7. CARPATHIAN UPLANDS

LAPUȘNIC! I have found the forgotten name at last, a hastily pencilled blur on a back page of my diary; and here it is again, minute, spidery, faded and scarcely legible, lost in a millipede’s nest of contour-lines and cross-hatching, and further defaced by one of the folds on my tattered 1902 map of Transylvania: twenty-odd miles from Deva, beside a small tributary running down between wooded bluffs to the south bank of the Maros; and a recent exchange of letters with István (who now lives in Budapest) has made it triply sure. This was where we handed the motor-car back to its owner, and the re-discovery of the name provides a landmark and a starting point. I had largely abandoned my diary during these lotus-eating weeks and, after setting out, failed to resume it for a number of crucial days; but luckily a few scribbled and remembered names are backed up by a collection of clear visions, and with these and the map the next stages of the journey drop into place, though one or two of them, like undated lantern slides loose in a box, may have got out of sequence.

Lázár, the owner of the house and the motor-car, was a friend of Count Jenö and of István, and the Count had been full of amusing tales about his adventures. He had been a cowboy in America and a gaucho in the Argentine, ridden in a circus rodeo when short of cash, and his side-whiskers, piercing eyes and handsome, leathery face perfectly fitted the role. His house was only a dozen miles south of István’s, and the fourth guest was another neighbour, from Maros Illye, also on the north bank, called István Horváth, who was always amiably teased for the naïvety of his observations. Dinner was a bachelor party under a lime tree, but our host’s cook and housekeeper, a pretty Swabian like a soubrette in an opera who often joined gaily in the talk as she handed the dishes round, obviously mitigated the celibacy of the house. I remember their lamplit faces and the sound of István’s lively touch on the piano keys later on. We spent another day there, I wrote to Angéla, and István and I parted at last, each trailing a faint cloud of hangover in opposite directions; and I was on my own again.

Oblivion veils all for a moment; then the path emerges in clear detail. It twisted from stream to stream up a steep and sunless canyon under dripping rocks soft with moss and tufted with fern. Dank hamlets and moulting thatch huddled like clumps of toadstools in the folds of the hillside. Buffaloes and oxen lurched moodily uphill under wooden yokes that were fixed to the shaft with a steel pin and one could hear the intermittent click-clack of water-wheels long before the ivy-smothered mills came in sight; the animals halted there and drank while the waggoners unloaded their sacks. Except for a few minutes a day, no sunbeam could reach these depths. Many of the blanched and ailing villagers were stricken with goitre, and these rustic distempers made me think of all the Hungarian warnings about the prevalence of veneral disease east of the frontier; it had almost sounded as though pox lurked in the rocks and hedges and leaped out at the traveller like a thunderclap.[1] István had laughed when I told him. No worse here than elsewhere, he said: in Rumania they were called ‘the worldly ills’—boale lumești. (An infant born out of wedlock was called ‘a child of the flowers’—un copil din flori—a kinder term than ours.) Still brooding on those warnings, I came to a sudden halt. What about that wretched automatic pistol? I had forgotten it at the back of a bedroom drawer at István’s. After a moment I thought: what a relief! It could have been nothing but an embarrassment and a nuisance—a danger, even, if found during a search in the wilds of Bulgaria or Turkey. But still—the mother-of-pearl butt, the gleaming nickel, the neat leather case! I would ask István to look after it.

The mass of the Carpathians to the left forced my itinerary south-west. The foothill canyon opened, but tall upheavals still confined the sky when I got to Tomesști at nightfall, where I found another pre-arranged haven under the roof of Herr Robert v. Winckler; he was a tall, thin, scholarly man, living alone with his books and his guns on the steep edge of the forest. He and his library were a treasure-house of relevant knowledge, and the stairs, on the way to bed, were forested with horns, antlers, fowling-pieces and wolf-traps. There were the skins of two enormous wolves on the landing, a stuffed lynx on the wall, a row of boars’ tushes and a bear’s skin on my bedroom floor; and the last thing I remember before blowing out the candle is the double reflection of the wick in its glass eyes. The depth of the flared embrasures showed the thickness of the walls and the logs stacked to the ceiling beside the massive tiled stove told how cold it must have been in winter. It was hard, in the summer moonlight, to imagine the onslaught of the wind along the canyons, the icicle-portcullises and the silent obliterating flakes that would place all these buildings under siege.

* * *

Transylvania, the Banat of Temesvár, the Great Plain, the Tatra mountains, Bukovina, Galicia, Podolia, Lodomeria, Moravia, Bohemia, Wallachia, Moldavia, Bessarabia and, above all, the Carpathians themselves—how closely the geography of Austria-Hungary and its neighbours approximated to the fictional world of earlier generations! Graustark, Ruritania, Borduria, Syldavia and a score of imaginary kingdoms, usurped by tyrants and sundered by fights for the throne, leap into mind: plots, treachery, imprisoned heirs and palace factions abound and, along with them, fiendish monocled swordsmen, queens in lonely towers, toppling ranges, deep forests, plains full of half-wild horses, wandering tribes of Gypsies who steal children out of castles and dye them with walnut-juice or lurk under the battlements and melt the chatelaines’ hearts with their strings. There are mad noblemen and rioting jacqueries; robbers too, half-marauder and half-Robin Hood, straddling quite across the way with their grievous crab-tree cudgels. I had read about betyárs on the Alföld; now haidouks and pandours had begun to impinge. Fur-hatted and looped with pearls, the great boyars of the Rumanian principalities surged up the other side of the watershed; ghostly hospodars with their nearly mythical princesses trooped in tall branched crowns round the walls of fortress-monasteries in frescoed processions; and beyond them to the north stretched ice-bound rivers and steppes and bogs where herds of elk moved at a shambling trot, and, once upon a time, the great aurochs, extinct now except on heraldic shields; wastes unfolded north-east to which unstable troops of Cossacks laid claim, or destructive settlements of Tatars; further still, a kingdom of sledded Polacks retreated into the shadows, and then a region of snowfalls where the Teutonic Knights cut the pagans of Lithuania to bits on the frozen Baltic, surviving still in the East Prussian world of scars and spikes; and beyond them, Muscovy and all the Russias... But to the south, closer than these and getting closer with every step, the valleys and woods of the Danube had been the theatre for momentous battles between Christendom and Islam: the armies of the Sultan moving upstream under green banners and preposterous turbans, while kings, voivodes and cardinals (the contusion of whose maces absolved them from bloodshed) and all the paladins of the West—their greyhounds curvetting beside them, sunbeams catching gold-inlay under their ostrich-plumes and the spirals and stripes on their lances, like Uccello’s in the Battle of San Romano—cantered light-heartedly downstream to their doom.

An old addict, I had been re-reading Saki just before setting out. Many pages are haunted by ‘those mysterious regions between the Vienna Woods and the Black Sea,’ and here I was, as deep in that maze of forests and canyons as it was possible to get. The timbered slopes outside the windows, and thoughts of the snow and the winter solstice, brought these stories to mind, especially the ones about wolves, the villains and the presiding daemons of East European winter. The terrible arrival of The Interlopers, in the last monosyllabic paragraph of the story, might have taken place a few miles away; and another, The Wolves of Czernogratz, with the howling crescendo of the same dread monsters, conjured up a thousand castles to the north and the west; and I had always been struck by the broken traveller in The Unbearable Bassington, ‘a man whom wolves had sniffed at.’ István was one, my host another, Gróf K a third; Transylvania was full of them. All the castles were haunted, and earthly packs of wolves were reinforced after dark by solitary werewolves; vampires were on the move; witches stirred and soared; the legends and fairy stories of a dozen nations piled up and the region teemed with everything that Goethe told the New World it was better without: ‘Useless memories and vain strifes...knights, robbers and ghost stories... Ritter und Raüber und Gespenstergeschichten...’ In the end, I stayed three nights, listening to stories of wolves and forests and reading in the library, and some of it must have found its way into the bloodstream. M. Herriot has left a consoling message for cases like this: ‘La culture, c’est ce qui reste quand on a tout oublié.’

A scramble through valleys and foothills, bearing south-west to avoid the Lugoj road, and a night’s sleep under an oak tree, brought me dog-tired and long after dark on the second day to a brick-kiln on the Caransebes, road, where I curled up and fell asleep just as the moon was coming up.

* * *

Travels like these are times of such well-being that spirits soar, and this, with the elation of being on the move again, helped to cure the feelings of loneliness after parting from István and the end of the magic days with Angéla.

