Between the Woods and the Water (36 page)

* * *

The racket of birds and the island cocks woke me up just in time to catch the muezzin's call. There was a flicker in the poplar leaves and sunrise threw the shadow of the island far upstream. The lure of the water was irresistible; but diving in off a tussock I found the current so strong after a few strokes that I clambered back before being whirled away.

Back in the coffee shop, the old men were already in their places and soon I was sipping at a minute cup and eating white goats' cheese wrapped in a bread flap; the aged hookah addict, coaxing the first bubbles through the water, unloosed staccato puffs like the smoke-signals of a Huron. A creak, a shadow and a rush of air passed over our heads: a stork, abandoning its one-
legged posture on the roof, glided to the rushes; folding one white wing with its black senatorial stripe over the other, he joined three companions vigilantly pacing on their scarlet stilts; the parents and their young were indistinguishable now. One of the old men made a gesture of flying and then, pointing in a roughly south-easterly direction, said “Afrik! Afrik!” They would be off soon. When? In a week, two weeks; not much longer...I had seen them arriving the evening I crossed the river into Hungary and here they were with their courtships, nesting, laying, hatching and growing up all over, and ready to fly.

The Czechoslovakian barges, laden with tiles and timber, were gliding away downstream when I reached the Orșova quay. I joined an Austrian pilot I had met the day before. He, too, spotted signs of restlessness among the storks. Would they set off on their own? No, no, he said; they would join one of the large migrations coming from the north-west, probably from Poland. Some village girls passed, sorting out roses, zinnias, hollyhocks, tiger-lilies and marigolds; not for a wedding but for decorating altars. The Orthodox were celebrating the Dormition of the Virgin next day, the pilot said, and the Catholics her Assumption: two aspects of the same occasion; and to illustrate his own doctrine, the pilot's forefinger, twirling in an ascending gyre, plotted the path of tomorrow's star-crowned figure dwindling into the empyrean. My passport, soon to be stamped with its seventh frontier-crossing (‘Orșova, 13 August, 1934') lay on the table with my stick and the rucksack next to it on a chair. Something, I couldn't think what, was missing. The stag's antler! I must have forgotten it among the grass and the brambles on the island when I rolled up my greatcoat. Relief soon followed disappointment; the trophy had become a bit of a nuisance; anyway, there was no time to go back. Perhaps some future palaeontologist might think the island had once teemed with deer.

* * *

In several ways, the hour called to mind the mood of ending and beginning I had felt on the bridge over the same river six hundred miles upstream: the fidgeting storks, the girls laden with flowers for a great festival, people gathered on the quay, even a heron flying so low that the tips of its flight-feathers left momentary rings on the water. Downstream, the reflection of the island and the rushes and tree-tops and the slender minaret shivered in the current. One of the islanders, a bearded Sinbad in a collapsed fez and a spotted turban, held up a string of fish for sale; another carrying a basket of eggs was arguing with a melon-grower up to his thighs in a cartload of huge green watermelons and, as he argued back, the grower went on rhythmically tossing his wares to a companion, like two men passing at football, while a third set them out invitingly along the flagstones. A Gypsy, stooping under a four-foot-long, unwieldy, but just portable silver-plated vessel slung on a baldric and shaped like an elongated Taj Mahal, clashed metal cups together to alert customers. Now and then he filled them from a spigot with an oriental soft drink called
braga
, chiefly swallowed by thirsty country folk. Some women in Cerna-valley clothes, with trusses of poultry beside them, were sitting and gossiping between the bollards and dangling their moccasined feet over the water. Just as the belfries were striking ten, the echo of a siren came from the entrance of the canyon upstream. “Pretty well on time,” the pilot said. “They drop anchor at ten-twenty.”

