mountain walls, meanwhile, were stealing closer. A buttress of rock, climbing eight hundred feet, advanced to midstream: the water, striking its flank, veered sharply south where it struck an answering Serbian wall which rose perpendicular for one thousand six hundred feet, while the width of the river shrank to four hundred; and, abetted by the propinquity of these two cliffs and the commotion among the drowned reefs and chasms, the foiled and colliding liquid sent waves shuddering upstream again far beyond Belgrade. The river welled angrily through the narrows, and the pilot stylishly outmanoeuvred them with swift twirls of the wheel. We sailed into the open. The threshold fell wide, the currents disentangled and a serene ring of mountains all at once enclosed us in a wide, clear dell of water. This was ‘the Cauldron’ of Kazan. Accompanied by gulls and resembling a steel engraving out of Jules Verne, we stole across the still circus under a tall and windless pillar of smoke.
When the boat reached the further side, it slid into the mountains again and the corridor led us from chamber to chamber. The river was constantly veering into new vistas of slanting light and shade; every now and then the precipices dipped enough for houses and trees and a blue or yellow church to huddle in a cranny, and the meadows behind them climbed steeply between peaks and landslides to join the dark curl of the woods. On the left bank, daylight now revealed the Széchenyi road in all its complexity; and, even more impressive, an intermittent causeway was hewn just wide enough for two to march abreast along the perpendicular face of the right bank. Sometimes its course was traceable only by slots in the rock where beams had once supported a continuous wooden platform above the river. Trajan’s completion of the road Tiberius had begun (and Vespasian and then Domitian continued) was hoisted over the river, to carry the invading legions to the bridgehead for Dacia a dozen miles downstream. On the rock face above it a large rectangular slab was embedded: carved dolphins, winged genii and imperial eagles surrounded an inscription celebrating both the completion of the road and the campaign that followed it in ad 103. Time had fretted it into near illegibility.[7]
After more twists, the gorge widened into the roads of Orșova.
* * *
The risk of letting the surveyors take me far beyond the point of no return (on foot, at least, in a single day) had been rewarded by finding the little steamer at Moldova Veche; and by mid-morning I was back at my Orșova starting point. Thank God for those surveyors! Carried away by the stirring name of the Iron Gates, I had almost missed the amazing Kazan. It was my last day in Middle Europe; I determined to risk my hand still further: instead of landing when we drew alongside Orșova quay, I would keep the doctor company to the next stop, and get back there again as best I could.
There was almost too much happening on this stretch of the river. Soon after the anchor was up, the doctor pointed out a polygonal chapel at the end of a line of trees beyond the north bank. When the Austrians drove the Hungarian revolutionary army eastwards in the 1848 uprising, Kossuth, to prevent the young Franz-Josef from being crowned King, seized the Crown of St. Stephen from the Coronation Church in Buda and carried it off with the entire coronation regalia, to Transylvania. After their defeat, the leaders secretly buried it in a field and escaped across the Danube into the Turkish dominions. All Hungary mourned the loss, but in due course the treasure was found and dug up; the Emperor was crowned King after all, and this octagonal chapel was put up to mark the hiding place.[8] Before Trianon, a village on the same bank had been the south-westernmost Rumanian frontier-post with Hungary. We left the leafy island to port, and, as the doctor told me its history, a new plan began to take shape.
Meanwhile the mountains on either side had drawn together again, tight-lacing the river into a milder version of the Kazan, and the sudden flurry round our vessel meant that we were actually inside the Iron Gates. But here, all the drama took place under water and the upheavals in the stream-bed stirred up fierce and complex currents. For hundreds of years rocks like dragons’ teeth had made the passage mortally dangerous, only to be navigated when the water was high. At the end of the last century, close under the Serbian shore, engineers blew, dug and dredged a safe channel a mile long, then dammed it off with a subfluminal wall. Threading these hazards, we learnt, made the upstream journey slow and toilsome, the opposite of our swift and buoyant passage downstream and we soon entered a serener reach where the mountains began to subside, and when we landed at Turnu-Severin, I was setting foot in the Regat—pre-Trianon Rumania, that is—for the first time.
