# MacMillan's Magazine/Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe

MacMillan's Magazine, VOL. LXXXIV, May-Oct. 1901 (pg 350)

### I

It was a brilliant day in early June when we launched our canoe on the waters of the Danube, not one hundred yards from its source in the Black Forest, and commenced our journey of four and twenty hundred miles to the Black Sea. Two weeks before we had sent her from London to Donaueschingen by freight, and when the railway-company telegraphed the word arrived we posted after her with tent, kit-bags, blankets, cameras, and cooking-apparatus.
Donaueschingen is an old-fashioned little town on the southern end of the Schwarzwald plateau, and the railway that runs through it brings it apparently no nearer to the world. It breathes a spirit of remoteness and tranquillity born of the forests that encircle it, and that fill the air with pleasant odours and gentle murmurings.
There, lying snugly on a shelf in the goods-shed, we found our slender craft, paddles and boat-hook tied securely to the thwarts⁠—and without a crack! “No duty to pay,” said the courteous official, after examining an enormous book, “and only seventeen marks for freight-charges the whole way from Oxford.” She was sixteen feet long (with a beam of thirty-four inches), and had the slim graceful lines and deep curved ribs of the true Eice Lake (Ontario) build. Two or three inches would float her, and yet she could ride safely at top speed over the waves of a rapid that would have capsized a boat twice her size. Splendid little craft, she bore us faithfully and well, almost like a thing of life and intelligence, round many a ticklish corner and under more than one dangerous bridge, though this article will only outline some of our adventures in her over the first thousand miles as far as Budapest.
From the yard of the Schuetzen Inn, where she lay all night, we carried her on our shoulders below the picturesque stone bridge and launched her in a pool where the roach and dace fairly made the water dance. You could toss a stone over the river here without an effort, and when we had said farewell to the kindly villagers and steered out into midstream, there was so little water that the stroke of the paddle laid bare the shining pebbles upon the bottom and grated along the bed.
“Happy journey!” cried the townsfolk standing on the bank in blue trousers and waving their straw hats. “And quick return,” added the hotelkeeper, who had overcharged us abominably in every possible item. We bore him little malice, however, for there were no inns or hotel-bills ahead of us; and uncommonly lighthearted were we as the canoe felt the stream move beneath her and slipped away at a good speed down the modest little river that must drop twenty-two hundred feet before it pours its immense volume through three arms into the Black Sea.
At first our progress was slow. Patches of white weeds everywhere choked the river and often brought us to a complete standstill, and in less than ten minutes we were aground in a shallow. We had to tuck up our trousers and wade. This was a frequent occurrence during the day and we soon realised that the hundred and twenty-five miles to Ulm, before the tributaries commence to pour in their icy floods from the Alps, would be slow and difficult. But what of that? It was glorious summer weather; the mountain airs were intoxicating, and the scenery charming beyond words. Nowhere that day was the river more than forty yards across, or over three feet deep. The white weeds lay over the surface like thick cream, but the canoe glided smoothly over them, swishing as she passed. Her slim nose opened a pathway that her stern left gently hissing with bubbles as the leaves rose again to the surface; and behind us there was ever a little milk-white track in which the blossoms swam and danced in the sunshine as the current raced merrily along the new channel thus made for it.
Winding in and out among broad fields and acres of reeds we dropped gently down across the great plateau of the Black Forest mountains. The day was hot and clear, and overhead a few white clouds sailed with us, as it were for company’s sake, down the blue reaches of the sky. Usually we coasted along the banks, the reeds touching the sides of the canoe and the wind playing over hosts of nodding flowers and fields level to our eyes with standing hay, while, in the distance, the mountain-slopes, speckled with blue shadows, were ever opening into new vistas and valleys. Here the peaceful Danube still dreams, lying in her beauty-sleep as it were, and with no hint of the racing torrent that comes later with full waking. Pretty villages appeared along the banks at intervals. Pforen was the first, snugly gathered into the nook of the hills; a church, a few red-roofed houses, a wooden bridge, and a castle with a fine stork staring down at us from her nest in the ruined tower. The peasants were away in the fields and we drifted lazily by without so much as a greeting. Neidingen was the second, where a huge crucifix presided over the centre of the quaint bridge, and where we landed to buy butter, potatoes, and onions. Gutmadingen was the third; and here a miller and his men helped our portage over the weir while his wife stood in the hot sunshine and asked questions.
“Where are you going to?”
“The Black Sea.” She had never heard of it, and evidently thought we were making fun of her. “Ulm, then,” Ah! Ulm she knew. “But it’s an enormous distance! And is the tent for rain?” she asked.
“No; for sleeping in at night.”
“Ach was!” she exclaimed. “Well, I wouldn’t sleep a night in that tent, or go a yard in that boat, for anything you could give me.”
The miller was more appreciative. He gave us a delicious drink⁠—a sort of mead, which was most refreshing and which, he assured us, would not affect the head in the least⁠—and told us there were twenty-four more weirs before we reached Ulm, the beginning of navigation. But nonetheless he, too, had his questions to ask.
“I thought all the Englishmen had gone to the war. The papers here say that England is quite empty.”
The temptation was too great to resist. “No,” we said gravely, “only the big ones went to the war. [We were both over six feet.] England is still full of men of the smaller sizes like ourselves.” The expression on his face lightened our work considerably for the next mile.
Soon after the river left the plateau behind it and took a sudden leap into the Donauthal. We shot round a corner about six o’clock and came upon a little willow-island in midstream. Here we landed and pitched our tent on the long grass, made a fire, peeled the onions, fried our strips of beef with the potatoes, and made excellent tea. On all sides the pines crept down close into the narrowing valley. In the evening sunlight, with long shadows slanting across the hills, we smoked our pipes after our meal. There were no flies and the air was cool and sweet. Presently the moon rose over the ridge of forest behind us and the lights of Immendingen, twinkling through the shadows, were just visible a mile below us. The night was cool and the river hurried almost silently past our tent door. When at length we went to bed, on cork mattresses with india-rubber sheets under us and thick Austrian blankets over us, everything was sopping with dew.
The bells of Immendingen coming down the valley were the first sounds we heard as we went to bathe at seven o’clock next morning in the cold sparkling water; and later, when we scrambled over the great Immendingen weir no villagers came to look on and say “Engländer, Engländer” for it was Sunday morning and they were all at Mass.
