Between the Woods and the Water (34 page)

* * *

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 these 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.

* * *

I was beginning to get the hang of the hardly believable chasm I had been exploring since the small hours and into which I was now doubling back. It was the wildest stretch of the whole river, and the pilots who sailed on it and the dwellers on its bank had many scourges to contend with. The worst of these were the Kossovar winds, named after the tragic region of Kossovo, where Old Serbia, Macedonia and Albania march. Terrible south-easterly storms, linked with the monsoon and the earth's rotation, spring up in a moment and strike the Middle and Lower Danube. At the spring equinox they reach a speed of fifty or sixty miles an hour and turn the river into a convulsed inferno, unmasting ships, smashing panes, and sending strings of barges to the bottom. In autumn, when the water level drops and the steppe-like country dries up like an oven, gales turn into dust-storms that blindfold pilots in hot whirlwinds and strip one bank of the river to the water level, eroding it sometimes to the point of overflow and flood; while simultaneously and at amazing speed, instantaneous dunes build up the other bank with shoals and sand-banks, blocking channels and closing the river-bed: seasonal disasters only to be righted by months of dyking and dredging. As I listened, the characteristics of the river became clearer: the hundreds of underwater streams feeding the river like anonymous donors; rolling gravel, which, in certain reaches, sings audibly through the muffling flood; millions of tons of alluvia always on the move; boulders bounding along troughs and chasms which suck the currents into
the depths and propel them spiralling to the surface; the peristaltic progress of slime and the invisible march of wreckage down the long staircase of the bottom; the weight and force of the river in the mountain narrows, forever scouring a deeper passage, tearing off huge fragments of rock and trundling them along in the dark and slowly grinding them down to pebbles, then gravel, then grit and finally sand. At the eastern end of the defile, in the flat region of southern Wallachia, there is an appalling winter wind from Russia they call the
buran
. It becomes the
crivatz
in Rumania, and when it blows, the temperature plummets far below zero, the river freezes over within forty-eight hours and a solid lid of ice shuts over it, growing steadily thicker as the winter advances. It was an effort, in this summer weather, to conjure up all this—the tracks of sleighs on the grey or glittering waste, and the fields of pack-ice like millions of joined ice-bergs crowding each other into the distance. Woe betide unwary ships that are caught in it! When the water expands into ice, hulls crack like walnuts. “We put a bucket of water on the bridge and keep dipping our hands in when the temperature begins to drop,” the pilot had said, “and make for safety at the first ice-needle.”

* * *

After the bridge at Turnu-Severin, the doctor travelled on to Craiova and I caught a bus back to Orșova, picked up my stuff, bought a ticket for the next day's boat, then walked a couple of miles downstream again and found a fisherman to scull me out to the little wooded island I had had my eye on ever since rejoining the Danube.

I had heard much talk of Ada Kaleh in recent weeks, and read all I could find. The name means ‘island fortress' in Turkish. It was about a mile long, shaped like a shuttle, bending slightly with the curve of the current and lying a little closer to the Carpathian than the Balkan shore. It has been called Erythia, Rushafa and then Continusa, and, according to Apollonius Rhodius, the Argonauts
dropped anchor here on their way back from Colchis. How did Jason steer the Argo through the Iron Gates? And then the Kazan? Medea probably lifted the vessel clear of the spikes by magic. Some say Argo reached the Adriatic by overland portage, others that she crossed it and continued up the Po, mysteriously ending in North Africa. Writers have tentatively suggested that the first wild olive to be planted in Attica might have come from here. But it was later history that had invested the little island with fame.

The inhabitants were Turkish, probably descendants of the soldiers of one of the earlier Sultans who invaded the Balkans, Murad I, or Bayazid I, perhaps. Left behind by the retreating Turks, the island lingered on as an outlying fragment of the Ottoman Empire until the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. The Austrians held some vague suzerainty over it, but the island seems to have been forgotten until it was granted to Rumania at the Treaty of Versailles; and the Rumanians had left the inhabitants undisturbed. The first thing I saw after landing was a rustic coffee-shop under a vine-trellis where old men sat cross-legged in a circle with sickles and adzes and pruning knives scattered about them. I was as elated when bidden to join them as if I had suddenly been seated on a magic carpet. Bulky scarlet sashes a foot wide gathered in the many pleats of their black and dark blue baggy trousers. Some wore ordinary jackets, others navy-blue boleros with convoluted black embroidery and faded plum-coloured fezzes with ragged turbans loosely knotted about them; all except the hodja's. Here, snow-white folds were neatly arranged round a lower and less tapering fez with a short stalk in the middle. Something about the line of brow, the swoop of nose and the jut of the ears made them indefinably different from any of the people I had seen on my journey so far. The four or five hundred islanders belonged to a few families which had intermarried for centuries, and one or two had the vague and absent look, the wandering glance and the erratic levity that sometimes come with ancient and inbred stock. In spite of their patched and threadbare clothes, their style and their manners were full of dignity. On encountering a stranger, they touched heart,
lips and brow with the right hand, then laid it on their breast with an inclination of the head and a murmured formula of welcome. It was a gesture of extreme grace, like the punctilio of broken-down grandees. An atmosphere of prehistoric survival hung in the air as though the island were the refuge of an otherwise extinct species long ago swept away.