It was the remains of Trajan’s amazing bridge that we had come to see, the greatest in the Roman Empire. Apollodorus of Damascus, who built it, was a Greek from Syria, and two great stumps of his conglomerate masonry still cumbered the Rumanian side; a third stood across the water in a Serbian meadow. Swifts were skimming over the water and red-legged falcons hovered and dived all round these solitary survivors of twenty massive piers. Once they had risen tapering to a great height and supported over a mile of arched timber superstructure: beams over which the cavalry had clattered and ox-carts creaked as the Thirteenth tramped north to besiege Decebalus in Sarmizegethusa. On the spot, only these stumps remained, but the scene of the dedication is carved in great detail on Trajan’s Column in Rome, and the Forum pigeons, ascending the shaft in a spiral, can gaze at these very piers in high relief: the balustered bridge soars intact and the cloaked General himself waits beside the sacrificial bull and the flaming altar with his legionaries drawn up helmet-in-hand under their eagle standards.
This was the end of the great cleft. East of here the Carpathians swoop away to the north-east and the river coils south and then east, simultaneously defining the edge of the Wallachian plain, the northern frontier of Bulgaria and the edge of the Balkans. It reaches the Black Sea at last in a delta rustling with a thousand square miles of reeds and tumultuous with many millions of birds. As I gazed downstream, a determination to explore eastern Rumania began to take root. I longed to get an idea of the habitat of those mythical-sounding princes—Stephen the Great and Michael the Brave and Mircea the Old; and there was Vlad the Impaler, as we know, and the ancient line of the Basarabs; Princess Chiajna, Ear-ring Peter and a score of strangely named rulers: Basil the Wolf, John the Cruel, Alexander the Good, Mihnea the Bad, Radu the Handsome... Except for one or two, like Sherban Cantacuzène and Dimitri Cantemir and Constantine Brancovan, I knew no more than their sobriquets. Dales and woods and steppes unfolded in my imagination; plains with dust-devils twirling half a mile high, forests and canyons and painted abbeys; swamps populated by strange sectaries, limitless flocks and drovers and shepherds with peculiarly shaped musical instruments; and, scattered among the woods and the cornfields, manor houses harbouring over-civilised boyars up to their ears in Proust and Mallarmé.
* * *
I was beginning to get the hang of the hardly believable chasm I had been exploring since the small hours and into which I was now doubling back. It was the wildest stretch of the whole river, and the pilots who sailed on it and the dwellers on its bank had many scourges to contend with. The worst of these were the Kossovar winds, named after the tragic region of Kossovo, where Old Serbia, Macedonia and Albania march. Terrible south-easterly storms, linked with the monsoon and the earth’s rotation, spring up in a moment and strike the Middle and Lower Danube. At the spring equinox they reach a speed of fifty or sixty miles an hour and turn the river into a convulsed inferno, unmasting ships, smashing panes, and sending strings of barges to the bottom. In autumn, when the water level drops and the steppe-like country dries up like an oven, gales turn into dust-storms that blindfold pilots in hot whirlwinds and strip one bank of the river to the water level, eroding it sometimes to the point of overflow and flood; while simultaneously and at amazing speed, instantaneous dunes build up the other bank with shoals and sand-banks, blocking channels and closing the river-bed: seasonal disasters only to be righted by months of dyking and dredging. As I listened, the characteristics of the river became clearer: the hundreds of underwater streams feeding the river like anonymous donors; rolling gravel, which, in certain reaches, sings audibly through the muffling flood; millions of tons of alluvia always on the move; boulders bounding along troughs and chasms which suck the currents into the depths and propel them spiralling to the surface; the peristaltic progress of slime and the invisible march of wreckage down the long staircase of the bottom; the weight and force of the river in the mountain narrows, forever scouring a deeper passage, tearing off huge fragments of rock and trundling them along in the dark and slowly grinding them down to pebbles, then gravel, then grit and finally sand. At the eastern end of the defile, in the flat region of southern Wallachia, there is an appalling winter wind from Russia they call the buran. It becomes the crivatz in Rumania, and when it blows, the temperature plummets far below zero, the river freezes over within forty-eight hours and a solid lid of ice shuts over it, growing steadily thicker as the winter advances. It was an effort, in this summer weather, to conjure up all this—the tracks of sleighs on the grey or glittering waste, and the fields of pack-ice like millions of joined ice-bergs crowding each other into the distance. Woe betide unwary ships that are caught in it! When the water expands into ice, hulls crack like walnuts. “We put a bucket of water on the bridge and keep dipping our hands in when the temperature begins to drop,” the pilot had said, “and make for safety at the first ice-needle.”