The valley grew narrower and limestone cliffs shone white through the sombre forests. It was very lonely between the villages. The river, now sixty yards wide, swept in great semicircular reaches under the very shadow of the hills; storks stood about fishing in the shallows; wild swans flew majestically in front of us⁠—we came across several nests with eggs⁠—and duck were plentiful everywhere. Once, in an open space on the hills, we saw a fine red fox motionless in his observation of some duck⁠—and ourselves. Presently he trotted away into the cover of the woods and the ducks quacked their thanks to us. Then suddenly, above Mbhringen, just when we were congratulating ourselves that wading was over for good, the river dwindled away into a thin trickling line of water that showed the shape of every single pebble in its bed. We went aground continually. Half the Danube had escaped through fissures in the ground. It comes out again, on the other side of the mountains, as the river Ach, and flows into the Lake of Constance. The river was now less in volume than when we started, clear as crystal, dancing in the sunshine, weaving like a silver thread through the valley, and making delightful music over the stones. Yet most of our journey that day was wading. Trousers were always tucked up to the knees, and we had to be ready to jump out at a moment’s notice. Before the numberless little rapids the question was: “Is there enough water to float us? Can we squeeze between those rocks? Is that wave a hidden stone, or merely the current?” The steersman stood up to get a better view of the channel and avoid the sun’s glare on the water, and in this way we raced down many a bit of leaping, hissing water; and, incidentally, had many a sudden shock before the end, tumbling out headlong, banging against stones, and shipping water all the time. The canoe got sadly scratched, and we decided at length to risk no more of these baby-rapids. A torn canoe in the Black Forest, miles from a railway, spelt helplessness. Thereafter we waded the rapids. It was a hot and laborious process⁠—the feet icy cold, the head burning hot, and the back always bent double. Weirs, too, became frequent, and unloading and reloading was soon reduced to a science. In the afternoon the villagers poured out to stare and look on. They rarely offered to help, but stood round as close as possible while we unloaded, examining articles, and asking questions all the time. They had no information to give. Few of them knew anything of the river ten miles below their particular village, and none had ever been to Ulm. Now and then there was a sceptical “Dass ist unmoglich (that’s impossible),” when we mentioned Ulm as our goal. “Ach je! They’re mad⁠—in that boat!”
From Donaueschingen to Ulm there is a weir in every five miles, and our progress was slow. Whenever the river grew deep we learned to know that a dam was near; and below a dam there was scarcely enough water to float an eggshell. But there was no occasion to hurry; everything was done in leisurely fashion in this great garden of Würtemburg, and most of the villages were sound asleep. At Mohringen, indeed, we got the impression that the village had slept for at least a hundred years and that our bustling arrival had suddenly awakened it. It lay in a clearing of the forest, in a charming mossy bed that no doubt made sleep a delightful necessity. The miller invited us to the inn, where we found a score of peasants in their peaked hats and black suits of broadcloth sitting each in front of a foaming tankard; but they drank so slowly that a hundred years did not seem too long to finish a tankard. There was very little conversation, and they stared unconscionably, bowing gravely when we ordered their stone mugs to be refilled and regarding us all the time with steady, expressionless interest. In due time, however, they digested us, and then the stream of inevitable questions burst forth.
“You bivouac? You go to the sea? If you ever get to Ulm! You have come the whole way from London in that shell?”
We gulped down the excellent cold beer and hurried away. The river dwindled to a width of a dozen yards and wading was incessant. We lightened the canoe as much as possible, but, our kit having been already reduced to what seemed only strictly necessary, there was little enough to throw away⁠—a tin plate, a tin cup, a fork, a spoon, a knife, and a red cushion. These we piled up in a little mound upon the bank with a branch stuck in the ground to draw attention. I wonder who is now using those costly articles.
Another series of picturesque villages glided past us: Tuttlingen, famous (as the dirty water proclaimed) for its tanneries, and where a couple of hundred folk in their Sunday clothes watched our every movement as we climbed round two high and difficult weirs; Nendringen, where a kind and silent miller gave us of his cool mead; Mülheim straggling halfway up the hills with its red-brown roofs and church and castle all mingled together in most picturesque confusion, as if it had slipped down from the summit and never got straight again; and Friedigen, where we laid in fresh supplies, and found two Germans who had spent years in California, and whose nasal voices sounded strangely out of place among their guttural neighbours. “Camp anywheres you please,” they said, “and no one’ll objec’ to your fires so long as you put ’em out.”
I forget how many more villages ending in ingen we passed; but now that the heat of the day, and the labour and toil of wading are forgotten, they come before me again with their still, peaceful loveliness like a string of quaint jewels strung along the silver thread of the river.
Soon the water increased and the canoe sped onwards among the little waves and rapids like a winged thing. The mountains became higher, the valley narrower. Limestone cliffs, scooped and furrowed by the eddies of a far larger Danube thousands of years before, rose gleaming out of the pinewoods about their base. We plunged in among the Swabian Alps, and the river tumbled very fast and noisily along a rock-strewn bed. It darted across from side to side, almost as though the cliffs were tossing it across in play to each other. One moment we were in blazing sunlight, the next in deep shadow under the cliffs. There was no room for houses, and no need for bridges; boats we never saw; big, grey fish-hawks, circling buzzards, storks by the score had this part of the river all to themselves.
Suddenly we turned a sharp corner and shot at full speed into an immense cauldron. It was a perfect circle, half a mile in diameter, bound in by the limestone cliffs. The more ancient river had doubtless filled it with a terrifying whirlpool, for the rocks were strangely scooped and eaten into curves hundreds of feet above us. But now its bottom was a clean flat field, where the little stream, with its audacious song, whipped along at the very foot of the cliffs on one side of the circle.
It was a lonely secluded spot, the very place for a camp. Though only five o’clock on a June afternoon the cliffs kept out the sunshine. We sank the canoe, to soak up cracks and ease strained ribs, and soon had our tent up, and a fire burning. Then we climbed the cliffs. It was a puzzle to see how the river got in or got out. As we climbed we came across deep recesses and funnel-shaped holes, caves with spiral openings in the roof, and pillars shaped like an hourglass. Across the gulf the ruined castle of Kallenberg stood on a point of rock that was apparently inaccessible, and when the evening star shone over its broken battlements, it might well have been a ghostly light held aloft by the shades of the robber-barons who once lived in it. When we went to bed at ten o’clock the full moon shone upon the white cliffs with a dazzling brilliance that seemed to turn them into ice, while the deep shadows over the river made the scene strangely impressive. Only the tumbling of the water and the chirping of the crickets broke the silence. In the night we woke and thought we heard people moving round the tent, but, on going out to see, the canoe was still safe, and the white moonshine revealed no figures. It was doubtless the river talking in its sleep, or the wind wandering lost among the bushes.
At five o’clock next morning I looked out of the tent and found our cauldron full of seething mist through which the sunshine was just beginning to force a way. An hour later the tent was too hot for comfort.
All day we followed the gorge, with many a ruined castle of impregnable position looking down upon us from the cliffs. The valley widened about noon, and fields ablaze with poppies lay in the sun, while tall yellow flags fringed the widening river. In another great circle, similar in formation to that of Kallenberg, but five times as large, we found the monastery of Beuron with its eighty monks and fifty lay-brothers. We bathed and put on our celluloid collars (full dress in an outfit where weight is of supreme importance) and went up to the gates. A bearded monk, acting as doorkeeper, thrust a smiling face through the wicket in answer to our summons and informed us with genuine courtesy that the monastery was not open to visitors at this time of year.
“There are many visitors in summer, I regret,” he explained.
“Visitors! How do they get here?”
“By road; they come from long distances, driving and walking.”
“But we may never be here again; we are on our way to the Black Sea.”
“Ah, then you will see far more wonderful things than this in your journey.” He remained firm; so, by way of consolation we went to the Gasthaus Zur Zonne and enjoyed a meal⁠—the first for a week that we had not cooked ourselves.