I feared I might have got rusty, but all was well and my kit seemed in as good repair as the first day in Holland. The ammunition boots from Millets in the Strand, crunching along on their only slightly blunted hobnails, were still good for unlimited miles. The old breeches were soft with much wear and cleaning, and every stitch was intact; only the grey puttees had suffered minor damage, but nothing showed when I had snipped off the ragged edges where snow and rain had frayed them. A grey shirt with the sleeves rolled up completed this marching gear. (I was darkening to the hue of a teak sideboard, with hair correspondingly bleached by the sun.) I blessed my stars that my first rucksack, with its complex framework and straps, heavy water-proof sleeping-bag and White Knight superfluity of gear had been stolen in Munich; the one my Baltic Russian friends had bestowed was smaller but held all I needed; to wit: a pair of dark flannel bags and another light canvas pair; a thin, decent-looking tweed jacket; several shirts; two ties, gym-shoes, lots of socks and jerseys, pyjamas, the length of coloured braid Angéla had given me; a dozen new handkerchiefs (as we know) and a sponge-bag, a compass, a jack-knife, two candles, matches, a pipe—falling into disuse—tobacco, cigarettes and—a new accomplishment—papers for rolling them, and a flask filled in turn, as the countries changed, with whisky, Bols, schnapps, barack, tzuica, slivovitz, arak and tziporo. In one of the side pockets there was a five-shilling Ingersoll watch that kept perfect time when I remembered to take it out and wind it up. The only awkward item was the soldier’s greatcoat; I hadn’t worn it for months, but felt reluctant to get rid of it. (Luckily. It was perfect for sleeping out, and, folded into a tight sausage and tied round the top of the rucksack, scarcely visible.) I still had the Hungarian walking-stick, intricately carved as a mediaeval crosier, the second replacement for the original ninepenny ashplant from the tobacconist’s off Sloane Square. Apart from sketch-book, pencils and disintegrating maps, there was my notebook-journal and my passport. (Dog-eared and faded, these sole survivors are both within reach at this moment.) There was Hungarian and Rumanian Self-Taught (little progress in the one, hesitant first steps in the other); I was re-reading Antic Hay; and there was Schlegel & Tieck’s Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark, bought in Cologne; also, given by the same kind hand as the rucksack, and carefully wrapped up, the beautiful little seventeenth-century duodecimo Horace from Amsterdam. It was bound in stiff, grass-green leather; the text had long ‘s’s, mezzotint vignettes of Tibur, Lucretilis and the Bandusian spring, a scarlet silk marker, the giver’s bookplate and a skeleton-leaf from his Estonian woods.[2]

It would have been hard to set off much later than the cock crew that morning, as the bird itself was flapping its wings on a barrel ten yards away; so I sloshed some water on my face and set off. It was going to be a sizzling day.

Pisica Veselă, the Merry Cat—the drovers’ inn where I halted and drank a tapering phial of tzuica—was awhirl with flies; a huge mahogany and orange hornet was dismantling a piece of meat on the earth floor, and the valley outside held the heat like a kiln. I was a pillar of dust and sweat by the time I got to a more congenial place further on, part-café, part-bar and part-grocer’s shop. ‘Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang’ was written round the walls in twirling German script, ‘Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang!’ I told the innkeeper of my first encounter with this couplet in Goch, on my first night in Germany. He was a cheerful Arad Schwob and he laughed and asked me if I knew who the poet was. “No? It was Martin Luther.”[3] I was rather surprised. Unlike the Lutheran Saxons, the Swabians were all Catholics.

He was full of useful information, which he poured out as we both sipped mugs of cold beer, and I came to a sudden decision. He helped me stock up: a salami cut into halves, to be kept out of the sun this time; some cooked pork, a packet of pumpernickel, bars of chocolate, cheese, several apples and two loaves, on the crust of which stamps were rather disturbingly glued. (“It’s a government tax,” he said, prizing them off. “The stamp shows it has been paid.”) He pointed out the way from the door and waved me godspeed.

The Banat mountains on the right of the road were wooded and imposing enough, but to the east the forest rose in the steep upheaval of the Carpathians and far away, above and beyond and well out of sight from my track, some of the tallest cordilleras of the Transylvanian Alps sailed up in bare and spectacular spikes. My sudden decision was to strike left and get away from the heat and dust of this beautiful incandescent valley; then, if I could, make my way south-east along the cool rim of the forest. Hastening there, I was soon under the first branches. A small track twisted uphill steeply through the boles and I plunged in.[4]

* * *

It was like going indoors. Climbing in the shade at once made the valley seem far away and the woods silent at first until the ear was attuned to the birds.

An hour’s climb ended on the edge of a slanting field where a string of reapers were getting in the late upland harvest: biblical, white-clad countrymen and women in wide hats of plaited straw, some with babies slung across their backs like papooses; when they got in the way, they hung them in the shade, snugly laced into their wooden troughs. Baskets, water jars, sickles and rakes were heaped up, half-a-dozen ponies were grazing and conical bee-hives were set in rows along the edge of the enfolding trees. As they moved forward and reaped and gathered and gleaned, an old woman’s high quaver sang the lead of a never-ending sequence of verses to a grave and rather haunting tune; the others joined in at each second line. I had heard it on the climb to the little plateau; it still floated up diminuendo long after the harvesters themselves had dropped out of sight, and when it died away, I could see them far below in occasional foreshortened glimpses among the sheaves and the ricks as though I were looking at them backwards through an ever-lengthening telescope, dwindled to specks by now. Then tree-tops hid them.

The road and the valley below had disappeared and there was nothing to the west the other side but the sierras of the Banat, and they too had begun to sink. Later, a score of cows, collared with heavy bells, were treading unwieldily down from a higher pasture. I exchanged greetings with the old cowherd and his sons: where did I come from? Anglia? They had never heard of it and went on their way looking perplexed. The path seemed forever on the point of dying away among rocks or fallen trees but at the last moment, like an irregular natural staircase, it always dodged or bestrode them.

‘Like going indoors...’ It was truer than I had thought; for there, all at once, lay a space like an enormous room: a long, enclosed clearing where beech trees sprang up like gigantic pillars flinging out vaults of tangled and interlocking boughs. Grey in shadow, their smooth trunks were flecked with silver where the sunbeams spilt their way through an infinity of leaves and scattered blurred discs of light over the bark and the muscular spread of the roots; they shed a sparser and still more grudging confetti on the unencumbered floor. (No wonder Roman poets always attached the epithet opaca to the umbra of the fagi!) ‘Opaque,’ so it was. Beeches are dog-in-the-manger trees to such an extent that nothing can grow underneath, hence these spacious ballroom glades; but opaque only in the sense that those layers of little pleated leaves all but locked out the sun. The air underneath was aqueous and still; it was nearly underwater light. The resilient mast strewing the ground would have been a hog’s paradise. (On the way down, I came on swart bristly snouts, watched over by pensive swineherds, tearing up the floors of similar beechen halls.) These great forest chambers, bounded by mingled stretches of hardwood and underbrush, slanted uphill and out of sight in a confusion of roots. Freshets channelled the penumbra, falling from rocky overhangs into pools that could be heard from afar, or welled up through husks and dead leaves and turned into streams. There had been two hoopoes in the lower woods and bee-eaters, with an eye to the hives perhaps, perched on twigs near the harvesters’ clearing; golden orioles, given away by their black and yellow plumage and the insistent shrill curl of their song, darted among the branches. But every so often invisible flocks of wood-pigeons plunged everything under a spell so drowsy, it was hard, sitting down for a smoke, to keep awake; then a footfall would loose off a hundred flurried wings and set them circling in the speckled light of one of the forest ballrooms like Crystal Palace multitudes calling for Wellingtonian hawks.

* * *

The track dipped into a small valley where a stream dropped from pool to pool out of the heart of the mountains, then followed the glen in a shallow tangle.

A party of Gypsies, in their invariable way managing to turn a corner of the forest into a slum, had settled here with tents and dogs and hobbled horses; but their squalor was redeemed by the extravagant wildness of their looks. Squatting like East Indians beside the stream, at first they seemed to be washing up; this was something so out of character, that I looked again. They were busy dipping wooden pans into the current at the downstream end of little conduits improvised with planks; kneading and sifting the mud and the gravel, wringing and searching shaggy wet sheepskins which had been cunningly placed under their flimsy sluices; all of them peering down, rapt as kestrels. I suddenly remembered Herr v. Winckler’s discourse and knew what they were up to. They answered my salute with a look of momentary consternation but allowed me to lie down and watch.

They were washing for gold. Veins of it run through many of these mountains, and of silver too, and the Romans used to sink mines. It interleaves the rock in thin layers, and tiny fragments of the exposed and eroded mineral are snapped off and worn down to dust mixed with mud, sand and gravel, or even caught in the grass and washed along the current with the other alluvia. The fragments are infinitesimal, hence the channels and fleeces set to catch them.[6] I guessed that gold and silver, almost heraldically, might be aur and argint in Rumanian, and they were. The nearest gold-seeker, and the chief of the party, said they had found none; but after we had smoked a couple of cigarettes I had rolled and exchanged civilities—as far as my inchoate string of Rumanian words allowed—he admitted they had got a little—not from here, but from a place called Porcurea, deep in the wild hills the other side of the Maros. I gathered that they had drawn a blank in this stream, and that they might have been misinformed. He reluctantly took a small leather pouch from his sash, extracted a smaller cotton bag, untied the string and shook a few grains into his slim palm. One or two expanded to the size of microscopic sequins but most of them were no more than twinkling motes. He offered to sell me the lot, making them dance like tinsel across his head-and-heart lines as he spoke; but he named so enormous a sum that I answered by pulling my breeches’ pockets inside out, which made him laugh. We were on friendly terms and when a girl approached and, as in duty bound, began to beg in a simultaneously collusive and perfunctory whisper, he said something in Romany, and she broke off with an apologetic smile. I couldn’t stop admiring the workmanship of the shallow wooden pans they used for shaking out the gold dust: half a yard in diameter and carved out of walnut, they were light and beautifully polished and after a lucky scoop the grains must have glittered there like the Milky Way on a dark sky. These Gypsies were lingurări, ‘spoon-men’; skilled in every kind of tin-smithery and wood carving.

