Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  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 clos
ed 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 t
hese 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.