It was a quiet, out-of-the-world spot. Monks were everywhere working in the fields, ploughing and haymaking; and it was here I first saw sheep following a shepherd. A curious covered bridge, lined with crucifixes, crossed the river, and we took an interesting photograph of a monk in a black straw hat and gown going over it with a cloud of dust in the blazing sunshine followed by fifty sheep. There was contentment on all faces, but the place must be dreadfully lonely and desolate in winter. We bought immense loaves in the monks’ bakery, and matches, cigars, sugar, and meat in a devotionshandlung (store for religious articles)!
Sigmaringen, with its old rock-perched castle and its hundred turrets gleaming in the sun, was reached just in time to find shelter from a thunderstorm that seemed to come out of a clear sky. There was a hurricane of wind, and the rain filled the quaint old streets with dashing spray. In an hour it cleared away, and we pushed on again; but the river had meanwhile risen nearly a foot. The muddy water rushed by with turbulent eddies, and the bridges were crowded with people to see us pass. They stood in silent dark rows without gesture or remark, and stared.
Suddenly the storm broke again with redoubled fury. Up went their umbrellas, and we heard their guttural laughter. In a few minutes we were soaked, and no doubt cut a sorry figure as we launched the canoe at the foot of the big weir and vanished into the gathering darkness. We swirled between the pillars of another bridge in sheets of rain and the outlook for a dry camp and a fire was decidedly poor. It was after nine o’clock when we landed in despair under a clump of trees on the left bank, and found to our delight that they concealed a solitary wedge of limestone cliff, and that in this cliff there was an arch, and under that arch a quantity of dry wood. A fire was soon blazing in the strip under the arch⁠—some three feet wide⁠—and the tent stood beneath the dripping trees. Our waterproof sheets and cork mattresses kept us dry, though all night the rain poured down, while outside we could hear the swollen river rushing past with a seething roar.
Next day the rapids began in earnest. Rapids are to canoers what fences are to fox-hunters. The first wave curls over in front of the canoe, there is a hiss and a bump, a slap of wet spray in the face, and then the canoe leaps under you and rushes headlong. At Riedlingen, while carrying the canoe across a slippery weir, we fell, boat and all, into the deep hole below the fall, luckily with no worse result than a wetting, for our kit was safely piled upon the bank. At Dietfurt we went into an apparently deserted village to buy milk, but the moment we entered the street it became alive. From every door poured men and women gaping, and the moment they spied the little yellow canoe upon the shore they rushed down in a flock shouting “E’ schiff! E’ schiff!” But, if they ran fast, we ran faster, and were off before the terrible onslaught of questions had even begun. The milk was a mere detail.
At Gutenstein, where we camped in a hayfield, the mowers woke us at dawn, peering into the mouth of the tent. But they made no objections and merely said “Gruss Gott” and “Gute Reise;” and for an hour afterwards I heard their scythes musically in my dreams as they cut a pathway for us to the river.
At Obermarchtal we left the mountains behind us, and with them, too, the memory of a pathetic figure. As we landed to go up to the little inn for eggs, an old man, leaning on a stick, hobbled down to meet us. His white hair escaped in disorder from beneath a peaked blue hat, and he wore a suit of a curious checked pattern that seemed wholly out of keeping with the dress of the country. At first, when he spoke, I could not understand him, and asked him in German to repeat his remarks.
“He’s talking English,” said my companion. “Can’t you hear?” And English it was. He invited us up to the inn and told us his story over a mug of beer.
“This is my native village. I was born and raised here, and sixty years ago I ran away from Germany to escape military service. I went to the United States and settled finally in Alabama. I had a shop in Mobile, down South in a nigger town, and as soon as I was ready I wrote to the girl I left here to come out to me. She came and we were married. I’ve had two wives since out there. Now they’re all buried in a little churchyard outside Mobile. And this is the first time I’ve been back in sixty years,” he went on after a gulp of beer. “The village ain’t changed one single bit. I feel as though I’d been sleepin’ and sorter dreamin’ all the while.⁠ ⁠… The shop’s sold and I’m takin’ a last look round at the ole place. There’s only one or two that remembers me, but I was born and raised here, and this is where I had my first love, and the place is full of memories, just chock full. No, I ain’t a goin’ to live here. I’m goin’ back to the States nex’ month, so as I can die there and lie beside the others in the cemetery at Mobile.”
The country became flatter and the mountains were soon a blue line on the horizon behind us. At Opfingen we crossed our last weir, and among the clouds in front of us saw the spire of Ulm cathedral, the tallest in the world. A fierce current swept us past banks fringed with myrtle bushes, poppies, and yellow flags. Poplars rose in lines over the country, bending their heads in the wind, and we camped at eight o’clock in a wood about a mile above the town. While dinner was cooking a dog rushed barking up to us followed by three men with guns. They were evidently German jager. Two of them were dressed like pattern plates out of a tailor’s guide to sportsmen⁠—in spotless gaiters, pointed hats with feathers (like stage Tyrolese), guns with the latest slings, and silver whistles slung on coloured cord round their necks. They examined the canoe first, and then came up and examined us. One of them, who was probably the proprietor of the land, a surly gruff fellow, had evidently made up his mind that we were poachers. And I must admit that at first sight there was ground for suspicion, for no poacher could possibly have found fault with our appearance.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Preparing to camp for the night,” we told him.
“When are you going on?”
“We intend to go into Ulm in the morning.”
“Where do you come from; are you Englishmen?”
“Yes; we come from London.”
“Ach was!” (they all say Ach was when they want to be witheringly scornful). “In that eggshell?”
“Certainly.”
“And where are you going to?”
“Odessa.”
They exchanged glances. “Evidently madmen, and not poachers,” said the face of the man with the biggest silver whistle plainer than any words could have spoken it. “Do you know these are private preserves?” was the next question.
“No.” My friend, a keen sportsman, sheltered himself scowling behind his alleged ignorance of German, (somehow he always knew our conversation afterwards to a word); but the penny whistle and the immaculate costume of the hunters in a scrubby wood where not even a rabbit lived, excited him to explosions of laughter which he concealed by frequent journeys to the tent.
“What’s in that tent?”
“Beds.” The chasseurs and the keeper went to examine, while the dog sniffed about everywhere. Our beds were not then untied, and the sportsman untied them; but they found only blankets and cork mattresses.
“You have no guns, or dogs, or fishing rods?” We shook our heads sulkily. “And you are only travelling peacefully for pleasure?”
“We are trying to,” we said meekly.
“Then you may sleep here if you go on again tomorrow; but don’t go into the woods after game.” Then the men moved off. Doubtless they were right to ask questions, yet we were so obviously travellers. “Still, our weatherworn appearance and unshaved faces probably made us look more than a little doubtful,” quoth my friend, who himself wore a slouch hat that did not add to the candour of his expression.
In the middle of dinner the men suddenly returned from another angle of the wood and examined everything afresh. We offered them some tea in a tin cup which they declined; and at last after watching us at our meal in silence for ten minutes they moved off, evidently still suspicious. Thereafter we always knew them as the chasseurs. They were not the only pests, however. Mosquitoes appeared later⁠—our first⁠—and that night we slept behind the mosquito-netting we had so carefully fitted to the mouth of the tent when we first erected it weeks before in the garden of a London square. During the night someone prowled about the tent. We heard twigs snapping and the footsteps among the bushes; but neither of us troubled ourselves to get up. If they took the canoe, they’d be drowned; and our other only valuables (a celluloid collar apiece, a clean suit for the big towns, and a map,) were safely inside the tent.