* * *
After the bridge at Turnu-Severin, the doctor travelled on to Craiova and I caught a bus back to Orșova, picked up my stuff, bought a ticket for the next day’s boat, then walked a couple of miles downstream again and found a fisherman to scull me out to the little wooded island I had had my eye on ever since rejoining the Danube.
I had heard much talk of Ada Kaleh in recent weeks, and read all I could find. The name means ‘island fortress’ in Turkish. It was about a mile long, shaped like a shuttle, bending slightly with the curve of the current and lying a little closer to the Carpathian than the Balkan shore. It has been called Erythia, Rushafa and then Continusa, and, according to Apollonius Rhodius, the Argonauts dropped anchor here on their way back from Colchis. How did Jason steer the Argo through the Iron Gates? And then the Kazan? Medea probably lifted the vessel clear of the spikes by magic. Some say Argo reached the Adriatic by overland portage, others that she crossed it and continued up the Po, mysteriously ending in North Africa. Writers have tentatively suggested that the first wild olive to be planted in Attica might have come from here. But it was later history that had invested the little island with fame.
The inhabitants were Turkish, probably descendants of the soldiers of one of the earlier Sultans who invaded the Balkans, Murad I, or Bayazid I, perhaps. Left behind by the retreating Turks, the island lingered on as an outlying fragment of the Ottoman Empire until the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. The Austrians held some vague suzerainty over it, but the island seems to have been forgotten until it was granted to Rumania at the Treaty of Versailles; and the Rumanians had left the inhabitants undisturbed. The first thing I saw after landing was a rustic coffee-shop under a vine-trellis where old men sat cross-legged in a circle with sickles and adzes and pruning knives scattered about them. I was as elated when bidden to join them as if I had suddenly been seated on a magic carpet. Bulky scarlet sashes a foot wide gathered in the many pleats of their black and dark blue baggy trousers. Some wore ordinary jackets, others navy-blue boleros with convoluted black embroidery and faded plum-coloured fezzes with ragged turbans loosely knotted about them; all except the hodja’s. Here, snow-white folds were neatly arranged round a lower and less tapering fez with a short stalk in the middle. Something about the line of brow, the swoop of nose and the jut of the ears made them indefinably different from any of the people I had seen on my journey so far. The four or five hundred islanders belonged to a few families which had intermarried for centuries, and one or two had the vague and absent look, the wandering glance and the erratic levity that sometimes come with ancient and inbred stock. In spite of their patched and threadbare clothes, their style and their manners were full of dignity. On encountering a stranger, they touched heart, lips and brow with the right hand, then laid it on their breast with an inclination of the head and a murmured formula of welcome. It was a gesture of extreme grace, like the punctilio of broken-down grandees. An atmosphere of prehistoric survival hung in the air as though the island were the refuge of an otherwise extinct species long ago swept away.