Emerging from the chasm, the ship veered out of profile and shrank to a single line of mast, funnel, bowsprit and prow; and then, expanding fast and enclosed in the confetti of gulls which had kept her company all the way from the quay of the Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft in Vienna, she bore down on our cheerfully crowded waterfront and her paddles creased the water with a widening symmetrical arrow. “It's the
Saturnus
,” the pilot said. The notes of a gramophone record reached us: it was
Tales from the Vienna Woods
. The pilot laughed: “You wait! When they weigh anchor, they put on
The Blue Danube
.” Everyone was collecting their stuff, a boatman took his stand beside the bollard, officials
put on gold-laced caps and the ship, drawing alongside, back-paddled into profile again in a turmoil of froth. A sailor leant over the rail and in a moment his hawser was skimming through the gulls like a lasso.

TO BE CONCLUDED

[1]
Băile Herculane, Herculesbad and Herkules Fürdö were the local names.

[2]
She gave them all back when I returned, but they went astray in a lost trunk during the war, and I miss them bitterly now.

[3]
It would be improper to call it Sibiu in this context.

[4]
R.F., the friend who has succeeded to the role of the polymath in
A Time of Gifts
, assures me that other orders—Piarists, Premonstratensians, Benedictines and Cistercians—played a much more important role in the later history of Hungary, Transylvania and the Banat; and, very notably, the Franciscans. The most famous of these was the fiery Capistrano, Hunyadi's ally and brother-in-arms against the Turks. It was in the wider Mitteleuropa sphere of the Holy Roman Empire, in England, Paraguay, India, China and Japan that the Society of Jesus had spread its wings widest. But, even if my sententious jottings by the Danube were not as much to the point as I thought, there is just enough truth in them not to cross them out.

[5]
‘Stefan' or ‘Stephan' Széchenyi is how he was known at Holland House, but I heard his christian name so often mentioned in its Magyar form that it is hard to write it otherwise. He was one of the earliest members of the Travellers Club.

[6]
The actual Great Balkan Range, as opposed to ‘the Balkans,' only begins on the other side of the Bulgarian-Yugoslav border.

[7]
I found it later. ‘Imperator Caesar divi Nervae filius,' the inscription ran, ‘Nerva Trajanus Augustus Germanicus—Pontifex Maximus tribunitae potestatis quartum—Pater patriae consul quartum—montis et fluviis anfractibus—superatis viam patefacit.' (‘The Emperor Caesar—son of the divine Nerva—Nerva Trajan Augustus Germanicus—High Priest and for the fourth time Tribune—Father of the country and for the fourth time Consul—overcame the hazards of mountain and river and flung open this road.')

[8]
They must be the most widely travelled regalia in the world. After World War II they were kept hidden for many years in the United States and only given back a few years ago. I saw them on display in the National Museum some months after their return: the famous crown itself, the mace-like sceptre, the orb, the armlets and the sword of state. The queue waiting to catch a glimpse of them—only for a few seconds, so great was the throng—stretched a hundred yards down the street and shuffled past the treasure in silent awe. It symbolised all Hungary's history and her pride for the past thousand years.

[9]
The Arabian words meaning that God is great—cried from the minaret a little earlier and now murmured indoors—had been replaced for a while in Turkey by the vernacular
Allah büyük
; just as the role of fez and turban had been usurped by the cloth cap, usually worn back to front like a coal-heaver's by the devout so that the forehead could touch ground at prayer unhindered by the peak. Inasmuch as anyone, apart from the hodja, was literate on Ada Kaleh, the old Arabic script, rather than the new Latin alphabet compulsory in Turkey proper, was still in use. I found, later on, the same distrust of change among the Turkish minorities which post-war treaties had stranded in Bulgaria and Greek Thrace.

[10]
Some think Hunyadi was Sigismund's illegitimate son, and others—the majority, perhaps—that he was of mixed Hungarian and Rumanian descent. With no right at all to an opinion, I have always hoped it was the latter, just in case he might one day become a symbol of concord between the two nations, rather than a bone to be snarled over.

[11]
A Distant Mirror
by Barbara Tuchman gives a fascinating account of his adventures.