In the morning we shaved and washed carefully, and put on our full dress for the benefit of Ulm. We intended to paddle down quietly and stop at the Rowing Club wharf of which we had read; according to the map it was a mile, and the current easy and pleasant. We wished our entrance to be sober and in good taste. The best-laid plans, however, will sometimes go amiss when you’re canoeing on the Danube. We were halfway when we heard a roar like a train rushing over a hollow bridge. It grew louder every minute. In front of us the water danced and leaped, and before we knew what had happened we were plunging about among foaming waves and flying past the banks at something more than ten miles an hour.
“It’s the Iller,” cried my friend as the paddle was nearly wrested from his grasp. “It’s marked on the map just about here.”
It was the Iller. It had come in at an acute angle after running almost parallel with us for a little distance. It tumbled in at headlong speed, with an icy, turbulent flood of muddy water, and it gave the sedate Danube an impetus that it did not lose for another hundred miles below Ulm. For a space the two rivers declined to mingle. The noisy, dirty Iller, fresh from the Alps, kept to the right bank, going twice as fast as its more dignified companion on the left. A distinct line (as though drawn by a rope) divided them, in colour, speed, and height⁠—the Iller remaining for a long time at least half an inch above the level of the Danube. At length they mingled more freely and swept us down upon Ulm in a torrent of rough, racing water. Our leisurely dignified entrance into Ulm was, like the suspicions of the chasseurs, a structure built on insufficient knowledge, a mere dream. Ulm lies on a curve of the river. Big bridges with nasty thick pillars (and whirlpools, therefore, behind them) stand at both entrance and exit. How we raced under the first bridge I shall never forget. We were halfway through the town, with the wet spray still on our cheeks, before the sound of the gurgling eddies below the bridge had ceased behind us. Where, oh, where was the friendly wharf of that Danube Rowing Club? The second bridge rose before us. There were crested waves under its arches. Already Ulm was almost a thing of the past; yet we had hoped to spend at least a week exploring its beauties.
“There it is,” cried my friend in the bows, “on the left bank! That old board⁠—see it? That’s the wharf.”
We managed to turn in mid current and point the canoe upstream. Then, by paddling as hard as we could, we dropped down past the wharf at a pace that just enabled us to grasp the rings in the boards and come to a standstill. You’ll never forget Ulm if you arrive there, as we did, in a canoe, when the Iller is in flood.

### II

We spent a week in the quaint old town of Ulm, but our adventures there have properly no part in our journey down the river. Only, in passing, I must mention the courtesy of the Danube Rowing Club. Fritz Miller (who rowed at Henley in 1900 for the Diamond Sculls) is the leading spirit in a list of members who showed us all possible kindness. They housed and mended our canoe, varnished it afresh, and gave us better maps. The secret charms of picturesque Ulm unknown to the tourist were shown to us; and in the evenings we used to meet for music and supper in a quaint little clubroom that hangs half of its Roman masonry over the rushing river.
Here the navigation of the Danube (such as it is) is said to begin. The fierce current allows no boats or steamers, but immense barges (called Ulmer schachtel) laden with merchandise, are floated down the current to the Bavarian towns below. On arrival they are sold for lumber, the return journey being impossible.
The Rowing Club takes out eights and fours. Rowing with all their might they move two miles an hour against the current; and it may well be imagined that, with this training, they are well-nigh the first rowing club in Germany.
There was a great deal of rain while we were in Ulm and we started again on a rapidly rising river, full of floating rubbish, and rushing at a pace that made it a pleasure merely to stand and watch it from the bank.
The Bavarian bank (Ulm is on the frontier line of Bavaria and Würtemburg) displayed black signboards with the kilometers marked in white. We timed our speed by one of Benson’s chronometers and found it to be over twelve miles an hour. It was like travelling over a smooth road behind fast horses. My notebook gives an average day, the day, for instance, we left Ulm.
June 19th. The members of the Rowing Club came down in force to see us off at eleven o’clock. Flags were flying in our honour and we heard the men shouting glückliche Reise as we shot the middle arch of the bridge on the waves of a rather nasty rapid. The bridge was lined with people, but we only faintly heard their cries for the thunder of the waves. This exceedingly rapid water makes awkward currents as it swirls round the pillars of the big bridges. Behind the arches are always whirlpools, which twist you sideways and toss you from them with ridiculous ease. A wrong turn of the steering paddle and the canoe would be sucked in instead of thrown out, and then⁠—! At a little distance below the bridge the eddies of the whirlpool from adjacent pillars meet in a series of crested waves. The only safe channel lies exactly in the middle. The canoe rises, slaps down again, all its length a-quiver; the first wave breaks under the bows and some of the water comes in, but before enough is shipped to be dangerous the frail craft rises again with a leap to the next wave. Then the race begins. The least wrong twist to left or right and the waves break sideways into the canoe and down she goes. It takes so little water to sink a laden canoe.
Today, for the first time, we heard the famous song of the Danube⁠—famous at least to us who had read of it in so many different accounts. It is a hissing, seething sound which rises everywhere from the river. You think steam must be escaping somewhere, or soda-water fizzing out from an immense syphon among the woods on the banks. It is said to be the friction of the pebbles along the bed of the river, caused by the terrific speed of so great a body of water. Under the canoe it made a peculiar buzzing sound accompanied by a distinct vibration of the thin basswood on which we knelt.
We swept through Bavaria much faster than we wished, but it was impossible to go slowly. The river communicated something of its hurry to ourselves, and in my mind the journey now presents itself something in the form of a series of brilliant cineomatographs. Delightful were our lunches at the quaint inns of remote villages⁠—black bread, sausage, and such beer!⁠—Lauingen, a town of the sixteenth century, where the spokesman of the crowd said, “I suppose you’re both single;” Donauworth, in a paradise of wild flowers, where the Lech tears in on the right with leaping waves; Neuberg, with a dangerous stone bridge and the worst rapids we had yet encountered. Then a long stretch where the swamps ceased and the woods began to change. Instead of endless willows we had pine, oak, sycamore, birch, and poplar. The river was a mile wide with outlets into lagoons, like Norfolk Broads, that ran parallel with us for miles and were probably empty mud flats at low water. Fishing-nets were hanging up to dry along the shore, and hay lay sunning itself on the narrow strips of the banks. We passed Ingolstadt, a military post, and then the river dipped down before us into blue hills and we came to Vohburg⁠—destroyed by the Swiss in 1641, and now, apparently, nothing but a collection of quaint chimneys and storks’ nests⁠—and, soon after it, Eining, near Abusina, a Roman frontier station established fifteen years before our era. Trajan’s wall crossed the river near here and extended north as far as Wiesbaden.