Several of my neighbours fingered strings of beads, but not in prayer; they spilt them between their fingers at random intervals, as though to scan their boundless leisure; and to my delight, one old man, embowered in a private cloud, was smoking a narghilé. Six feet of red tubing were cunningly coiled, and when he pulled on the amber mouthpiece, charcoal glowed on a damped wad of tobacco leaves from Ispahan and the bubbles, fighting their way through the water with the sound of a mating bull-frog, filled the glass vessel with smoke. A boy with small tongs arranged fresh charcoal. While he did so, the old man pointed towards me and whispered; and the boy came back in a few minutes with a laden tray on a circular table six inches from the ground. Seeing my quandary, a neighbour told me how to begin: first, to drink the small glass of raki; then eat the mouthful of delicious rose-petal jam lying ready spooned on a glass saucer, followed by half a tumbler of water; finally to sip at a dense and scalding thimbleful of coffee slotted in a filigree holder. The ritual should be completed by emptying the tumbler and accepting tobacco, in this case, an aromatic cigarette made by hand on the island. Meanwhile the old men sat in smiling silence, sighing occasionally, with a friendly word to me now and then in what sounded like very broken Rumanian; the doctor had said that their accent and style caused amusement on the shore. Among themselves they spoke Turkish, which I had never heard: astonishing strings of agglutinated syllables with a follow-through of identical vowels and dimly reminiscent of Magyar; all the words are different, but the two tongues are distant cousins in the Ural-Altaic group of languages. According to the doctor it had either drifted far from the metropolitan vernacular of Constantinople or remained immovably lodged in its ancient mould, like a long-marooned English community still talking the language of Chaucer.
I didn’t know what to do when leaving; an attempt at payment was stopped by a smile and an enigmatic backward tilt of the head. Like everything else, this was the first time I came across the universal negative of the Levant; and, once more, there was that charming inclination, hand on breast.
So these were the last descendants of those victorious nomads from the borders of China! They had conquered most of Asia, and North Africa to the Pillars of Hercules, enslaved half Christendom and battered on the gates of Vienna; victories long eclipsed, but commemorated here and there by a minaret left in their lost possessions like a spear stuck in the ground.
Balconied houses gathered about the mosque and small workshops for Turkish Delight and cigarettes, and all round these crumbled the remains of a massive fortress. Vine-trellises or an occasional awning shaded the cobbled lanes. There were hollyhocks and climbing roses and carnations in whitewashed petrol tins, and the heads and shoulders of the wives who flickered about among them were hidden by a dark feredjé—a veil pinned in a straight line above the brow and joining under the nose; and they wore tapering white trousers, an outfit which gave them the look of black-and-white ninepins. Children were identically-clad miniatures of the grown-ups and, except for their unveiled faces, the little girls might each have been the innermost of a set of Russian dolls. Tobacco leaves were hung to dry in the sun like strings of small kippers. Women carried bundles of sticks on their heads, scattered grain to poultry and returned from the shore with their sickles and armfuls of rushes. Lop-eared rabbits basked or hopped sluggishly about the little gardens and nibbled the leaves of ripening melons. Flotillas of ducks cruised among the nets and the canoes and multitudes of frogs had summoned all the storks from the roofs.
Hunyadi had put up the first defensive walls, but the ramparts all round belonged to the interregnum after Prince Eugene had taken Belgrade and driven the Turks downstream, and the eastern end of the island looked as though it might sink under the weight of his fortifications. The vaults of the gun-galleries and the dank tremendous magazines had fallen in. Fissures split the ramparts and great blocks of masonry, tufted with grass, had broken away and goats tore at the leaves among the debris. A pathway among pear trees and mulberries led to a little cemetery where turbanned headstones leant askew and in one corner lay the tomb of a dervish prince from Bokhara who had ended his life here after wandering the world, ‘poor as a mouse,’ in search of the most beautiful place on earth and the one most sheltered from harm and mishap.
It was getting late. The sun left the minaret, and then the new moon, a little less wraith-like than the night before, appeared on cue in a turquoise sky with a star next to it that might have been pinned there by an Ottoman herald. With equal promptitude, the hodja’s torso emerged on the balcony under the cone of the minaret. Craning into the dusk, he lifted his hands and the high and long-drawn-out summons of the izan floated across the air, each clause wavering and spreading like the rings of sound from pebbles dropped at intervals into a pool of air. I found myself still listening and holding my breath when the message had ended and the hodja must have been half-way down his dark spiral.