[12]
Huntingdon's mother was the Fair Maid of Kent. Some authorities question not only the numbers involved, but also whether Huntingdon and his men were actually there; they only allow the presence of a number of English knights among the Hospitallers who had embarked in Rhodes. They sailed up the Danube in a fleet of forty-four Venetian ships, to strengthen the army besieging Nicopolis. Other leaders suggested for an overland contingent have been Bolingbroke himself and John Beaufort, time-honoured Lancaster's son. But alibis seem to disqualify them all; Huntingdon, too, perhaps... France and Burgundy have a dozen sad contemporary ballads about the tragic crusade, but one seeks in vain for a single English lament.

P
ROGRESS
has now placed the whole of this landscape underwater. A traveller sitting at my old table on the quay at Orșova would have to peer at the scenery through a thick brass-hinged disc of glass; this would frame a prospect of murk and slime, for he would be shod in lead and peering out of a diver's helmet linked by a hundred feet of breathing-tube to a boat stationed eighteen fathoms above his head. Moving a couple of miles downstream, he would fumble his way on to the waterlogged island and among the drowned Turkish houses; or, upstream, flounder among the weeds and rubble choking Count Széchenyi's road and peer across the dark gulf at the vestiges of Trajan on the other side; and all round him, above and below, the dark abyss would yawn and the narrows where currents once rushed and cataracts shuddered from bank to bank and echoes zigzagged along the vertiginous clefts would be sunk in diluvian silence. Then, perhaps, a faltering sunbeam might show the foundered wreck of a village; then another, and yet another, all swallowed in mud.

He could toil many days up these cheerless soundings, for Rumania and Yugoslavia have built one of the world's biggest ferro-concrete dams and hydro-electric power plants across the Iron Gates. This has turned a hundred and thirty miles of the Danube into a vast pond which has swollen and blurred the course of the river beyond recognition. It has abolished canyons, turned beetling crags into mild hills and ascended the beautiful Cerna valley almost to the Baths of Hercules. Many thousands of the inhabitants of Orșova and the riparian hamlets had to be uprooted and transplanted elsewhere. The islanders of Ada Kaleh have been
moved to another islet downstream and their old home has vanished under the still surface as though it had never been. Let us hope that the power generated by the dam has spread well-being on either bank and lit up Rumanian and Yugoslav towns brighter than ever before because, in everything but economics, the damage is irreparable. Perhaps, with time and fading memories, people will forget the extent of their loss.

Others have done as much, or worse; but surely nowhere has the destruction of historic association and natural beauty and wildlife been so great. My mind goes back to my polymath Austrian friend and his thoughts on the still unhindered thousands of miles which led fishes from Krim Tartary to the Black Forest and back again; how, in 1934, he lamented the projected power-dam of Persenbeug, in Upper Austria, “Everything is going to vanish! They'll make the wildest river in Europe as tame as a municipal waterworks. All those fish from the East! They'll never come back. Never, never, never!”

The new featureless lake has taken all the hazards from shipping, and the man in the diving-suit would find nothing but an empty socket on the site of the mosque: it was shifted piecemeal and reassembled in the Turks' new habitat, and I believe a similar course was followed with the main church. These creditable efforts to atone for the giant spoliation have stripped the last shred of mystery from those haunted waters. No imaginative or over-romantic traveller will ever be in danger of thinking he detects the call to prayer rising from the depths and he will be spared the illusion of drowned bells, like those of Ys, the
cathédrale engloutie
off the Breton coast; or those of the legendary city of Kitezh, near the Middle Volga, hard by Nizhni-Novgorod. Poets and story-tellers say that it vanished underground during the invasion of Batu Khan. Later it was swallowed up in a lake and chosen listeners can sometimes hear its bells tolling from the drowned towers.

But not here: myths, lost voices, history and hearsay have all been put to rout, leaving nothing but this valley of the shadow. Goethe's advice, ‘Bewahre Dich vor Räuber und Ritter und
Gespenstergeschichten,' has been taken literally, and everything has fled.

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