Then the river narrowed between precipitous limestone cliffs and we entered the gorge of Kehlheim. At its very mouth, between impregnable rocks, lay the monastery of Weltenburg, the oldest in Bavaria. The river sweeping round a bend into the rocky jaws made landing difficult; but we accomplished it, and entered the old courtyard through an iron gate with graceful stone pillars. There were everywhere signs of neglect and decay. The monks’ quarters formed one side of the square and the church another; a third side was a wall of rock; the fourth was the river. It was secluded, peaceful beyond description, absolutely out of the world. The air was cool, the shadows deep. Fruit-trees grew in the courtyard, and monks (there were only thirteen in all) in black gowns were piling up wood for the winter. A priest was intoning vespers in the church, which boasted a beautiful organ, marble altars, and elaborate carving of the usual gilded sort. The sunshine filled the painted air. Outside over the neglected walls crept vines, and at the far end of the courtyard a wild rose-tree, covered with sweet-smelling blossoms, grew at the foot of crumbling stone steps that led under shady trees to a chapel perched on the cliffs. We toiled up in the heat and were rewarded by a glorious view; from above the monastery was shut in like a nest between river and cliffs.
Later in the day we were driven by a violent thunderstorm to the first landing-place we could find. It was a few miles below Weltenburg in the very heart of the gorge. With surprising good fortune we found a cave leading deep into the mountain, and in less than ten minutes we were dry and snug before a fire burning cheerfully for dinner. It was a camp⁠—the storm howling outside and the firelight dancing down behind us into the interior of the cave, which was unnecessarily full of bats.
At Batisbon, the Castra Regina of the Romans, we were solemnly warned not to attempt to pass under the bridge. “The whirlpools are savage,” they told us. “Of the seven arches of this six-hundred-year-old bridge, all but one are forbidden by the police.” Leaving the canoe half a mile above we landed and walked down the shore to examine. “Boats have gone through,” said a pompous man on the bridge as he pointed out the worst places to us, “but even if they got under the arch they have always been sucked in there!” He pointed to a white seething circle of water. “You’ll never get through that in your cockleshell, and you’ll be arrested even if you do.”
“Arrested⁠—how?” we asked. By way of answer he raised his eyebrows and held up a fat hand in eloquent warning. However, we carefully selected our channel from the bridge, and twenty minutes later were coming down stream towards the arches as cautiously as our speed would permit. People ran along the shore waving their hats and shouting to us to stop. The bridge in front was black with the crowd waiting to see the verrückte Engländer upset. We reached the arch and recognised our channel. The water dropped suddenly in front of us and the canoe dipped her nose with it. We were off. The bank and the shouting people flew past us in a black streak. I was just able to recognise one man, our pompous friend, standing below the bridge shading his eyes with his hand, evidently determined to get the best view possible. The roar of voices dwindled behind us into a murmur and a minute later we were out of sight; Batisbon, bridge, whirlpools, and townsfolk were things of the past. We were not arrested, but perhaps the police are still trying to catch us.
After this came a dull spell as we crossed the great wheat-plain of Bavaria, winding for two days with many curves and little current. Every morning here the workers in the fields woke us early, and praised the boat, and asked us the usual questions, and told us the usual falsehoods about the depth of the river, the distances of the towns, the floods of past years, and all the rest of it. We made no halt at Straubing (Servio Durum of the Romans), or at Deggendorf where the Isar adds its quota of mountain-gathered waters.
Another day was very dismal⁠—cold showers and storms of wind following one upon another. We crouched under bridges, trees, and anything else that gave cover, paddling fast between the squalls to keep ourselves warm. The plain of Straubing affords little shelter. Towards evening, however, the river made a welcome turn towards the mountains, and we camped on a high bank among clumps of willows with thick woods behind them. New potatoes, dried prunes, and onions in the stew-pot were points of light in a gusty and otherwise dismal meal. We pegged the tent inside and out. All night the wind tore at it, howling; but a gypsy-tent never comes down. The wind sweeps over it, and finding an ever lessening angle of resistance, only drives it more firmly into the ground.
Gradually, now, we were passing out of the lonely portions of the upper river. The country was becoming more populated; larger towns were near; railway-bridges spanned the river; steamers and tugs raced down, and toiled up it.
A few miles above Passau we camped on an island, and were visited by an inquisitive peasant, who saw our fire and came over from the mainland in a punt. “Are we trespassing?” I asked. “No; the island’s usually under water.” This was all he ever said in our hearing, though he stayed with us, it seemed, for hours. He was a surly-looking fellow in the roughest clothes, with trousers turned up to his knees, and bare feet. His curiosity was immense; with arms crossed and legs wide apart, he stood and stared in silence with expressionless features. We had some villainous Black Forest cigars, bearing on the label the words la noblesse, which we sometimes used to get rid of obnoxious people. We gave him two. Knowing nothing about the Greeks and those bearing gifts he nodded his thanks⁠—and smoked both to the very end! Yet he never stirred, his eyes never left us. It was impossible to prepare our frugal dinner under this merciless scrutiny. At length I prevailed upon him to go over for some eggs, and to bring them to us in the morning for breakfast. He left without a word in his punt, and a sense of oppression seemed to go with him. But, just as dinner was over and we were settling round the fire to our tobacco, he suddenly reappeared. He had brought the eggs in his hat, and he was dressed this time in his Sunday clothes! For an hour he stood beside the fire, answering no questions, volunteering no remarks, till at length my friend went up, shook hands, wished him good night, and straightway disappeared into the tent. I did likewise, and then the fellow took the hint, and went.
This happened at a place called Pleinling. Another thing also happened there. On the smaller of the arms into which our island divided the river was a weir. With empty canoe, and dressed in shirt and trousers, we practised shooting this weir next morning. The day was hot, and our other things were meanwhile drying on the bank. The silent peasant came over to watch the proceedings, and with him came a picturesque old fellow, most talkative and entertaining, with white hair and a face like Liszt’s. When he saw us preparing to shoot the fall he was much excited. “Have you wives and children?” he asked shaking his head warningly. I went over first while my friend took the camera, and got his picture a second before the canoe plunged into the foam and upset. The old fellow, whose name was Jacob Meyer, was not in the least put out. He leaned on his scythe and watched me struggling in the water with the overturned canoe without making any effort to help. Afterwards, when we gave him a noblesse he took a lean, dirty little purse out of his pocket, and said, “How much am I to pay for it?” And when we promised to send him the photographs he asked the same question again.
Some hours later we reached Passau, a few miles from the Austrian frontier, and this last glimpse of Bavaria, after traversing its entire breadth, was the sweetest of all. But only from the river itself can you see the quaint old houses leaning over at all imaginable angles; the towers and crooked wooden balconies; gardens hanging from the second storeys; walls with ancient paintings dimmed by wind and weather; and decayed archways showing vistas of tumbling roofs, broken chimneys, and peeps of vivid blue sky at the far ends. The picture it made in my mind as we paddled through it in the late afternoon is uncommonly picturesque⁠—a jumble of gables, towers, bridges, and the swift muddy Danube rushing past it all in such tremendous hurry.