Surrounded by pigeons, men were unhasteningly busy at the lustral fountain by the mosque and the row of slippers left by the door was soon lengthened by my gym shoes. Once inside, the Turks spread in a line on a vast carpet, with lowered eyes. There was no decoration except for the mihrab and the mimbar and the black calligraphy of a Koranic verse across the wall. The ritual gestures of preparation were performed in careful and unhurried unison, until, gathering momentum, the row of devotees sank like a wave; then tilted over until their foreheads touched the pile of the carpet, the soles of their feet all suddenly and disarmingly revealed; rocking back, they sat with their hands open in their laps, palms upward; all in dead silence. Every few minutes, the hodja sitting in front of them murmured “Allah akbar!” in a quiet voice, and another long silence followed. In the unornate and hushed concavity, the four isolated syllables sounded indescribably dignified and austere.[9]
* * *
The first time I had tried to sleep beside the Danube had been at the Easter full moon before crossing the bridge at Esztergom; and here I was, amidstream again, but between Carpathian and Balkan. The new moon had sunk, leaving a pearly light on the water. Settled near the western cape of the island in a clump of poplars, I lay listening to the frogs. A meteor shot across the other stars now and then. Nightingales had fallen silent weeks ago, but the island was full of owls. Barking dogs were answered from the Serbian shore, and carts creaked along the riverside path. A string of barges had tied up at the quay of Orșova, two miles upstream, waiting for daylight before tackling the Iron Gates. The little port dropped corkscrews of lamplight into the water and the sound of instruments and singing was clear enough for me to pick out the tunes. An occasional splash was a reminder of all the shoals on the move, and the seventy different kinds of fish that haunted the Danube. Some of them belonged to the fish-populations of the Dnieper and the Don, close kin to those of the Caspian and the Volga; they could swim a thousand miles uphill into the heart of Europe with not a single dam to bar the way... My head was too full of sights and sounds for sleep; better to lie and gaze up and listen to the night sounds and light another of those aromatic cigarettes exotically stamped with a gold crescent moon. No good squandering the short night in sleep, or in brooding on the eternity of rivers and that inexhaustible volume of liquid on the move:
Rusticus exspectat dum defluat amnis, at ille
Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.
Yes. Exactly... There was plenty to think about.
Early in the last chapter, when I was meditating on the links between myth and history in these regions, a procession of kings, prelates and knights suddenly wandered across the page, heading downstream. It was really an overlap of two separate campaigns, both of them disasters. One had taken place when Sigismund of Hungary and his allies were routed at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396; the other, half a century later, in 1444, when the twenty-year-old King Vladislav of Poland, John Hunyadi[10] and Cardinal Cesarini advanced to the Black Sea; the army was utterly destroyed at the battle of Varna by Sultan Murad II. Hunyadi lived to fight again, but the Cardinal vanished in the mêlée and the head of the young King ended on a spear above the gates of Brusa. This was Christendom’s last attempt to throw back the Turks before they laid their last fatal siege to Constantinople. They took the city nine years later.
But it was the first campaign that I was brooding over. I had read all about it in the Telekis’ library, and, if I remembered it now, it was because it was here, at Orșova, that the Crusaders’ army had crossed the river into the Sultan’s dominions; and, what was more, exactly now.
The ferrying started at the beginning of August—perhaps on the 5th—and continued for about eight days; so that the last pikeman or sutler had probably reached the southern bank this very evening, five hundred and thirty-eight years ago. There were contingents from the whole of western Europe, and a dazzling array of leaders: Sigismund, with his Hungarian army, and his Wallachian feudatories under Mircea the Old; the Constable Count of Eu; John the Fearless, son of Philip the Bold of Burgundy; Marshall Boucicault, ‘inspired by the rapture of combat’; Guy de la Trémoille, John of Vienne, James de la Marche, Philip of Bar, Rupert Count Palatine of the Rhine; and best of all, Enguerrand VII of Coucy, Edward III of England’s valiant son-in-law.[11] Some accounts mention a thousand English men-at-arms under the Black Prince’s stepson (Richard II’s half-brother) the Earl of Huntingdon.[12] Moving downstream, they invested the Turkish fortress at Nicopolis.