They had come there a couple of days ago by a different route. The night before, near Caransebes, I had stumbled in the dark across a road and a small railway which wind their way eastward on the map, climbing the valley of the Bistra river some miles to the north but more or less parallel to my own unmapped and much steeper sheep’s track. The Gypsies had branched off the road and then made their way southwards to this grudging sylvan Golconda. The road and the railway, meanwhile, ascended to a pass called the Iron Gate—one of many—then sank twisting and turning into Hunyadi country—Hunedoara—and the little town of Hátzeg. (This was the way I ought to have gone, but it was too late.)

Fired by success in forming nouns by knocking the last syllable off the Latin, I made a zigzag gesture over the current and said “pisc?” ending in a ‘sh’ sound; and it was nearly right (phonetically, ‘fish’ is peshti). “Sunt foarte multi,” the Gypsy said: “There are very many.” Then I drew a blank with ‘trotta’ and ‘trutta,’ one of which I hoped might be the Latin for trout,[6] but I remembered, from delicious meals, that it was pisztráng in Hungarian, and he responded to the sound at once with the Rumanian păstrăv. (Both races had got it from a Slavonic root. Among the southern Slavs it is pastrmka and pastarva, or something similar, overflowing into Greece as péstrofa, and to the north, in Poland, pstra̜s: the tick under ‘a’ represents a ghostly ‘n.’ When and where did these Slav sounds first dilute the Latin speech of the Rumanians? What was the Dacian word for ‘trout’? Beside what stream was the lost word uttered for the last time before Slavonic syllables blotted it out? If only we knew!) My Gypsy acquaintance spoke Rumanian and Magyar with equal fluency, though probably both imperfectly—many comic stories depend on Gypsies’ queer intonations and errors—and conversed with his fellow-tribesmen in Romany, so he was trilingual. Pointing out places on the map, I discovered he couldn’t read, but he was not the less clever for it.

The Gypsies and their treasure were soon as far below as the reapers had been earlier on.

* * *

A kind of spell haunts wooded slopes like these: it drives the intruder blindly uphill, knocks ten years off his age (reducing mine to nine) unlooses a host of immature and atavistic hankerings and turns his thoughts towards Sherwood Forest, the whirr of clothyard shafts, sundered willow-wands, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Guy of Gisborne and Much the Miller’s son; jumping the Atlantic, the scene changes to wigwams, smoke-signals, deerslayers, Mohicans, warpaint, calumets, birch-bark canoes and palefaces descried through gaps in the maple branches. I had once read somewhere that in King John’s reign a squirrel could travel from the Severn to the Humber without touching ground; and, more recently, that trees had once covered the whole of Transylvania. Forest, then, must have been the Dacians’ natural abode. The Romans obviously felled thoroughfares and laid roads; the Goths, emerging from their millions of conifers, would have felt quite at home here for their generations north of the Danube before moving on to Italy and Spain. (But what, in the dark North, and among these Dacian trees, can have prepared the Vandals for the satins and the incense of Carthage?) There would have been no environmental complaint among the forest-haunting Lombards, as they exterminated the Gepids in the undergrowth; and when the time came for the Slavs to smother Eastern Europe, they must have settled in these woods with no feeling of change. But what of the Huns? And the Avars and the Bulgars who had streamed along the valleys; indeed, the Magyars themselves; and the Pechenegs and the Cumans? And finally, the last of the Turco-Tatar invaders, the terrible Mongol brood of Jenghiz Khan, when in 1241 they laid all these regions waste? Unless the plains of south Russia were similarly timbered, few of these invaders can have seen many trees; they were desert-children, they belonged to steppes and tundras. I could imagine Batu and his companions with their flat bow-cases and quivers and habergeons and targets and their ponies with elaborate cheek-pieces and scarlet throat-plumes, turning in their saddles and looking at each other nonplussed under their epicanthic eyelids, perhaps through wolf-masks; clad in corselets of many-coloured scales, or with shoulders plumed like eagles’ wings, according to the shamanistic totems of their clans; all halted in dismay on the verge of a thicket stretching a hundred leagues.

In such a wilderness, how could they have manoeuvred and advanced at their rumoured speed, and dismantled or razed every town, church, castle, palace, cathedral and abbey in the third of a continent? It was the thirteenth century, after all, Plantagenet and Valois times, and not everything can have been built of immediately combustible stuff. They had only a year to conquer, slay, enslave, lead captive, demolish and then clear out—not much time, especially at the end, when the death in Mongolia of Jenghiz Khan’s successor launched the Mongol princes home in a breakneck race for the throne: it was four thousand miles to Karakorum. Admittedly, they put thousands of their prisoners to the sword; but ‘leading whole populations away captive,’ as the chronicles say, must have delayed them, and demolition without explosions needs time and more equipment than flint and steel and a few crowbars, with perhaps a battery or two of oxdrawn siege-engines for hurling stones. Yet they are said to have destroyed all that was destructible; and, incidentally, with strangely unerring thoroughness, wiped out every fragment of historical evidence from the previous thousand years as well.[7]

There was plenty to think about. I was constantly wondering what these barbarians looked like. I had not yet recovered from the knowledge that the Huns used to dress in white linen raiment and the skins of fieldmice sewn together...

Coming on a bank covered with wild strawberries, I ate all within reach, moved to a new vantage-point and began again. One might stay all summer with pan, sieve and fishing rod, amassing gold and living off trout and fraises-des-bois, a sybaritic Carpathian Tom Tiddler.

The jangle of a sheep bell higher up interrupted these thoughts. There was a sound of pattering and the barking of dogs; then somebody’s objurgating voice calling down the curses of the Dragon’s mother: it was a common Rumanian oath—the Devil’s mother, in this context—“Mama Dracului!” Suddenly the bell and the pattering hoofs stopped, and I could see a ram and a dozen sheep on the path above, rooted there in dismay at my hindering presence. One or two were edging to the right, which led to the abyss. I barred the way and by shouting and slashing at branches headed them into an angle of rock, where they crowded higgledy-piggledy, but stood still. Meanwhile, two fierce white dogs were snarling and barking at them and at me, and the shepherd, whirling his crook and threatening them too with the Devil’s Dam, came bounding down through the trees. We outflanked the runaways and turned them uphill.

In a few minutes we were herding them to a wide and gently slanting meadow, green as April after the withered stalks below, where a hundred sheep were grazing. The shadows were beginning to slope across grass cropped as level as a lawn, and the sound of munching was broken now and then by the deep clank of the bell-wethers. Even the ewes had short curved horns, the lambs shorter still; but bell-wethers and rams were armed with heavy crinkled spirals that could have shaken the walls of Jericho. The woods still mounted interminably but now dark streaks of pine strove with the deciduous trunks and entwined their roots with those of oak and alder and hornbeam. It was only possible to descry the tops of the lower mountains now by peering from the outer edge, where the tree-tops fell away. The westering sun lit a faraway parade of level clouds, and shade filled the intervening valleys. The lower sierras of the Banat, several leagues away, were rimmed with light like a half-submerged shoal of sea-creatures.

Radu the shepherd and his family welcomed me as an ally. Two or three houses, skilfully built and roofed with wooden scales faded silver-grey, gathered at one end of the clearing and a lych-gate led into a courtyard of stakes; behind, in an oval sheepfold, sweep-wells creaked by drinking troughs made of bisected tree-trunks scooped hollow. Radu and his two brothers, with shouts and whistles and half a dozen dogs, herded the flock inside, then barred it. Were they pent to keep them from straying, I wondered. To make sure, I smacked one of the stakes and said “Why?” to Radu—“Dece?”—and his answer—“Lupii”—told all.

A wide ledge ran round the house, and this and the inside walls were whitewashed. There was a fireplace with a semi-conical chimney; golden maize-cobs were stacked with the symmetry of a honeycomb and the stripped husks for firing lay heaped in a corner. It was very clean and trim for a place that was only used at times like this, for in winter snow covered everything. The only wall decoration was a hanging oil-dip twinkling before an icon of the Virgin and Child, haloed in frills of gilt tin.