Half a mile below, the Inn poured in from the Tyrolese Alps and carried us into the finest gorge we had so far seen. The newcomer brought cold air with it, and we swept into the gloomy ravine between high mountains with something like a genuine shudder. More and more swiftly ran the river as it compressed itself with an angry roar into a few hundred yards’ width and swirled into the hills raging at the indignity thus heaped upon it. It became very difficult now to choose camping-places, as the stream fills the entire gorge, leaving only narrow ledges at the foot of the heights where a tent can stand. Upon one of these ledges, broader than the rest, we managed at length to land. A projecting point of rock sent the water flying out at a tangent into midstream and formed a strong backwater below it. Into this we contrived to twist the canoe’s nose and on a little promontory, covered with yellow ragwort, we pitched our tent. It commanded a view for two miles up the ravine with the sinking sun at the far end. A boy was tending half a dozen cows among the scanty bushes; a queer little imp with wide-open blue eyes, who watched us land and prepare our camp with no signs of fear or surprise. We gave him cherries and chocolate, and he stuffed his mouth with one and his pockets with the other; then he came and stood over our fire and warmed himself without invitation, as if it had been made for his special benefit. A quaint little figure he cut with his pointed, feathered hat and big eyes. He told us that his name was Josef, that he lived two miles further on, went to bed every night at nine o’clock and got up every morning at four. Then he took off his hat, said good night, and vanished into the bushes after his cows.
The sun set in a blaze of golden light that filled the whole gorge with fire; but when the glory faded, the strange grandeur of the place began to make itself felt. The ravine was filled with strange noises, the wooded heights looked forbidding, and the great river rolled in a sullen black flood into the night.
Next morning we passed a big rock in midstream with a shrine perched on its summit; and just beyond it we entered Austria and visited the customs at Engelhartzell, a village on the right bank with an old Cistercian monastery behind it. There was no duty to pay, and we raced on past the mountain village of Obermühl, and out of the gorge into a fertile and undulating country basking in the fierce sunshine.
Neuhaus, with a fine castle on a wooded height, and Ashach, with a view of the Styrian Alps, flashed by. The river from here to Linz is full of history, and its muddy waters have more than once borne crimson foam. There were bloody fights here during the revolt of the peasantry of Upper Austria. Ashach, in 1626, was the insurgents’ headquarters where (as also at Neuhaus) they barricaded the Danube with immense chains to prevent the Bavarians from assisting Count Herberstein, the Austrian governor, who was shut up in Linz. When in flood the Danube escapes from this narrow prison with untold violence. Everywhere the villages bear witness of its path, though most of them lie far away from the banks. High upon the walls lines show the high-water marks of previous years with the dates. “A single night will often send us into the upper storeys,” said a woman who sold us milk and eggs; “but the water falls as quickly as it rises, and then we come down again.” She took it as a matter of course.
The shores became lonely again and our camps were rarely disturbed. One morning, however, about six o’clock we heard someone rummaging among our pans. Then something stumbled heavily against the tent, and there was a sound of many feet and an old familiar smell. We rushed out, to find ourselves in the centre of a herd of about fifty cows. One had its nose in the provision-basket; another was drinking the milk standing in the pail of water; a third was scratching its head against the iron prop of the kettle. Their curiosity was insatiable; every time we drove them off they returned. While my friend was frying the bacon and I was performing ablutions lower down on the river bank, a squadron swept down upon us unexpectedly by a clever flank movement, and one of them whipped up my pyjamas near the tent and ran down the shore with them on her horns. My friend dared not leave the bacon⁠—and I was in nudis! It was exciting for the next few minutes.
In blazing heat that day we came to Linz, the capital of Upper Austria. Below it the Traun and the Enns flowed in, and the Danube became a magnificent river rolling through broad banks alternately wooded and covered with crops and orchards; and now, too, we begin again to see vineyards, of which Bavaria had seemed bare.
For a long time, strange as it may sound, we had been enforced vegetarians and drinkers of condensed milk. We could rarely get fresh milk, though we trudged many a mile to farmhouses and inns for it; either it was all used for butter, or had already been sent to the towns. Of course it would not keep sweet in our canoe under the blazing heat, and we could only trust to the chance of getting it an hour or so before we needed it. But, when we were lucky enough to get it, how delicious were those messes of boiled bread and milk! Meat, too, was hard to come at, except at certain hours. The butchers in the small towns open their shops at certain times only. Not one of them would ever trouble himself to supply us with merely a pound of meat, and more would not, of course, keep fresh.
We were drawing near Vienna now, but first we passed through another fine gorge. It began at Grein (where the Duke of Coburg’s castle, Greinburg, looks down from the heights) and before we emerged breathless at the other end we had come through the famous whirlpools known as the Wirbel and Strudel. The river, narrowed by half its width, plunged with many contortions round sharp corners between high cliffs and past the island-rock of Wörth. Rising in long, heaving undulations the water was alive with whirlpools, twisting and sucking, and throwing us here and there, gushing up underneath us with ugly noises and seething on every side. There was no foam, no crests, no waves or spray; it was like a monstrous snake trying to writhe through a hole too small for it. The shore raced by at top speed, and steering was uncomfortable for a time. In former years these whirlpools were a source of great danger to the navigation; but in 1866 the Emperor had certain rocks blown up and now an inscription on the face of the cliff testifies to the thanks of a grateful people. The traveller in a big steamer might think this description exaggerated. He would not think so in a canoe.
It is impossible to mention, as one would like, all the abbeys, churches, monasteries, ruins, islands, and other points of historic interest that throng the banks. The scenery is enchanting as well as enchanted. There were some interesting castles in these mountains, and grim they still look even in their ruins. Aggstein rose in solitary grandeur on a peak that commanded miles of the Danube in both directions. It was built in the twelfth century by the Kuenings, a robber-race which stretched chains across the river, plundered the traffic, and drowned the owners. We could still see the Blashaus Tower from which the sentinel announced the approach of boats. Its was a plundering, murdering family, and was finally destroyed by the great Ulrich von Grafeneck.
Before Ybbs (the Roman Pons Isidis) we saw the wonderful ruins of Dürrenstein where Richard Cceur de Lion was imprisoned. Here, on the very spot, it was interesting to recall how he was recognised when walking through the fields at Erdberg (since merged in Vienna), captured, and handed over to his enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria, who entrusted him in turn to the keeping of the Kuenings. They kept him for fifteen months (1193) in the great castle of Dürrenstein beneath whose grim walls we passed in our canoe. In Austria the story is implicitly believed, whatever we may think of it in England.
The following day we saw the blue hills of the Wienerwald rising behind Vienna, and before long we were obliged to don our best clothes, and send a porter down from our hotel to fetch the luggage from the bathing-house where the canoe lay below the Reichsbrücke.
We did not stay long in Vienna. Rooms in July seem stuffy after a tent, and a fly-spotted ceiling is a poor substitute for the stars.