But, having learned of the invasion and siege, Sultan Bayazit hastened across the Balkans with all the speed of his Thunderbolt nickname. When the battle was joined, the vainglorious French brought down total catastrophe by the reckless and premature bravery of their attack. Rescued by the Hospitallers’ fleet, Sigismund survived and, later on, became Emperor; John of Burgundy was taken prisoner and ransomed, to be hacked to bits a few years later on the bridge of Montereau by his Orléans rivals; Boucicault was ransomed too, but was taken at Agincourt, and died a prisoner in Yorkshire; Coucy, though ransomed, died at Brusa before he could return. Some of those who escaped were killed by local inhabitants; some, weighted by their armour, drowned in the Danube; the Count Palatine reached home in rags, then died from the hardships he had endured; and the other great captains, in reprisal for Turkish garrisons massacred on their march downstream, were slain with all their followers in a shambles of beheading lasting from dawn to Vespers. Three years later the victorious Sultan was defeated at Ankara and taken prisoner by Tamerlane: caged in a litter, he expired from grief and shame among his Mongol captors. Huntingdon—if, indeed, he was there—got safely back. But four years later, after his half-brother Richard’s dethronement and murder, he was condemned for taking up arms against Bolingbroke: his head was smitten off and exposed in an Essex market-place. Few of his supposed soldiers, if they were there, can have practised in the butts at Hereford again, or fished in the Wye.
I was thinking vaguely of this disastrous crusade—not in this detail, which is the fruit of a dash to the bookcase—and of John of Burgundy’s retinue and their new green liveries and the twenty-four waggon-loads of green satin tents... All the contingents rivalled each other in splendour of banners and armour and saddlery and plate. I was wondering lazily about the Crusaders’ line of march from their general assembly-point at Buda. All chroniclers agreed on the route; and I was approaching that edge of drowsiness which is illustrated in strip-cartoons by a swarm of z’s gathering like bees over the heads of sleeping tramps: ‘They followed the left bank of the Danube as far as Orșova...’
The z’s dispersed in a flash and I sat up, wide awake. They couldn’t have! What would they have trodden on? ‘Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving’—what? Trajan’s road had been useless for more than a thousand years, and, until Széchenyi’s was built five centuries later, most of the left bank, like the right, dropped plumb into the water like a fiord, and for mile after mile. And, though I didn’t know it then, the reference books are unanimous: until Széchenyi’s road was engineered in the 1830s, the whole of this reach of the river was totally impassable on both sides. Those thousands of horses, the waggons laden with coloured tents, the thousands of flour-sacks and the hay-wains, the bushels of Beaune, and the heralds in their new tabards and the gaudy bobtail of camp-followers that the chroniclers record with such disapproval—they would have had to make a two-hundred-mile sweep to the north, nearly to the Maros, and then through Lugos, and Caransebes, and along the Timis, valley and down the Mehadia to the last part of my own route to the mouth of the Cerna. This detour, which would have taken them many weeks, could never have gone unrecorded... But there is no mention of such a thing; let alone of the slightly more practicable cliff tops on the right bank. Nobody seemed to have noticed this insoluble clash of history and geography.
How did they do it, then? There was no Medea to lift them into the air, like Jason and the Argonauts... Upon this, with the return of sleep, a vision began to take shape. The long and winding procession of the Crusaders, flagged with the crosses and bars of Hungary, the black raven of Wallachia, then the host of single- and double-headed eagles and rampant lions of different hues; the Palatinate lozenges, and, above all, the fleurs-de-lys of France and Burgundy; and perhaps (only perhaps, alas) the same lilies quartering the Plantagenet leopards; all advancing along the chasm and levitated just above the turbulent currents by sorcery. There was no other way.
* * *
The racket of birds and the island cocks woke me up just in time to catch the muezzin’s call. There was a flicker in the poplar leaves and sunrise threw the shadow of the island far upstream. The lure of the water was irresistible; but diving in off a tussock I found the current so strong after a few strokes that I clambered back before being whirled away.
