Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  * * *

  It was like going indoors. Climbing in the shade at once made the valley seem far away and the woods silent at first until the ear was attuned to the birds.

  An hour’s climb ended on the edge of a slanting field where a string of reapers were getting in the late upland harvest: biblical, white-clad countrymen and women in wide hats of plaited straw, some with babies slung across their backs like papooses; when they got in the way, they hung them in the shade, snugly laced into their wooden troughs. Baskets, water jars, sickles and rakes were heaped up, half-a-dozen ponies were grazing and conical bee-hives were set in rows along the edge of the enfolding trees. As they moved forward and reaped and gathered and gleaned, an old woman’s high quaver sang the lead of a never-ending sequence of verses to a grave and rather haunting tune; the others joined in at each second line. I had heard it on the climb to the little plateau; it still floated up diminuendo long after the harvesters themselves had dropped out of sight, and when it died away, I could see them far below in occasional foreshortened glimpses among the sheaves and the ricks as though I were looking at them backwards through an ever-lengthening telescope, dwindled to specks by now. Then tree-tops hid them.

  The road and the valley below had disappeared and there was nothing to the west the other side but the sierras of the Banat, and they too had begun to sink. Later, a score of cows, collared with heavy bells, were treading unwieldily down from a higher pasture. I exchanged greetings with the old cowherd and his sons: where did I come from? Anglia? They had never heard of it and went on their way looking perplexed. The path seemed forever on the point of dying away among rocks or fallen trees but at the last moment, like an irregular natural staircase, it always dodged or bestrode them.

  ‘Like going indoors...’ It was truer than I had thought; for there, all at once, lay a space like an enormous room: a long, enclosed clearing where beech trees sprang up like gigantic pillars flinging out vaults of tangled and interlocking boughs. Grey in shadow, their smooth trunks were flecked with silver where the sunbeams spilt their way through an infinity of leaves and scattered blurred discs of light over the bark and the muscular spread of the roots; they shed a sparser and still more grudging confetti on the unencumbered floor. (No wonder Roman poets always attached the epithet opaca to the umbra of the fagi!) ‘Opaque,’ so it was. Beeches are dog-in-the-manger trees to such an extent that nothing can grow underneath, hence these spacious ballroom glades; but opaque only in the sense that those layers of little pleated leaves all but locked out the sun. The air underneath was aqueous and still; it was nearly underwater light. The resilient mast strewing the ground would have been a hog’s paradise. (On the way down, I came on swart bristly snouts, watched over by pensive swineherds, tearing up the floors of similar beechen halls.) These great forest chambers, bounded by mingled stretches of hardwood and underbrush, slanted uphill and out of sight in a confusion of roots. Freshets channelled the penumbra, falling from rocky overhangs into pools that could be heard from afar, or welled up through husks and dead leaves and turned into streams. There had been two hoopoes in the lower woods and bee-eaters, with an eye to the hives perhaps, perched on twigs near the harvesters’ clearing; golden orioles, given away by their black and yellow plumage and the insistent shrill curl of their song, darted among the branches. But every so often invisible flocks of wood-pigeons plunged everything under a spell so drowsy, it was hard, sitting down for a smoke, to keep awake; then a footfall would loose off a hundred flurried wings and set them circling in the speckled light of one of the forest ballrooms like Crystal Palace multitudes calling for Wellingtonian hawks.

  * * *

  The track dipped into a small valley where a stream dropped from pool to pool out of the heart of the mountains, then followed the glen in a shallow tangle.

  A party of Gypsies, in their invariable way managing to turn a corner of the forest into a slum, had settled here with tents and dogs and hobbled horses; but their squalor was redeemed by the extravagant wildness of their looks. Squatting like East Indians beside the stream, at first they seemed to be washing up; this was something so out of character, that I looked again. They were busy dipping wooden pans into the current at the downstream end of little conduits improvised with planks; kneading and sifting the mud and the gravel, wringing and searching shaggy wet sheepskins which had been cunningly placed under their flimsy sluices; all of them peering down, rapt as kestrels. I suddenly remembered Herr v. Winckler’s discourse and knew what they were up to. They answered my salute with a look of momentary consternation but allowed me to lie down and watch.