The canoe was packed full of provisions ready to start when our first accident occurred. The river had risen a couple of feet and was very swift. My friend had just taken off his shoes and placed them on the top of the other luggage. Several of the crowd, in their misguided fashion, were trying to help us, when I stepped into the little space vacant for me in the stern. How it happened no one knew; someone let go too soon, and she was instantly swept out sideways into the current. The next second I was dropped out neatly into five feet of water, and the canoe, settling till only the tops of the luggage remained in sight, went full tilt down stream. There were fifty yards of clear water, and then came a row of barges tied ten feet from the shore and leaving an inner channel. Into this the canoe luckily was swept; had she careered off into midstream probably we should never have seen her again. With boat-hooks and poles we ran along the banks to catch her before she banged into the barges. My friend ran in his socks. The hotel-porter, the bathhouse man, and a dozen idlers all followed shouting different things at once. But the canoe and the mad current had the start of us. Crash! with a sound of rending, splintering wood she banged into the nearest barge and turned completely over. A few seconds later the various articles appeared on the surface again, and there began a sort of obstacle-race that might have been highly comical had it not been so serious. Our beds with the cork mattresses floated high out of the water. Jumbo (a huge kit-bag holding our wardrobe) came next, up to his neck. A smaller waterproof bag, tied at the neck and holding bread and cameras, followed, spinning merrily. The provision basket (filled with the morning’s careful shopping and some tea just arrived from England) showed only its nose above the surface. Coats, hats, socks, maps, tent-poles and tent followed in motley array at the end of an idiotic looking procession. Every time an article banged into a barge it went under for a few seconds, and meanwhile the canoe was crashing on among ropes and poles in the van. The heavy articles defied our efforts, and Jumbo pulled one man bodily into the water when he tried to drag it ashore.
In the end, however, most of the things were saved. The men caught the canoe as she spun past a barge, and held her till help came. All the articles, too, were fished out except those that would not float. Thus, we lost our lantern, the prop of the kettle, a pair of my friend’s shoes, an odd one of mine, the ridgepole of the tent, and my town hat and coat. It was wonderfully little. The bows of the canoe, however, were completely smashed in; and to make it worse, the rain suddenly came down in torrents and a cold wind blew from the north.
Then a carpenter appeared on the scene and said he could mend the canoe and make a new tent-pole. The people of the bathhouse took our things in to dry, while we jumped into a closed carriage and drove back into Vienna, my friend with no shoes on his feet, and I without a hat on my head. Yet, such was our good luck, that three hours later we were spinning down the river in the mended canoe; the sun was shining brightly, our things were dried, we had a new tent-pole, Vienna was out of sight below the horizon⁠—and when we landed for camp the place was so lonely that, on climbing the bank, I looked straight into the eyes of a great stag with branching antlers.
For two days at racing speed we journeyed through wild and lonely country towards the frontiers of Hungary. The river was like a wide lake⁠—no houses, no boats, no token of man except the daily steamer between Vienna and Budapest. We passed signs of Roman days and Turkish occupancy strangely mingled: Carnuntum, where Marcus Aurelius is said to have written much of his philosophy; Theben on a spur of the little Carpathians, with its rock-perched fortress destroyed by the Turks in 1683 when they swept on to besiege Vienna, and again by the French in 1809. At its very feet the March (the boundary between Austria and Hungary) comes sedately in, and the Danube received a new impetus as we passed below its shadow and into Hungary at last.
The Germans had been kind in a negative fashion, the Bavarians courteous, the Austrians obliging; but the hospitality of the Hungarians was positively aggressive. “Nothing is too much,” they used to declare when we expostulated with them on the overwhelming nature of their attentions, “nothing is too good for Englishmen. Everybody will tell you the same in Hungary.” Kossuth was the magical word, and hatred of the Austrians the keynote of their emotions. We blessed the generation that had welcomed him in exile and went on our way rejoicing. The crowds no longer stood gaping; they helped without being asked. When we landed for provisions they ran down to hold the canoe, while others went into the village to make our purchases more cheaply for us. Even their questions were intelligent. German is of uncertain value here, and we had carefully learned the Magyar words for the articles we most needed. “Now you begin to learn Magyar when it is too late,” laughed the woman in a Pressburg shop where we bought milk and eggs and bacon; “but it’s no matter: you can’t starve in Hungary.” The Hungarian name of the town is Pozsony. It was formerly the capital, where the kings of the Hapsburg race were crowned. Below it the Danube branches into three arms, one of which makes a circuit of fifty miles and comes in again at Komorn. The main river is a couple of miles wide and full of islands, separated by rapids and falls. An officer assured us that we should get lost for days together unless we carefully kept to the main channel. The country is utterly deserted, save for the little black landing-stages of the steamers that appear every twenty miles or so, the villages lying far back and protected by high earthen banks. The loneliness and desolation of these vast reaches of turbulent river and low willow-clad islands were impressive; in flood-time it must be grand.
The water escaped into so many side channels and lagoons that the depth of the river was most variable. Grey shingle-beds appeared often in midstream, and over and over again we were swept into them before we could cross to deeper water. It was difficult to distinguish them in time from the muddy, foam-streaked river, until we learned that the cormorants invariably used them for fishing grounds; and then we took the black bodies in the distance as warning signals that saved us much dangerous wading. The velocity of the stream is so great that one almost expects to see the islands swept bodily away. Big grey hawks circled ever over head and grey crows by the thousand lined the shores. That evening, after crossing and recrossing the river, we found a sheltered camp on a sandy island where pollards and willows roared in the wind. As if to show the loneliness of the spot an otter, rolling over and over among the eddies, swam past us as we landed. About sunset the clouds broke up momentarily and let out a flood of crimson light all over the wild country. Against the gorgeous red sky a stream of dark clouds, in all shapes and kinds, hurried over the Carpathian mountains, and when we went to bed a full moon cast the queerest shadows through the tossing branches. We dined⁠—prosaic detail!⁠—off tongue, onions, potatoes, tea, and dried prunes which we stewed and ate with quantities of beetroot sugar.
Next day the river grew wider, swifter, and even more deserted. At Korteljes we landed to buy provisions, though only the watchman’s hut was in sight. As we stepped on shore my hat blew off and floated down stream. At once the man (who spoke a little German) went into his hut and produced one of his own which he begged me to wear; it was a greasy wide-brimmed felt, but I could not refuse it, and he seemed delighted. He directed us to a farm a mile inland for milk and eggs, and gave us the correct pronunciation of the necessary words. The farm stood on the broad plain in a grove of acacia trees, with snow-white walls and overhanging thatched roofs, forming a square, within which were oxen, buffaloes, pigs, geese, and romping children in brilliant skirts. The older girls had yellow kerchiefs on their heads; one little girl, in flaming colours, was chasing a chicken in and out among the trees and oxen; all stopped to stare as we approached, swinging an empty milk-can. Through the farmhouse door I got a glimpse into a spotless kitchen, and a most courteous woman with brilliant dark eyes sold us what we required very cheaply. I took off my new greasy hat to them when we left, and the children followed us to the river, a motley escort.
On we went down the great rushing stream, ever flanked by a sea of silvery willows swaying and bending in the wind, reed beds, ten feet high, alternating with stretches of grey shingle. Between the wooded islands vistas opened in all directions; narrow glades where the river sent out new arms in patches of sunshine with the faint sound of water tumbling over distant shallows; while down some far blue reach, filled with the afternoon shadows, we could see immense herds of cattle, swine, and flocks of geese, feeding in meadows lined with poplars and birch trees. Horses in vast quantities roamed along the banks, watched by herdsmen who wore cool white skirts instead of trousers. Often, in the backwaters, oxen, horses, buffalo, pigs, and geese were all crowded together trying to keep cool in the great heat.