Back in the coffee shop, the old men were already in their places and soon I was sipping at a minute cup and eating white goats’ cheese wrapped in a bread flap; the aged hookah addict, coaxing the first bubbles through the water, unloosed staccato puffs like the smoke-signals of a Huron. A creak, a shadow and a rush of air passed over our heads: a stork, abandoning its one-legged posture on the roof, glided to the rushes; folding one white wing with its black senatorial stripe over the other, he joined three companions vigilantly pacing on their scarlet stilts; the parents and their young were indistinguishable now. One of the old men made a gesture of flying and then, pointing in a roughly south-easterly direction, said “Afrik! Afrik!” They would be off soon. When? In a week, two weeks; not much longer...I had seen them arriving the evening I crossed the river into Hungary and here they were with their courtships, nesting, laying, hatching and growing up all over, and ready to fly.
The Czechoslovakian barges, laden with tiles and timber, were gliding away downstream when I reached the Orșova quay. I joined an Austrian pilot I had met the day before. He, too, spotted signs of restlessness among the storks. Would they set off on their own? No, no, he said; they would join one of the large migrations coming from the north-west, probably from Poland. Some village girls passed, sorting out roses, zinnias, hollyhocks, tiger-lilies and marigolds; not for a wedding but for decorating altars. The Orthodox were celebrating the Dormition of the Virgin next day, the pilot said, and the Catholics her Assumption: two aspects of the same occasion; and to illustrate his own doctrine, the pilot’s forefinger, twirling in an ascending gyre, plotted the path of tomorrow’s star-crowned figure dwindling into the empyrean. My passport, soon to be stamped with its seventh frontier-crossing (‘Orșova, 13 August, 1934’) lay on the table with my stick and the rucksack next to it on a chair. Something, I couldn’t think what, was missing. The stag’s antler! I must have forgotten it among the grass and the brambles on the island when I rolled up my greatcoat. Relief soon followed disappointment; the trophy had become a bit of a nuisance; anyway, there was no time to go back. Perhaps some future palaeontologist might think the island had once teemed with deer.
* * *
In several ways, the hour called to mind the mood of ending and beginning I had felt on the bridge over the same river six hundred miles upstream: the fidgeting storks, the girls laden with flowers for a great festival, people gathered on the quay, even a heron flying so low that the tips of its flight-feathers left momentary rings on the water. Downstream, the reflection of the island and the rushes and tree-tops and the slender minaret shivered in the current. One of the islanders, a bearded Sinbad in a collapsed fez and a spotted turban, held up a string of fish for sale; another carrying a basket of eggs was arguing with a melon-grower up to his thighs in a cartload of huge green watermelons and, as he argued back, the grower went on rhythmically tossing his wares to a companion, like two men passing at football, while a third set them out invitingly along the flagstones. A Gypsy, stooping under a four-foot-long, unwieldy, but just portable silver-plated vessel slung on a baldric and shaped like an elongated Taj Mahal, clashed metal cups together to alert customers. Now and then he filled them from a spigot with an oriental soft drink called braga, chiefly swallowed by thirsty country folk. Some women in Cerna-valley clothes, with trusses of poultry beside them, were sitting and gossiping between the bollards and dangling their moccasined feet over the water. Just as the belfries were striking ten, the echo of a siren came from the entrance of the canyon upstream. “Pretty well on time,” the pilot said. “They drop anchor at ten-twenty.”
Emerging from the chasm, the ship veered out of profile and shrank to a single line of mast, funnel, bowsprit and prow; and then, expanding fast and enclosed in the confetti of gulls which had kept her company all the way from the quay of the Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft in Vienna, she bore down on our cheerfully crowded waterfront and her paddles creased the water with a widening symmetrical arrow. “It’s the Saturnus,” the pilot said. The notes of a gramophone record reached us: it was Tales from the Vienna Woods. The pilot laughed: “You wait! When they weigh anchor, they put on The Blue Danube.” Everyone was collecting their stuff, a boatman took his stand beside the bollard, officials put on gold-laced caps and the ship, drawing alongside, back-paddled into profile again in a turmoil of froth. A sailor leant over the rail and in a moment his hawser was skimming through the gulls like a lasso.