  They were washing for gold. Veins of it run through many of these mountains, and of silver too, and the Romans used to sink mines. It interleaves the rock in thin layers, and tiny fragments of the exposed and eroded mineral are snapped off and worn down to dust mixed with mud, sand and gravel, or even caught in the grass and washed along the current with the other alluvia. The fragments are infinitesimal, hence the channels and fleeces set to catch them.[6] I guessed that gold and silver, almost heraldically, might be aur and argint in Rumanian, and they were. The nearest gold-seeker, and the chief of the party, said they had found none; but after we had smoked a couple of cigarettes I had rolled and exchanged civilities—as far as my inchoate string of Rumanian words allowed—he admitted they had got a little—not from here, but from a place called Porcurea, deep in the wild hills the other side of the Maros. I gathered that they had drawn a blank in this stream, and that they might have been misinformed. He reluctantly took a small leather pouch from his sash, extracted a smaller cotton bag, untied the string and shook a few grains into his slim palm. One or two expanded to the size of microscopic sequins but most of them were no more than twinkling motes. He offered to sell me the lot, making them dance like tinsel across his head-and-heart lines as he spoke; but he named so enormous a sum that I answered by pulling my breeches’ pockets inside out, which made him laugh. We were on friendly terms and when a girl approached and, as in duty bound, began to beg in a simultaneously collusive and perfunctory whisper, he said something in Romany, and she broke off with an apologetic smile. I couldn’t stop admiring the workmanship of the shallow wooden pans they used for shaking out the gold dust: half a yard in diameter and carved out of walnut, they were light and beautifully polished and after a lucky scoop the grains must have glittered there like the Milky Way on a dark sky. These Gypsies were lingurări, ‘spoon-men’; skilled in every kind of tin-smithery and wood carving.

  They had come there a couple of days ago by a different route. The night before, near Caransebes, I had stumbled in the dark across a road and a small railway which wind their way eastward on the map, climbing the valley of the Bistra river some miles to the north but more or less parallel to my own unmapped and much steeper sheep’s track. The Gypsies had branched off the road and then made their way southwards to this grudging sylvan Golconda. The road and the railway, meanwhile, ascended to a pass called the Iron Gate—one of many—then sank twisting and turning into Hunyadi country—Hunedoara—and the little town of Hátzeg. (This was the way I ought to have gone, but it was too late.)

  Fired by success in forming nouns by knocking the last syllable off the Latin, I made a zigzag gesture over the current and said “pisc?” ending in a ‘sh’ sound; and it was nearly right (phonetically, ‘fish’ is peshti). “Sunt foarte multi,” the Gypsy said: “There are very many.” Then I drew a blank with ‘trotta’ and ‘trutta,’ one of which I hoped might be the Latin for trout,[6] but I remembered, from delicious meals, that it was pisztráng in Hungarian, and he responded to the sound at once with the Rumanian păstrăv. (Both races had got it from a Slavonic root. Among the southern Slavs it is pastrmka and pastarva, or something similar, overflowing into Greece as péstrofa, and to the north, in Poland, pstra̜s: the tick under ‘a’ represents a ghostly ‘n.’ When and where did these Slav sounds first dilute the Latin speech of the Rumanians? What was the Dacian word for ‘trout’? Beside
what stream was the lost word uttered for the last time before Slavonic syllables blotted it out? If only we knew!) My Gypsy acquaintance spoke Rumanian and Magyar with equal fluency, though probably both imperfectly—many comic stories depend on Gypsies’ queer intonations and errors—and conversed with his fellow-tribesmen in Romany, so he was trilingual. Pointing out places on the map, I discovered he couldn’t read, but he was not the less clever for it.

  The Gypsies and their treasure were soon as far below as the reapers had been earlier on.