These brothers were friendly, shy, self-reliant men with a lean, sweated look and hazel eyes so used to gazing half-shut at the sun and the wind that the wrinkles at the corners expanded over their tanned cheeks in small white fans. They wore moccasins and their white homespun tunics, caught in with wide belts, expanded to the volume of kilts. Their father was identical in feature and garb, except that his hair was white and that he was still jerkined in a fleece cojoc and hatted in a conical fleece caciula. He sat on the ledge, his hands crossed on the helve of an axe. The face of Radu’s wife was sad in repose, gay in motion, and strikingly beautiful; she and another woman span as they went about their tasks. Their worn, heavily carved distaffs were stuck in sashes of black braid. Elaborate detail but sober colours marked their attire: headkerchiefs and aprons of faded blue over white and many-pleated skirts, and intricately worked oblongs of the same faded hue which panelled their wide sleeves. Their torsos were enclosed in dashing-looking soft leather hauberks, shiny with wear and lacing up the side. When one of them started a new thread, Radu’s wife licked the tip of her thumb and forefinger like a bank-teller, pulled some wool from the yarn which, drawn tapering to her other hand, span with the twirl of her spindle; all as unconsciously as knitting. She sang a doina to herself as she moved about the yard, each verse beginning “Foaie verde!”—“Green leaf”—or “Frunze verde!”—“Green frond.” These green-leaf invocations always struck me as a sort of woodland salute to beech, ash, oak, pine and thorn, as if the trees and their foliage held some mysterious and beneficent power.

There was nothing to drink but water, so we all had a swig out of the flask, sitting about the ledge on stools, and I ate mamaliga for the first time—polenta or frumenty, that is, made out of ground maize, the staple of country people in these parts; I had been warned against it, but perversely found it rather good. Radu pointed to the gun on the wall and said we could have a hare for supper if I stayed on for another day. We ended with soft white sheep’s cheese: there was a tang of curds and whey in the yard, and dripping cotton bags hung from shady branches like snow-white pumpkins. The old man—one hand cupped, the other clenched—was busy at some task: clinks of metal were followed by a whiff like singeing cloth, caused by a piece of dried fungus which he had ignited by holding it against a flint and striking it with a magnet-shaped piece of steel; then, blowing on the smouldering fragment, he laid it on top of the rubbed tobacco leaves in the bowl of a primitive, reed-stemmed pipe. It was the first time I had come across this stone-age device, called a tchakmak farther south.

I would have picked up a mass of lore about wolves if I had known more of the language: there were two or three pelts about the house. They sometimes carried off lambs and sheep, but there was little to fear at the moment; they were in the depths of the woods with their cubs; winter, when hunger and cold drove them down into the valleys, was the dangerous time. Mostly by gestures, he told me a pack had attacked some Gypsies in the snow the year before and left nothing but their boots and a few splinters of bone. What did they sound like? He put back his head and gave a long howl that was full of uncanny menace, and of anguish, too; (and he mimicked the stags’ belling which would begin in a couple of months: a dark, primordial, throaty roar, which I heard next year in a High Moldavian ravine: the kind of sound ancient Cretans must have heard with dread from the entrance to the maze). Foxes, lynxes, wild cats, wild boars and brown bears were the other chief denizens of these woods.

It was getting dark and everyone was beginning to yawn, so I pulled on everything I had and lay outside under a tree. Radu brought out a heavy embroidered blanket, part of his wife’s dowry, saying it would be cold later. Indoors, lit by the sanctuary lamp, she had crossed herself several times from right to left in the Orthodox way, thumb, index and middle finger joined to show the Oneness of the Trinity, and kissed the two haloed faces on the icon goodnight.

* * *

But these shepherds were not Orthodox, though their rites and nearly all their doctrines were sprung from the great Byzan-tine branch of Eastern Christendom. They were Uniats—‘Greco-Catholics,’ as they called them locally—who, by their ancestors’ submission to an Act of Union—hence the Uniat name—were no longer spiritual subjects of the Oecumenical Patriarch at Constantinople, or of the Rumanian Primate, but of the Pope. The Rumanians everywhere enter Christian history as members of the Orthodox, or Eastern Church; but, as we know, Transylvanians in the Middle Ages were subjects of the Hungarian crown. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Turkish wars reduced eastern Hungary to the famous vassal Principality of Transylvania. Eager to separate their Orthodox subjects from their co-religionist kinsmen the other side of the mountains—impelled also by Protestant vernacular zeal—the Rákóczi princes succeeded, by various means, in ending the Slavonic Mass of their subjects (which the Rumanians had retained from their early days under Bulgarian spiritual sovereignty), and imposing a Rumanian translation; not to encourage nationalism—just the reverse, in fact—but to widen the gulf between the liturgy of their Rumanian subjects and the Slavonic (and, recently, Greek) rite of their Eastern kinsmen; they hoped to set the Orthodox world of the Slavs and the Greeks at a further remove. Half a century later, when the Turkish eclipse made way for direct Habsburg rule, the Protestant cause waned and the Catholic waxed; and in 1699, a mixture of coercion and blandishment, backed by the astuteness of the Jesuits of Emperor Leopold, brought about a great triumph for the Counter-Reformation in the East: ecclesiastical dominion, that is, over many of the Rumanian Orthodox in Transylvania. By accepting the Union, the neophytes (or apostates) had to accept four points: the Filioque clause in the Creed; wafers instead of bread in the Communion service; the doctrine of Purgatory (which, like Limbo, is unknown in the East); and, most important of all, the supremacy of the Pope. All the other points of difference—the marriage of priests, a bearded clergy, the cult of icons, different vestments, rituals and usages—remained unchanged. This Act severed all official links between the Transylvanian hierarchy and the hierarchy of Wallachia and Moldavia; but distrust lingered in the Uniat rank-and-file and, for nearly a century, very many village priests slipped away and had themselves privily ordained by Orthodox bishops.

But in the end, these changes had the opposite of the wished effect. The new Mass kindled a sudden interest in the Rumanian language, and in Rumanian letters and origins as well. The publication of vernacular religious books in Transylvania, which the Princes inexpediently fostered, competed with those beyond the mountains and forged an intellectual bond. Also, after the Union, gifted Transylvanian sons of the Uniat manse were sent to study in Rome, where the spiral carvings of Trajan’s Column—Roman soldiers at grips with Dacian warriors dressed very like modern Rumanian mountaineers—filled them with exciting convictions of joint Roman and Dacian descent, and these gave body to traditions which, in a more nebulous form, had long been in the air. Thousands of Rumanian children were called Traian and Aurel after their first and last Roman Emperors and convictions about Dacian descent had sunk deep roots. Among Rumanians on both sides of the mountains, these ideas fostered a national spirit and irredentist claims which the past hundred years have plentifully granted. The Rumanian ethnic cause owes much to the Uniat Church, and the debt, for reasons comparable in worldliness to those which first established the Union, has been repaid by state abolition and compulsory return to the Orthodox fold. Not a decision prompted by religious fervour.

Thinking of all this, my mind flew back to those happy mornings among the books and microscopes of Count Jenö’s library. The Double Procession of the Holy Ghost...! This tintack which split Christendom was just the kind of thing to excite the Count’s historical curiosity. We had been talking about how, in the Byzantine East, the Holy Ghost proceeded only from the Father (“I don’t quite know what they mean, mind you,” the Count had confessed) while, in the Catholic West he proceeded from the Father and the Son—ex Patre Filioque procedit. When did this Western clause—not mentioned in the first seven Councils (the only ones valid in the East)—first crop up? Reference-books soon heaped up round us on the library table. “Here we are!” the Count exclaimed after a while, reading out: “Clause interpolated in the Creed at the Third Council of Toledo (never heard of it!) in 589, when King Reccared of Aragon renounced the Arian heresy!” The Count looked up excitedly “Toledo! King Recarred! He was a Goth! Probably from these parts, his grandparents, I mean—Ulfilas’s lot, gone West!” He read on skipping elliptically from page to page in a Jingle-ish way...“Clause not yet adopted at Rome...omitted from manuscripts of the Creed...inclusion perhaps a copyist’s mistake! H’m... Upheld by Paulinus of Aquileia at the Synod of Friuli, 800, yes, yes, yes...but only adopted among the Franks... Here we are! Frankish monks intoning the Filioque clause at Jerusalem! Outrage and uproar of Eastern monks!” He paused and rubbed his hands. “I wish I’d been there!” He pushed back his spectacles for a moment and then resumed. “Pope Leo III tries to suppress the addition, in spite of the insistence of Charlemagne—a Frank, of course!—but approves of the doctrine. H’m. Sounds like cold feet... But the next Pope adopts it...ninth century already. Then comes Photios, the great Eastern Patriarch and general fury, mutual anathema, and the final breach in 1054...” He looked up. “I’ve always wanted to know about it. I didna ken, I didna ken,” he said; then, closing the book, “Weel, I ken noo.”

Turning the pages of a Uniat missal belonging to his wife, he alighted on a directive preceding the Uniat liturgy: “‘In the Mass, the words and from the Son, concerning the procession of the Holy Ghost, are not included in the Creed. At the Council of Florence in 1439, the Church in no way demanded this addition from the Orientals, but only their adherence to this dogma of the faith.’ Adhere, but don’t utter!” he exclaimed. “A dogma that need not speak its name!” I said that it sounded a shadowy form of allegiance. “Please remember,” the Count said gravely, “you are speaking of the Holy Ghost.”