TO BE CONCLUDED
[1] Băile Herculane, Herculesbad and Herkules Fürdö were the local names.
[2] She gave them all back when I returned, but they went astray in a lost trunk during the war, and I miss them bitterly now.
[3] It would be improper to call it Sibiu in this context.
[4] R.F., the friend who has succeeded to the role of the polymath in A Time of Gifts, assures me that other orders—Piarists, Premonstratensians, Benedictines and Cistercians—played a much more important role in the later history of Hungary, Transylvania and the Banat; and, very notably, the Franciscans. The most famous of these was the fiery Capistrano, Hunyadi’s ally and brother-in-arms against the Turks. It was in the wider Mitteleuropa sphere of the Holy Roman Empire, in England, Paraguay, India, China and Japan that the Society of Jesus had spread its wings widest. But, even if my sententious jottings by the Danube were not as much to the point as I thought, there is just enough truth in them not to cross them out.
[5] ‘Stefan’ or ‘Stephan’ Széchenyi is how he was known at Holland House, but I heard his christian name so often mentioned in its Magyar form that it is hard to write it otherwise. He was one of the earliest members of the Travellers Club.
[6] The actual Great Balkan Range, as opposed to ‘the Balkans,’ only begins on the other side of the Bulgarian-Yugoslav border.
[7] I found it later. ‘Imperator Caesar divi Nervae filius,’ the inscription ran, ‘Nerva Trajanus Augustus Germanicus—Pontifex Maximus tribunitae potestatis quartum—Pater patriae consul quartum—montis et fluviis anfractibus—superatis viam patefacit.’ (‘The Emperor Caesar—son of the divine Nerva—Nerva Trajan Augustus Germanicus—High Priest and for the fourth time Tribune—Father of the country and for the fourth time Consul—overcame the hazards of mountain and river and flung open this road.’)
[8] They must be the most widely travelled regalia in the world. After World War II they were kept hidden for many years in the United States and only given back a few years ago. I saw them on display in the National Museum some months after their return: the famous crown itself, the mace-like sceptre, the orb, the armlets and the sword of state. The queue waiting to catch a glimpse of them—only for a few seconds, so great was the throng—stretched a hundred yards down the street and shuffled past the treasure in silent awe. It symbolised all Hungary’s history and her pride for the past thousand years.
[9] The Arabian words meaning that God is great—cried from the minaret a little earlier and now murmured indoors—had been replaced for a while in Turkey by the vernacular Allah büyük; just as the role of fez and turban had been usurped by the cloth cap, usually worn back to front like a coal-heaver’s by the devout so that the forehead could touch ground at prayer unhindered by the peak. Inasmuch as anyone, apart from the hodja, was literate on Ada Kaleh, the old Arabic script, rather than the new Latin alphabet compulsory in Turkey proper, was still in use. I found, later on, the same distrust of change among the Turkish minorities which post-war treaties had stranded in Bulgaria and Greek Thrace.
[10] Some think Hunyadi was Sigismund’s illegitimate son, and others—the majority, perhaps—that he was of mixed Hungarian and Rumanian descent. With no right at all to an opinion, I have always hoped it was the latter, just in case he might one day become a symbol of concord between the two nations, rather than a bone to be snarled over.
[11] A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman gives a fascinating account of his adventures.
[12] Huntingdon’s mother was the Fair Maid of Kent. Some authorities question not only the numbers involved, but also whether Huntingdon and his men were actually there; they only allow the presence of a number of English knights among the Hospitallers who had embarked in Rhodes. They sailed up the Danube in a fleet of forty-four Venetian ships, to strengthen the army besieging Nicopolis. Other leaders suggested for an overland contingent have been Bolingbroke himself and John Beaufort, time-honoured Lancaster’s son. But alibis seem to disqualify them all; Huntingdon, too, perhaps... France and Burgundy have a dozen sad contemporary ballads about the tragic crusade, but one seeks in vain for a single English lament.