  * * *

  A kind of spell haunts wooded slopes like these: it drives the intruder blindly uphill, knocks ten years off his age (reducing mine to nine) unlooses a host of immature and atavistic hankerings and turns his thoughts towards Sherwood Forest, the whirr of clothyard shafts, sundered willow-wands, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Guy of Gisborne and Much the Miller’s son; jumping the Atlantic, the scene changes to wigwams, smoke-signals, deerslayers, Mohicans, warpaint, calumets, birch-bark canoes and palefaces descried through gaps in the maple branches. I had once read somewhere that in King John’s reign a squirrel could travel from the Severn to the Humber without touching ground; and, more recently, that trees had once covered the whole of Transylvania. Forest, then, must have been the Dacians’ natural abode. The Romans obviously felled thoroughfares and laid roads; the Goths, emerging from their millions of conifers, would have felt quite at home here for their generations north of the Danube before moving on to Italy and Spain. (But what, in the dark North, and among these Dacian trees, can have prepared the Vandals for the satins and the incense of Carthage?) There would have been no environmental complaint among the forest-haunting Lombards, as they exterminated the Gepids in the undergrowth; and when the time came for the Slavs to smother Eastern Europe, they must have settled in these woods with no feeling of change. But what of the Huns? And the Avars and the Bulgars who had streamed along the valleys; indeed, the Magyars themselves; and the Pechenegs and the Cumans? And finally, the last of the Turco-Tatar invaders, the terrible Mongol brood of Jenghiz Khan, when in 1241 they laid all these regions waste? Unless the plains of south Russia were similarly timbered, few of these invaders can have seen many trees; they were desert-children, they belonged to steppes and tundras. I could imagine Batu and his companions with their flat bow-cases and quivers and habergeons and targets and their ponies with elaborate cheek-pieces and scarlet throat-plumes, turning in their saddles and looking at each other nonplussed under their epicanthic eyelids, perhaps through wolf-masks; clad in corselets of many-coloured scales, or with shoulders plumed like eagles’ wings, according to the shamanistic totems of their clans; all halted in dismay on the verge of a thicket stretching a hundred leagues.

  In such a wilderness, how could they have manoeuvred and advanced at their rumoured speed, and dismantled or razed every town, church, castle, palace, cathedral and abbey in the third of a continent? It was the thirteenth century, after all, Plantagenet and Valois times, and not everything can have been built of immediately combustible stuff. They had only a year to conquer, slay, enslave, lead captive, demolish and then clear out—not much time, especially at the end, when the death in Mongolia of Jenghiz Khan’s successor launched the Mongol princes home in a breakneck race for the throne: it was four thousand miles to Karakorum. Admittedly, they put thousands of their prisoners to the sword; but ‘leading whole populations away captive,’ as the chronicles say, must have delayed them, and demolition without explosions needs time and more equipment than flint and steel and a few crowbars, with perhaps a battery or two of oxdrawn siege-engines for hurling stones. Yet they are said to have destroyed all that was destructible; and, incidentally, with strangely unerring thoroughness, wiped out every fragment of historical evidence from the previous thousand years as well.[7]

  There was plenty to think about. I was constantly wondering what these barbarians looked like. I had not yet recovered from the knowledge that the Huns used to dress in white linen raiment and the skins of fieldmice sewn together...

  Coming on a bank covered with wild strawberries, I ate all within reach, moved to a new vantage-point and began again. One might stay all summer with pan, sieve and fishing rod, amassing gold and living off trout and fraises-des-bois, a sybaritic Carpathian Tom Tiddler.

  The jangle of a sheep bell higher up interrupted these thoughts. There was a sound of pattering and the barking of dogs; then somebody’s objurgating voice calling down the curses of the Dragon’s mother: it was a common Rumanian oath—the Devil’s mother, in this context—“Mama Dracului!” Suddenly the bell and the pattering hoofs stopped, and I could see a ram and a dozen sheep on the path above, rooted there in dismay at my hindering presence. One or two were edging to the right, which led to the abyss. I barred the way and by shouting and slashing at branches headed them into an angle of rock, where they crowded higgledy-piggledy, but stood still. Meanwhile, two fierce white dogs were snarling and barking at them and at me, and the shepherd, whirling his crook and threatening them too with the Devil’s Dam, came bounding down through the trees. We outflanked the runaways and turned them uphill.

  In a few minutes we were herding them to a wide and gently slanting meadow, green as April after the withered stalks below, where a hundred sheep were grazing. The shadows were beginning to slope across grass cropped as level as a lawn, and the sound of munching was broken now and then by the deep clank of the bell-wethers. Even the ewes had short curved horns, the lambs shorter still; but bell-wethers and rams were armed with heavy crinkled spirals that could have shaken the walls of Jericho. The woods still mounted interminably but now dark streaks of pine strove with the deciduous trunks and entwined their roots with those of oak and alder and hornbeam. It was only possible to descry the tops of the lower mountains now by peering from the outer edge, where the tree-tops fell away. The westering sun lit a faraway parade of level clouds, and shade filled the intervening valleys. The lower sierras of the Banat, several leagues away, were rimmed with light like a half-submerged shoal of sea-creatures.