Among the Orthodox, Uniats have always borne a faint stigma of desertion, and among the rank and file of Catholics in Transylvania they seemed somehow—and rather unfairly—neither flesh, fowl nor good red herring. The switch of fealty was certainly prompted less by spiritual conviction than by raison d’état: Counter-Reformation expansion and zeal on one side, and on the other, the chance of flight from a harsh to a slightly less harsh form of oppression. Later generations clung to their faith with staunch rustic tenacity as they still do in the Ukraine, and nobility and pathos haunt their story.

The first Uniats of all, however, were neither the Transylvanians nor the Ruthenes, but later members of the Palaeologue dynasty: Michael VIII very briefly, and finally, the last two Emperors of the East. Our thoughts must wing back to the last years of Byzantium, where the Turks were closing in for the final scene. It was the hope of succour from the West that in 1437 sent John VIII Palaeologue and his court and clergy on the extraordinary journey to Florence which Benozzo Gozzoli has commemorated on the walls of the Medici Palace. During the discussions in Santa Maria Maggiore, two of the Eastern prelates were given cardinals’ hats; but at home, chiefly stirred up by the Filioque question, Byzantium was in a ferment. Nevertheless, willy-nilly, and in the teeth of Orthodox protest, the Emperor accepted the Western demands. Gibbon describes the culminating moment with the Emperor enthroned on one side of the Duomo and the Pope on the other. ‘I had almost forgot,’ he writes, ‘another popular and Orthodox protestor: a favourite hound, who usually lay quiet on the foot-cloth of the Emperor’s throne; but who barked most furiously while the Act of Union was reading, without being silenced by the soothing or the lashes of the royal attendants.’ Then the Emperor had to return and face his booing subjects at Byzantium. But, except for some brave Genoese, no help came and John’s brother Constantine XI, still a Uniat—though a reluctant one, it would seem—fell fighting in the mêlée when the Turks stormed and captured the city. ‘The distress and fall of the last Constantine,’ Gibbon says, ‘are more glorious than the long prosperity of the Byzantine Caesars.’

But it was the first Gibbon quotation which had fired Count Jenö. “Just fancy! A dog in church! I wonder what he was called? What breed he was? One of those Arabian greyhounds, I bet...” After a pause, he said, “It reminds me of a similar occasion: The Vatican Council on Papal Infallibility in 1870! Endless sessions and lobbying, you know, and nothing but rows—Schwarzenberg, Dupanloup, Manning and the rest of them. But they pushed it through at last. When it was being ceremonially read out in Saint Peter’s, a terrible storm broke out—clouds black as soot! forked lightning! rain, hail and thunder, you couldn’t hear a word!” Count Jenö, an easy-going but devout Catholic, beamed among his moths and his specimen-cases. He loved this kind of thing. “Not a word! Much worse than the Emperor’s dog! What’s more, the Franco-Prussian war broke out next day, and all the French and German cardinals rushed north on the new railway—in different first-class carriages, of course—and cut each other stone dead when they got out to smoke and stretch their legs on the platform at Domodossola...”

Well, as a result of all this, Radu and his family, after two and a half centuries under Rome, are members of the Orthodox Church again: rather bewildered, perhaps.

* * *

Cliffs and bands of rock jutted from the trees and sometimes the woods opened to make way for landslides and tumbled boulders and fans of scree. There was the scent of pine-needles and decay. Old trunks had rotted and fallen and the pale leaves of the saplings which replaced them scattered the underworld with various light and broke it into hundreds of thin sunbeams. The ghost of a track, perhaps only used by wild animals, advanced with hesitation; the matted carpet of leaves, cones, pine-needles, acorns, oak-apples, beech-mast and the split caskets of chestnuts must have been piling up forever. A tall pine had collapsed in a tangle of creepers and I was scrambling on all fours through the foxgloves and bracken underneath when my hand closed on something half-buried in leaves. It was a five-pointed stag’s antler: a marvellous object, from the frilled coronet at the base to the tips of sharp tines as hard as ivory. How could something gnarled with these ancient-looking wrinkles have such a swift growth and so brief a life? They prick through a stag’s brow in spring like twin thoughts breaking out of the skull, then shoot and ramify with the fluid motion of plants, fossilising as they grow; larger each year, more fiercely spiked, then scabbarded in velvet to be torn to shreds against boles and branches until the buck they have armed is ready to clear the woods of rivals; only to fall off again at the end of winter, like moulting feathers. This one was about a foot and a half long and perfectly balanced and I set off through the bracken feeling like Herne the Hunter. It was impossible to leave it there, even if I couldn’t take it all the way to Constantinople.

Soon I came on four does, each with a fawn grazing or pulling at the branches that hemmed the clearing. I must have been down-wind; they only looked up when I was fairly close. They turned in a flurry, heading for the underbrush and sailing downhill in great arcs until all their white rumps had vanished in turn; and, as they took flight, a russet stag, unseen till then, looked up with a sweep of horn that was spread far wider than the antler in my hand; and while the does were curvetting past, his antlers swung out of profile into full face like a ritual separation of twin candelabra. His wide eyes were severe but unfocused, white flecks scattered the back of his tawny coat, and his hooves were neat and shining. Turning aside, he took one or two sedate and strutting paces, trotted a few more with his head and its scaffolding well back, and leaped down the slope after the does. The load of horn rose and sank with each bound; then he flew headlong through a screen of branches like a horse through a hoop and the boughs closed behind him as he crashed downhill and out of earshot.

I could hardly believe they had all been there a few seconds before. Could my antler have once been his, shed a few years back? Perhaps even now he had not reached full span, although August was beginning: I had seen no tatters of velvet... Anyway, the trove in my hand could just as easily have been centuries old.

Bit by bit, the shoulders of bare rock began to grudge foothold to the taller trees and I was advancing through dwarf fir and a slag-like scree covered with a spectral confusion of thistles. A pale ridge of mineral had sprung up to the right; a much loftier upheaval soared to the left, with another far away beyond it, wrinkled, ashen and shadowless, like an emanation of the noon’s glare. I was moving along an empty valley of pale rocks and boulders, cheerlessly plumed here and there with little fir trees, and eventually these too died away. The warp of the mountains had led me astray. I was not sure that I was where I thought I was, or where I ought to be. It was a bleak place with the pallor of a bone-yard and a wind blowing up made it bleaker still. Damp mist was advancing along the trough, thin wisps at first, followed by denser whorls of vapour clammy to the touch, until it was hard to see more than a few yards. I must have been in the heart of one of those clouds that people gaze at from the plain as they come decoratively to anchor along the cordilleras. When the mist turned into fine rain, I fumbled my way up the flank of the ridge which had stealthily piled up between me and the slope I had been following for two days. I found a cleft in it at last, climbed steeply out of the mist and then down again through boulders and unstable cataracts of scree and plunged through the thistle-belt and the dwarf fir, putting the ascending process into reverse until I was back among the bracken and the sheltering hardwoods and pines. Scrambling about the planetary emptiness above, I had lost my bearings; and when I found the vestige of a sheep-track—unless it had been trodden there by deer—I followed its slight slant, hoping for a turn to the left, but in vain; until, late in the afternoon, I heard dogs barking far away and an occasional bell, and lastly, a clear liquid music that I couldn’t place. But when the trees opened there was something familiar about the sloping grass, the shingle roofs at the far end and the grazing sheep. It was Radu’s clearing; I had travelled in an enormous circle.

Vexation only lasted a moment. I had thought I would never see that place again.

The musical notes came from Radu’s brother Mihai. He was sitting on a green rock with his crook beside him under the moss-covered boughs of an enormous oak and playing a six-holed wooden pipe a yard long. It was a captivating sound, sometimes liquid and clear, sometimes, in the bass notes, reedy and hoarse. Minims and quavers hovered, sinking at the end of each passage to deep semibreves before reascending and moving on. Across the valley, the sun dropped among the lower ranges and clouds broke the sunset into long beams. They climbed to our ledge, touched the undersides of the leaves and lit up the sheep’s wool. The oak-branches, the drifts of clouds and the mossy glooms winding through the trunks were suddenly shot through with spokes of sunset. Birds scattered the air and the topmost branches, and for a few minutes all the tree-trunks flared as crimson as a blood-orange. It might have been the backwoods of Arcadia or Paradise and we advanced over the grass with the antler and the flute and a troop of five dogs like actors in an enigmatic parable or a myth with its context lost.

The others were surprised and welcoming. It was like coming home. Radu was puzzled: why lug that antler about? Last night’s thought of a hare had not been forgotten—indeed, my return might have been pre-ordained—for his gun leant against a tree and the yard was afloat with fumes of onion, garlic, paprika and bay leaves.

After leaving sketches of some of them next morning, I set out again, guided for a furlong or two by Mihai, who filled me with half-grasped instructions.

