Between the Woods and the Water Read Online Free PDF

the ruined kingdoms of the Caliphate, among the wreckage of Cracow and Sandomir and the Moravian pine-forests and the smoking Magyar cities, a scattering of savage princes turned their slant-eyed boyish faces towards Chinese Tartary; the race for the succession was about to start; and by the middle of March, they had all vanished. Béla, returning from an island refuge in Dalmatia, found his kingdom in ruins. Death and capture had halved the population and the survivors were cautiously beginning to emerge from the woods. His task resembled the founding of a new kingdom, and the first step was to make it secure against the Mongols. Hence the castle that I was striding through at Visegrád. Up went this tremendous stronghold and many others followed; and the next time the Mongols invaded, they were repulsed.
    * * *
    As much German as Magyar was to be heard on the half-awake quay of Visegrád, for the speakers were Géza’s Swabians. When the Turks were driven out, thousands of peasant families from South Germany had boarded flat-bottomed boats and set off from the cities of the Upper Danube, chiefly from Ulm; sailing downstream, they landed on the depopulated shore and settled for good. Their language and their costumes on feast days were said to have remained unaltered since the time of Maria Theresa in whose reign they had taken root. There must have been a lot of intermarriagebut spotting people with obligingly tow-coloured or raven hair, I thought—and probably wrongly—I could pick out a typical German from a typical Magyar.
    When the path along the Danube turned east, the radiance of morning poured along the valley. Soon the cape of a slender island, plumed with willow trees and patterned with fields of young wheat, divided the river in two. Nets were looped from branch to branch, fishing boats were moored to the trunks of aspens, poplars and willows and pewter-coloured stems lifted a silvery pale-green haze against the darker leaves of the riverside woods. The island followed the river’s windings for nearly twenty miles. A trim steamer ruffled the current now and then, and as the day advanced, the sparse traffic of barges multiplied.
    But within an hour or two, the river began to conduct itself in a fashion unprecedented since our first snowy meeting at Ulm eleven weeks earlier. (Only eleven weeks! It seemed half a lifetime already!) Indeed, ever since the river had first bubbled out of the underworld in Prince Fürstenberg’s park in the Black Forest. For the Danube, after describing two congruent semicircles, was turning due south; and so it would continue, flowing clean across Hungary for a hundred and eighty miles—from the top to the bottom of the atlas page, as it were—until it turned again and streamed eastwards under the battlements of Belgrade. It was an exciting moment.
    * * *
    By late afternoon, towards the end of the island which had kept me company all day, I reached Szentendre, a little baroque country town of lanes, cobbled streets, tiled roofs and belfries with onion cupolas. The hills were lower now; vineyards and orchards had replaced the cliffs and the forests and there was a feeling in the air that one was nearing a great city. The townspeople were the descendants of Serbians who had fled from the Turks three centuries ago; they still talked Serbian and worshipped in the GreekOrthodox Cathedral which their ancestors had built. Griechisch Orientalisch in German, they are distinct from the Uniats further east— Griechisch Katholisch —who, though they cling to the Orthodox rite, acknowledge the Pope. I only learnt about this later but an icon instead of a crucifix on my bedroom wall ought to have put me on the scent.
    [1] If I had come that way a few months later, I would have seen the first fragments of King Matthias’s palace dug up. I have seen it since: the magnificent Renaissance ruins give a clear idea of what royal Hungary was like before the