  Radu the shepherd and his family welcomed me as an ally. Two or three houses, skilfully built and roofed with wooden scales faded silver-grey, gathered at one end of the clearing and a lych-gate led into a courtyard of stakes; behind, in an oval sheepfold, sweep-wells creaked by drinking troughs made of bisected tree-trunks scooped hollow. Radu and his two brothers, with shouts and whistles and half a dozen dogs, herded the flock inside, then barred it. Were they pent to keep them from straying, I wondered. To make sure, I smacked one of the stakes and said “Why?” to Radu—“Dece?”—and his answer—“Lupii”—told all.

  A wide ledge ran round the house, and this and the inside walls were whitewashed. There was a fireplace with a semi-conical chimney; golden maize-cobs were stacked with the symmetry of a honeycomb and the stripped husks for firing lay heaped in a corner. It was very clean and trim for a place that was only used at times like this, for in winter snow covered everything. The only wall decoration was a hanging oil-dip twinkling before an icon of the Virgin and Child, haloed in frills of gilt tin.

  These brothers were friendly, shy, self-reliant men with a lean, sweated look and hazel eyes so used to gazing half-shut at the sun and the wind that the wrinkles at the corners expanded over their tanned cheeks in small white fans. They wore moccasins and their white homespun tunics, caught in with wide belts, expanded to the volume of kilts. Their father was identical in feature and garb, except that his hair was white and that he was still jerkined in a fleece cojoc and hatted in a conical fleece caciula. He sat on the ledge, his hands crossed on the helve of an axe. The face of Radu’s wife was sad in repose, gay in motion, and strikingly beautiful; she and another woman span as they went about their tasks. Their worn, heavily carved distaffs were stuck in sashes of black braid. Elaborate detail but sober colours marked their attire: headkerchiefs and aprons of faded blue over white and many-pleated skirts, and intricately worked oblongs of the same faded hue which panelled their wide sleeves. Thei
r torsos were enclosed in dashing-looking soft leather hauberks, shiny with wear and lacing up the side. When one of them started a new thread, Radu’s wife licked the tip of her thumb and forefinger like a bank-teller, pulled some wool from the yarn which, drawn tapering to her other hand, span with the twirl of her spindle; all as unconsciously as knitting. She sang a doina to herself as she moved about the yard, each verse beginning “Foaie verde!”—“Green leaf”—or “Frunze verde!”—“Green frond.” These green-leaf invocations always struck me as a sort of woodland salute to beech, ash, oak, pine and thorn, as if the trees and their foliage held some mysterious and beneficent power.

  There was nothing to drink but water, so we all had a swig out of the flask, sitting about the ledge on stools, and I ate mamaliga for the first time—polenta or frumenty, that is, made out of ground maize, the staple of country people in these parts; I had been warned against it, but perversely found it rather good. Radu pointed to the gun on the wall and said we could have a hare for supper if I stayed on for another day. We ended with soft white sheep’s cheese: there was a tang of curds and whey in the yard, and dripping cotton bags hung from shady branches like snow-white pumpkins. The old man—one hand cupped, the other clenched—was busy at some task: clinks of metal were followed by a whiff like singeing cloth, caused by a piece of dried fungus which he had ignited by holding it against a flint and striking it with a magnet-shaped piece of steel; then, blowing on the smouldering fragment, he laid it on top of the rubbed tobacco leaves in the bowl of a primitive, reed-stemmed pipe. It was the first time I had come across this stone-age device, called a tchakmak farther south.

  I would have picked up a mass of lore about wolves if I had known more of the language: there were two or three pelts about the house. They sometimes carried off lambs and sheep, but there was little to fear at the moment; they were in the depths of the woods with their cubs; winter, when hunger and cold drove them down into the valleys, was the dangerous time. Mostly by gestures, he told me a pack had attacked some Gypsies in the snow the year before and left nothing but their boots and a few splinters of bone. What did they sound like? He put back his head and gave a long howl that was full of uncanny menace, and of anguish, too; (and he mimicked the stags’ belling which would begin in a couple of months: a dark, primordial, throaty roar, which I heard next year in a High Moldavian ravine: the kind of sound ancient Cretans must have heard with dread from the entrance to the maze). Foxes, lynxes, wild cats, wild boars and brown bears were the other chief denizens of these woods.