* * *

The scurry and improvisation of the days before starting south from Lázár’s had driven serious planning clean out of our minds. The proper thing on leaving the Maros would have been to follow its tributary, the Cerna,[8] past Hunyadi’s castle once more then to the beautiful Hátzeg valley. Here I could have stayed with the eccentric Gróf K—the one who had ridden a horse with its head in a bag. (His fame was widespread; the shepherds smiled when his name cropped up.) Then I could have climbed through the forest to the great Retezat massif. It was here that István had suggested that we might have hunted chamois. When I reached civilisation again after these mountain days, I was distressed to learn all I had missed: chamois, perhaps; deep silent valleys; a special rose-red heather smelling of cinnamon and named after Baron Bruckenthal; hundreds of streams; peaks that sailed into the air like pyramids and dropped plumb into the abyss; cascades of mighty blocks scattered in wild disorder; scores of Alpine lakes... It struck me, all the same, that I had hardly been starved of splendours. Could that distant glimpse yesterday have been the summit of the Retezat? Probably not. I didn’t know then and I still don’t.[9]

Other wonders lay hidden in that labyrinth of valleys. Deep in the heart of them were the remains of Sarmizegethusa, the old capital of the Dacians and the stronghold of King Decebalus. By the time he had reduced Domitian to paying the Dacians a kind of Dac-geld, Decebalus and his realm had become the most powerful force ever to confront the Empire; he was a great and noble figure, and when Hadrian invaded his mountains, it was almost a contest between equals. It took a bitter and laborious campaign and all the science and siegecraft of Rome to subdue him: skills which Decebalus himself had anyway half-mastered; and in the end, rather than surrender to be led fettered in a triumph, the King fell on his sword in the high Roman fashion. Sarmizegethusa became Ulpia Traiana, the stronghold of the Legio Tredecima Gemina, and the place was cluttered still with carved fragments recalling the Leg. XIII Gem., which sounds like a legion at double strength. Its eagles presided there as long as the province lasted. Stupendous walls and the ruins of an amphitheatre show the importance of the city; broken statues of gods and emperors and the great hewn ashlars of temples scatter the region; fallen shrines speak of Isis and Mithras, and fissured mosaics underfoot spread the mythological floors of old dining rooms.

The most difficult parts of my attempt to keep to the western slopes of this range were avoiding loss of height and resisting the ways the grain of the mountains tried to impose; but upheavals, bands of rock, dejection-cones and landslides made this hard; it was often a question of zigzagging to the bottom of a ravine and up the other side, or of swerving into a hinterland where I was nearly bound to go astray. I did both; but, looking at the sun and my resurrected watch and the compass (only used, so far, on my last day in Hungary) I managed not to get irretrievably lost.

I saw nobody all day; there were numbers of red squirrels, a few black ones, and innumerable birds; but the only larger creatures were hawks and, usually in pairs, languidly and loftily afloat round the jutting bastions of rock, golden eagles. Sometimes I was looking across wide bowls of tree-tops before plunging into them; at others, striding over grassy saddles or scrambling on those expanses that, from below, looked like bald patches; but most of the time I followed whatever dim woodland tracks I could unravel; breaking off, every so often, to side-step across unstable and irksome cascades of shale: then back under the branches. As usual, on lonely stretches, poetry and songs came to the rescue, sometimes starting echoes. I still had plenty of food; there were dozens of streams to drink from, many of them thick with watercress, and as I flung myself face down beside one like a stag at eve, I thought how glad I was, at that particular moment, not to be standing properly at ease on the parade ground at Sandhurst. Oxford would have been better; but this was best.

The ledge I found for the night was sheltered by trees on three sides and, on the fourth, the tips of the pine trees zoomed into the depths. When the afterglow following a bonfire-sunset had gone and the bed-time pandemonium of birds began to quieten, I rugged up, lit a candle, fished out my book and for a few pages followed the adventures of Theodore Gumbril. The stars were unbelievably dense, to gaze up turned one into a multi-millionaire, and better still, the Perseids were still dropping like fireworks. I had travelled far and I was soon asleep, but when the chill of the small hours woke me, I put on another layer of jersey, swallowed what remained in the flask and found the late-rising moon had extinguished many of the stars, just as Sappho says she does. The last quarter scattered the woods with vistas and depths and the gleams of lit rock.

Soon after setting off in the morning, I halted on a grassy bluff to tie up a lace when I heard a sound which was half a creak and half a ruffle. Looking over the ledge to a similar jut fifteen yards below, I found myself peering at the hunched shoulders of a very large bird at the point where his tawny feathers met plumage of a paler chestnut hue: they thatched his scalp and the nape of his neck and he was tidying up the feathers on his breast and shoulders with an imperiously curved beak. A short hop shifted the bird farther along its ledge and it was only when, with a creak, he flung out his left wing to its full stretch and began searching his armpit, that I took in his enormous size. He was close enough for every detail to show: the buff plus-four feathers covering three-quarters of his scaly legs, the yellow and black on his talons, the square-ended tail-feathers, the yellow strip at the base of his upper beak. Shifting from his armpit to his flight-feathers, he set about preening and sorting as though the night had tousled them. He folded the wing back without haste, then flung out the other in a movement which seemed to put him off balance for a moment, and continued his grooming with the same deliberation.

Careful not to move an eyelash, I must have watched for a full twenty minutes. When both wings were folded, he sat peering masterfully about, shrugging and hunching his shoulders from time to time, half-spreading a wing then folding it back, and once stretching the jaws of his beak wide in a gesture like a yawn, until at length on a sudden impulse, with a creak and a shudder, he opened both wings to their full tremendous span, rocking for a moment as though his balance were in peril; then, with another two or three hops and a slow springing movement of his plus-foured legs, he was in the air, all his flight-feathers fanning out separately and lifting at the tips as he moved his wings down, then dipping with the following upward sweep. After a few strokes, both wings came to rest and formed a single line, with all his flight feathers curling upwards again as he allowed an invisible air-current to carry him out and down and away, correcting his balance with hardly perceptible movements as he sailed out over the great gulf. A few moments later, loud but invisible flaps sounded the other side of a buttress and a second great bird followed him almost without a sound. They swayed gently, with a wide space of air between them, like ships in a mild swell. Then as they crossed the hypotenuse of shadow which stretched from the Carpathian skyline to the flanks of the Banat mountains, the morning light caught and burnished their wings and revealed them both in their proper majesty. To look down on this king and queen of birds, floating there in aloof companionship, brought a long moment of exaltation. To think the Kirghiz used golden eagles for hunting! They carried them on horseback, a seemingly impossible feat, then unhooded them over the steppe to soar and spy out antelopes and foxes and wolves and then stoop on their quarry. Hereabouts, Radu had conveyed, they sometimes rivalled wolves in decimating flocks and, I learned later on, in wreaking havoc among the sheep and goats of the Sarakatsan nomads of the Rhodope mountains, and the flocks of Radu’s relations, the Koutzovlachs of the Pindus. They circle above the folds, hover, take aim, then fall like javelins and carry lambs piteously bleating into the sky.

I wondered if these two had merely alighted on their morning rounds, or whether their nest were nearby. Better not to look! (I had a sudden vision of those blood-curdling front pages of the Domenica del Corriere, in cobalt, orange and sepia: a goalkeeper crushed to death by an anaconda under the eyes of awe-stricken teams: ‘Ofside! Un incidente in Torino’; three rhinoceroses chasing a Carmelite nun across a chaotic Apennine market-place: ‘Uno Sfortunato Incontro’; or, in this case, ‘Al Soccorso dei Bambini!’—a nestful of eaglets and two eagles tearing a marauder to bits, who desperately beats at them with an antler...)

I could follow their motionless hover and their languid circlings for a long time as I headed south. The encounter, within twenty-four hours of that brief Altdorfer-vision of the stag, was almost too much to take in. I wondered how near to wild boars my path had gone, or might go; and to wolves and bears. They, too, were said to keep out of men’s way at this time of the year. I hadn’t seen any of them; but perhaps they had seen me as I crashed past. What about the famous passion of bears for honey and the bee-hives of those harvesters? I longed to catch a glimpse of one of them ambling bandy-legged across the middle distance or reaching on tip-toe, plagued by bees, into a hollow tree after a comb. There had been movements like an unquiet spirit in the branches during the night; larger than a squirrel, it had sounded: could it have been a wild cat or a lynx? Perhaps a pine-marten.

Starting at dawn, ending at dark and only separated by light sleep, each day in the mountains seemed to contain a longer sequence of phases than a week at ground level. Twenty-four hours would spin themselves into a lifetime, and thin mountain air, sharpened faculties, the piling-up of detail and a kaleidoscope of scene-changes seemed to turn the concatenation into a kind of eternity. I felt deeply involved in these dizzy solitudes, more reluctant each minute to come down again and ready to go on forever. Thank heavens, I thought, climbing along a dark canyon of pines, no likelihood of it ending yet. But suddenly, very faintly and a long way off, there was the sound of an axe falling; then two or three. However far away, the sound struck a baleful note; it spoke of people from the lower world and the two days’ solitude since leaving the shepherds had installed feelings of unchallenged ownership of everything within sight or hearing.