At Komorn, rising with its fortress just above the dead level of the plain, we laid in provisions. The grocer was inquisitive: “Where have you come from? Where are you going to? How do you cook? Where do you sleep? Are you not afraid of grasshoppers and snakes? What an awful distance you have come⁠—the source of the Danube, where is it? You are both quite young, aren’t you? But you are so enormous,”⁠—and so on, and so on.
From here we saw the blue mountains that encircle Budapest⁠—not more than forty miles away as a crow would fly it, but a splendid loop of sixty-five miles by the river. Budapest draws one like a magnet. There is a suggestion of delicious wildness about it born of I know not what. The very name seems set to some flying fragment of the wild national music⁠—a bar of the csárdás, or of the wailing Hungarian songs that thrill with such intense virility. The West, too, sinks lower on the horizon when Budapest is reached, and the Danube sweeps you on through the Iron Gates to Turkey and the Fekete Tengerig (Black Sea).
Willows, reeds, and islands have all vanished now, and there were no sudden whirlpools in midstream. With majestic dignity that disguised the real speed, the mass of water, a mile to a mile and a half wide, swept steadily down under that fierce heat towards the mountains. We kept to midstream and were never tired of watching the banks slip by with their ever changing pictures: open shore; fields with barley standing in sheaves; vineyards coming down to the water’s edge; cottages with thick thatch and white walls; villages full of wild, overgrown gardens, and groves of acacia trees of brilliant washed green. We landed for milk at a farmhouse on the right bank and found that the proprietor spoke English and had travelled in England and Norway and studied in Vienna. “It’s only twenty-six kilometers to Budapest,” he told us. Later on we overtook some peasants in a boat full of vegetables, and kept pace with them for a little, while we chatted in German. “It’s a little over forty kilometers to Pest,” they said. Boats became frequent after this, broad, flat-bottomed, laden with farm-produce, and rowed by men and women who took their hats off to us and asked many questions in bad German. All agreed on one thing⁠—that the Austrians were a poor lot of people compared with the Hungarians; and all differed on another thing⁠—the distance to Budapest. It varied with every boat, and at length we became so confused with the arguments of the spokesman in German and the mocking chorus of the rest in Hungarian, that we almost expected to hear that we had already passed it, or were perhaps on the wrong river altogether.
To avoid calamities we increased our speed and left the string of boats behind. In the afternoon we came to Gran. The dome of its huge Italian basilica dominates for miles the plain we had just traversed, but looks like a round gleaming pebble beside the mountains that rise behind it. The charms of this quaint little town made us realise that time is after all but a form of thought; in other words, we stayed too long. At half-past six we entered the wide deep valley of these magical mountains hoping to find a camping-place so soon as we were beyond the town. The sun was hidden; the mountains stood outlined in purple against a wonderful sky, with long thin clouds just touching some of the higher peaks; the water glowed as though fires burned beneath the waves. Mile after mile we followed the windings of the valley, the hills folding up behind us, but opening ever in front again into new and darker distances. But no camping-place appeared; one side was too steep, the other treeless. The shadows lengthened and grew deeper; the hills changed from purple to black; the lights of villages twinkled across the river as across a wide lake. They fairly lined the base of the hills, and secluded camping-spots were evidently things of the past; there was not even an island.
Eight, nine o’clock passed; it became too dark to cross or recross with safety. We hugged the left bank, eagerly scanning the shore under the steep hills and waiting for the moon to rise. It was ten o’clock when the moon topped the mountains of the other shore and filled the valley with silver. We found a level yard or two below some vineyards, unpleasantly close to the abode of the proprietor, and there made a small fire and dined late off eggs and cocoa. The scenery was more thrilling than the meal: the dim hills rising through the moonlight; the white river filling the space between as if the whole valley were sliding noiselessly past, the fragrant air, warm and still, shot here and there with fireflies⁠—and Hungary⁠—wild, musical, enchanted Hungary! The fire had died down and we were smoking at the mouth of the tent when sounds of music floated to our ears, and presently a barge of peasants towed by three men along the shore came slowly up the stream. Cymbals and violins were playing a national air and a few low voices were singing. The barge floated past as if no one had seen us, and the music died away in the distance.
And on the mere the wailing died away.
Several hours later the returning voices and violins woke us in the tent as the party went down again too far from shore to be visible to the eye.
A man fishing woke us early and asked if the weinhüter (watchman of vineyards) had not disturbed us. Luckily he had not. “That’s because it’s Sunday and he’s overslept himself.” In spite of this warning we breakfasted leisurely, and then paddling down stream in blazing sunshine landed a mile below at Visegrad on the opposite bank. This little town, with its ruined castle, and fortress destroyed by the Austrians, nestles among the mountains, and here the good folk of Budapest come in summer to their villas among the acacia trees. Everybody spoke to us, helped to pull up the canoe, told us what to see, where to get good coffee or cooling drinks, described (with painful detail) the remaining twenty miles to Budapest, and showed themselves in all ways most courteous and obliging. Gypsy-music sounded everywhere among the trees, and the peasants in bright Sunday costumes lent colour to the scene.
Below Visegrad, which we left with much reluctance, begins an island which stretches the whole twenty miles to Budapest. Taking the inner channel we paddled peacefully all day under blue mountains in a haze of delicious heat, past villages, ferries, churches, castles, private villas, acres of vineyards over the slopes of the hills, and vast herds of horses and oxen standing in the water, till we camped at sunset on a treeless bit of plain at the extreme point of the island, only a mile from Budapest. It was like camping on the Brighton downs. With difficulty we collected scraps of wood enough to make a fire that would boil water. It was a windless night, and our candle stood tied to a stick in the open air with a motionless flame. The moon, rising late, showed rounded curves of bare hills behind us⁠—and then, two figures approached us cautiously from the river. They came to the outside of the firelight circle and stopped; but at our invitation they came within and smoked the last of our noblesse cigars⁠—poor fellows! Night-fishermen they were, short, thickset, dark-faced Huns. They drank our cocoa and explained their strange-looking nets to us while waiting for the moon to rise higher. All night long they fished, and on their way home to bed at five next morning they looked in to give us a hearty good morning and the information that the cows were coming.
The thunder of hoofs confirmed this, and we got up in time to protect the tent from a herd of several hundred cattle. A herder followed them, a dwarf-like creature with a poleaxe as big as himself, and a badge which proclaimed him government keeper of the plain (Crownland) where all men’s cattle might feed on certain conditions. He spoke no German, but he understood the meaning of a plate of veal, and he finished our meat (two pounds) in about ten minutes. Then he drank some cocoa, asking, with a wry face, if it were paprika (Hungarian pepper).
It was piping hot on the treeless plain, and Budapest lay waiting for us. We shaved and donned our town suits. The herder, grateful for his meal, helped to carry our things to the canoe, and, long after we were off, stood shading his eyes with his hand and staring after us. We drifted lazily down another mile of steaming hot river and landed at the wharf of the Hunnia Rowing Club on the right bank⁠—nearly a thousand miles from the sleepy little village in the Black Forest where we had embarked six weeks before.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1951, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 72 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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