* * *

The axes had been hard at work. Oaks, beeches and alders stood about in solitude amid a disorder of shorn stumps, rings of chips and felled pine-trees. They had been cut nearly through with two-handed saws then finished off with axe, beetle and wedge, and even as I watched, the woodmen were banging their wedges into the last victim of the day. The impacts only reached me when the beetles were lifted for the next blow; and soon, with a splitting and a crash, down the tree came, and they fell on it, lopping and trimming the prone trunk with saws, axes and billhooks. When enough stripped timber had accumulated, a team of horses with grapples and hauling gear would be summoned and the trunks dragged to the edge of the clearing and tipped down a steep ride: a chaos of timber choked the grass all the way down to a point where waggons could load them. It reminded me of the stripes of snow I had seen in the forests round the Austrian Danube and the pine-trunks tumbling down them like spilt matchboxes: all to be sawn into deal planks or put together in rafts and floated downstream.

I learnt all this in German from a burly man in a red-checked flannel shirt and a celluloid eye-shade like a journalist’s in a film. After leaving the team of woodmen, he had fallen in with me on his way to a log-cabin with a corrugated iron roof. Here, most incongruously seated at a table, a bearded man in a black suit and a black beaver hat turned up all round was poring over a large and well-thumbed book, his spectacles close to the print. In a few years’ time he would look exactly like one of the Elders in The Temple by Holman Hunt and this is exactly what he was. Two sons about my age, also dressed in black, were on either side of him, equally rapt. They too were marked for religion: you could tell by their elf-locks and the unshorn down which fogged their waxy cheeks. How different from the man in the check shirt; he was the Rabbi’s younger brother and his cast of feature might have been the work of a hostile cartoonist. He was foreman of this timber concession and he came from Satu Mare—Szatmár—a town in the Magyar belt to the north-west of Transylvania. The Rabbi and his sons were spending a fortnight with him and the loggers were mountain people from the same region.

When the foreman led me to the group at the table, they looked up apprehensively; almost with alarm. I was given a chair, but we were all overcome with diffidence. “Was sind Sie von Beruf?” The foreman, anything but shy, looked at me in frank puzzlement. “Sind Sie Kaufmann?” Was I a pedlar? I felt slightly put out by the question, but it was perfectly reasonable. Nobody else was wandering about like this and I suppose the only itinerant strangers in these parts, if they were not beggars or out-and-out bad hats, must have been pedlars, though I had never come across any. (But a stranger in such a place obviously needed explanation. The shepherds and Gypsies had both shown a touch of misgiving at first: unknown figures in the wilderness bode no good. In the past, they were bent on rounding up laggards for feudal corvées; nowadays, it would be tax-gathering, census-compiling, exaction of grazing dues, the search for malefactors, deserters, or runaway recruits overdue for their military service—a whole range of vexatious interference with the freedom of the woods.) My interlocutors looked bewildered when I tried to explain my reasons for not staying at home. Why was I travelling? To see the world, to study, to learn languages? I wasn’t quite clear myself. Yes, some of these things, but mostly—I couldn’t think of the word at first—and when I found it—“for fun”—it didn’t sound right and their brows were still puckered. “Also, Sie treiben so herum aus Vergnügen?” The foreman shrugged his shoulders and smiled and said something in Yiddish to the others; they all laughed and I asked what it was. “Es ist a goyim naches!” they said. ‘A goyim naches,’ they explained, is something that the goyim like but which leaves Jews unmoved; any irrational or outlandish craze, a goy’s delight or gentile’s relish. It seemed to hit the nail on the head.

The initial reserve of the other dwellers in these mountains had not lasted long; nor did it here: but the Jews had other grounds for wariness. Their centuries of persecution were not ended; there had been trials for ritual murder late in the last century in Hungary and more recently in the Ukraine, and fierce deeds in Rumania and pogroms in Bessarabia and throughout the Russian Pale. Slanderous myths abounded and the dark rumours of the Elders of Zion had only been set in motion fifteen years earlier. In Germany, meanwhile, terrible omens were gathering, though how terrible none of us knew. They came into the conversation and—it seems utterly incredible now—we talked of Hitler and the Nazis as though they merely represented a dire phase of history, a sort of transitory aberration or a nightmare that might suddenly vanish, like a cloud evaporating or a bad dream. The Jews in England—a happier theme—came next: they knew much more than I, which was not hard; and Palestine. Sighs and fatalistic humour spaced out the conversation.

Everything took a different turn when scripture cropped up. The book in front of the Rabbi was the Torah, or part of it, printed in dense Hebrew black-letter that was irresistible to someone with a passion for alphabets; especially these particular letters, with their aura of magic. Laboriously I could phonetically decipher the sounds of some of the simpler words, without a glimmer of their meanings, of course, and this sign of interest gave pleasure. I showed them some of the words I had copied down in Bratislava from shops and Jewish newspapers in cafés, and the meanings, which I had forgotten, made them laugh; those biblical symbols recommended a stall for repairing umbrellas, or ‘Daniel Kisch, Koscher Würste und Salami.’[10] How did the Song of Miriam sound in the original, and the Song of Deborah; David’s lament for Absolom; and the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley? The moment it became clear, through my clumsy translations into German, which passage I was trying to convey, the Rabbi at once began to recite, often accompanied by his sons. Our eyes were alight; it was like a marvellous game. Next came the rivers of Babylon, and the harps hanging on the willows: this they uttered in unfaltering unison, and when they came to ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,’ the moment was extremely solemn. In the back of my diary are a few lines in Hebrew inscribed there by the Rabbi himself; as they are in the cursive script, utterly indecipherable by me; and underneath them are the phonetic sounds I took down from his recitation of them.

Here it dies away for a moment, then resumes:

The few words that sound like proper nouns revealed what it must be: “Tell it not in Gath,” that is, “publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.” The next incomplete piece must be “Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew...” By this time the other-worldly Rabbi and his sons and I were excited. Enthusiasm ran high. These passages, so famous in England, were doubly charged with meaning for them, and their emotion was infectious. They seemed astonished—touched, too—that their tribal poetry enjoyed such glory and affection in the outside world; utterly cut off, I think they had no inkling of this. A feeling of great warmth and delight had sprung up and the Rabbi kept polishing his glasses, not for use, but out of enjoyment and nervous energy, and his brother surveyed us with benevolent amusement. It got dark while we sat at the table, and when he took off the glass chimney to light the paraffin lamp, three pairs of spectacles flashed. If it had been Friday night, the Rabbi said, they would have asked me to light it; he explained about the shabbas goy. This was the Sabbath-gentile whom well-off Jews—“not like us”—employed in their houses to light fires and lamps and tie and untie knots or perform the many tasks the Law forbids on the Seventh Day. I said I was sorry it was only Thursday (the Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday) as I could have made myself useful for a change. We said good-night with laughter.

* * *

Stretched under one of the surviving oaks, I was brimming with excitement. I had thought I could never get on friendly terms with such unassailable-looking men. I had often caught glimpses of similar figures. The last time had been on the moonlit platform the night I entered Rumania; they had looked utterly separate and remote and unapproachable; I could as soon have asked a Trappist abbess for a light.

I thought about the shabbas goy. I would not have been indispensable after all, for a little way off, gathered round a low fire of their own, the loggers were quietly singing in Hungarian. It sounded indefinably different from Rumanian singing, but equally captivating and equally sad.

After I said goodbye next morning, the younger boy, who was wearing a skull-cap and carrying white prayer-shawls with black stripes at the ends, joined the other two indoors and as I left, I could hear them intoning their prayers in a harrowing lamentation while the foreman, no zealot, was pointing out a fresh stand of timber to the loggers.

* * *

For a remote shelf of the Carpathians, it had been an unexpected encounter. What itineraries had brought them all the way from Canaan and Jerusalem and Babylonia? A few Karaite schismatics, who had settled on the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, had made their way to Eastern Europe, but not much had been heard of them since; and a handful of Jews—by religion, if not by blood—may have come in with the Magyars; if, that is, the warlike Kabar tribesmen belonged to the élite among their fellow-Khazars who had been converted to Jewry: for three Kabar tribes accompanied the Magyar move westward which ended on the Great Plain; they must surely have embraced Christianity when the rest were converted. The most probable ancestors of my hosts—in part, at any rate—would seem to have been the Jews who had settled along the Rhine in the early days of the Roman Empire, after making their way through Italy before the Babylonian dispersal; perhaps before the destruction of the Temple.

In early times, when all religions were polytheistic, gods were shared out and exchanged; they wandered from pantheon to pantheon and were welcome everywhere. The Manichaeans virtually reduced the Zoroastrian cast to two rivals of equal power: a perilous tendency, as its offspring heresies proved. But the Jews bowed down to a solitary god who tolerated no rivals and could neither be seen, graven as an image, nor even mentioned by name, and there was discord with neighbours from the start. (It seems at times that strife can no more be separated from monotheism than stripes from a tiger.) Their period of mundane glory passed away; hard days followed; and by the time it had given birth to Christianity and then to Islam, Judaism was in the position of a King Lear hag-ridden by Goneril and Regan, but with no part written for Cordelia, or anyone to act it—unless, for a century or two, it was the Khazar Empire. The promotion of Christianity from the catacombs to the state religion of the West made the solitary position of the Jews irretrievable. An inflexible programme of revenge for the Crucifixion was set on foot and the following centuries of outlawry and humiliation gave rise to a demonology and a mystique that are active still. In the Middle Ages the Jews were to blame not for deicide only, but for every calamity that smote the West, notably the Black Death and the invasions of the Mongols: these incarnate fiends were the Twelve Tribes galloping out of the East to reinforce the wicked plans of Jewish kinsmen in Europe... In German lands, especially, the ardour of the Crusades burst out in a grim series of massacres. These things set many of the Jews on the move once more and they came to a halt in Poland. (It was their long German sojourn that had made a mediaeval German dialect, chiefly the Franconian, the basis of the Yiddish lingua franca of Eastern Europe.) The kingdom welcomed them at first. They settled and multiplied; but, with time, things began to change. The clergy denounced the kings for their protective policy and at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, persecution began: the Dominicans extorted a yearly fine and the usual charges of desecrated hosts and ritual murder reappeared... In spite of all this, it was a sort of heyday for Jewish scholarship and theology. They were too large a population to move on when fresh troubles beset them. The worst of these were the Cossack massacres of the seventeenth century; and after the partition of Poland, Russian persecution, and the pogroms in the Pale, set many thousands on their travels again. (The Rabbi and his brother were not quite sure, but they thought some of their ancestors might have come from those parts four or five generations back; Galicia was the other most likely provenance.) In spite of endemic anti-Jewish feeling in Hungary, Jews had managed to play a considerable part in the country’s life—it had been better for them there than in Russia or Rumania. My companions felt patriotic about Hungary, they said: they talked Hungarian rather than Yiddish among themselves, and lamented their recent change of citizenship.

In a continent where countless races had changed utterly or vanished into thin air, the Jews, however battered and woebegone, had altered least. Many things apart from religion singled them out, and here in the mountains especially they bore the stamp of an urban and indoor folk, different in everything from the surrounding rustics. Costume, diet, bearing, gesture, complexion and intonation—the insidious nasal note that their detractors mimicked so tirelessly—widened the gulf. (I could not look at the two boys without wishing their corkscrew-locks away, and felt guilty at once for doing so.) Parallel to the indignities inflicted by the gentiles, there was an array of self-imposed stigmata which seemed purposely designed to flaunt outside aesthetic notions and, should it be needed, choke off approach. (They were exactly the things, of course, which anyone seeking assimilation—as, with a second guilty twinge, I felt I should have done—would most eagerly jettison.) But for those who looked on merging as treachery, it was utterly different. They clung to ancient ways as they had done for ever; but the marks left by the ghetto had become, if not emblems of martyrdom, at least treasured symbols of solidarity in hard times, for there had never been a moment when an end to persecution, by apostacy, was out of reach; a few words and a splash of water and their troubles would have been over. But they had chosen the edge of the sword and flight and the fate of outcasts rather than break faith. No wonder, once indoors and away from it all, that they shunned contact with the vile world outside, and, if the externals of their life seemed alien and rebarbative, so much the better; it would shoot home the excluding bolts. Skill and flair, in a world beset with difficulties, offered chances of survival, prosperity and brilliant achievement; but it struck me, in a moment of lamplit clairvoyance, that among devotees like my companions, all these were an illusion. The pre-occupation of the Rabbi and his sons—the columns of black-letter, hedged about with the glosses and footnotes and rubrics of two or three thousand years, represented the true aim of existence; something to be pursued and loved in secret and behind barred shutters: their scriptures, their poetry, their philosophy, their history and their laws. These were the lodestar of their passion, and the sea of outside troubles must have fallen back while they re-explored the mysteries of their religion and traced the subtleties of the law or unravelled the meanings of the Kabbala and the Zohar or weighed the tenets of the Hassidim against the refutations of the Gaon of Vilna; and, as they re-read the deeds of Joshua and David and the Maccabees, the oafish slogans in the lanes outside must have died away.

* * *

‘Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew...’ The words kept floating to the surface during the following hours, next morning in particular, when I woke up dry as a bone and remembered my damp resurrection at the swineherds’ hut near Visegrad. There had been a drift or two of mackerel sky the evening before and I had slept under cover for the first time for a week. A timely cave, where part of the opening had been roughly walled in with dry-stone masonry to form a sheepfold, gaped invitingly at nightfall; but it was hopping with insects, so I left it for a smaller one about the size of an opera box and I can only have been asleep a little while when a liquid rippling, not caused by water, woke me up. Below, just discernible in the starlight, a great flock of sheep was on the move and hundreds of little cleft feet were trotting by. Shepherds and dogs passed in dead silence. It was as though the animals were being rustled; I watched until they had vanished, and next day they seemed like sheep in a dream.

There was no dew; but mist wreathed the clefts and ravines. Faraway spurs rose up, stage-wings only defined by the hair-thin line of their summits against the next vaporous upheaval, each a paler blue as it receded, while the valleys that twisted downhill were dusky with timber.

The mountains were full of echoes. Small landslides would spread like a rumour, and the four key-notes of an octave, sung loud enough, rocketed into the distance five or six times with a second or two between each chord, and branched off down side valleys, a little fainter after each encore. The mountains would have been a perfect auditorium for those Tibetan-looking horns six or ten feet long. (Bucium, the Rumanian word, is almost certainly from the Roman buccina, the long brazen tube on triumphal arches that distends legionaries’ cheeks among looted tabernacles and candlesticks.) The other side of this watershed, at the storming of Sarmizegethusa, the fanfares of Trajan must have unloosed pandemonium. (Apart from those of the Rumanians, the other giant horns to be heard in this part of Europe were those of the Huzuls, shy, Slav-speaking Uniat Ruthenes living in a world of spells and legends two hundred-odd miles to the north-north-west in the Sub-Carpathian ranges next door to Bukovina.)

I came on some flocks and a shepherd playing a small bone flute: I soon learnt that something of the kind was as inseparable from herdsmen as a distaff and spindle from their wives and I wished I had looked at it closer: bone flutes are favourite instruments among the Sarakatsan nomads of northern Greece whom I got to know later; theirs are made out of the long bone in an eagle’s wing. This was probably the shinbone of a sheep. A tibia, in fact.

But another reason made me wish, a year hence, that I had paid more attention. A later part of this journey carried me to eastern Rumania, and I returned there the following year; and, between then and the outbreak of war, I spent much time in a remote, Grand Meaulnes-like country house in Moldavia, not far from the present Russian frontier. They were long sojourns of unalloyed happiness: I adored the inhabitants; and while I was there, I picked up a slipshod fluency in Rumanian of which a few vestiges remain.

Like many another, I soon came under the spell of the oldest poem in the language. It is called Mioritza. Universally but sporadically known throughout the Rumanian-speaking world for hundreds of years, it was only taken down and printed during the last century, so it must be described as a folk-poem, but the classification fits these strange verses rather awkwardly. Many have pored over their arcane symbolism. Some say that they demonstrate a deep streak of fatalism among country Rumanians, while others find exactly the opposite: they deduce a kind of mystical triumph over precisely such an interpretation of fate. Perhaps its origins should be sought in pre-Christian times; the poem undoubtedly springs from abstruse and complex roots. But for me its magic lay, and lies, in its linking together of directness and the tragic sense, its capture of the isolated feeling that surrounds shepherds, and the forlorn exaltation that haunts their steep grazings and forests; all enhanced, here, by the charms and the frustration of half-apprehended mysteries. Above all, in my case, the poem conjures up early glimpses of shepherd life on these first mountain travels; half the setting is accordingly a high Carpathian shieling, and the other, sheepfolds scattered, later on, across the dales of Moldavia.

The poem consists of 123 rhyming couplets (and occasionally triplets) of five syllables, which feminine endings often lengthen; the scansion is two or three feet to the line; and I can’t resist giving a few key fragments of a ramshackle but pretty literal translation.

‘From an upland high,’ it begins, ‘near the gates of the sky, / along a steep trail / dropping into the vale / come three flocks of sheep / that three young shepherds keep, / the first, a Moldavian, / the second a Vrancean, / and the third, Transylvanian...’ (The slide into semi-poetic diction imposed by the search for rhymes—a necessary search, if one wants to get the feel of the poem—gives a dimmed idea of the spare rustic frugality of the original; I wish I could convey its almost runic pithiness. When the three shepherds meet, the scene darkens at once. While the sun sets, the Transylvanian and the Vrancean plot to murder the young Moldavian. He is braver than they; his sheep are sturdier and longer-horned, his horses better broken and his dogs fiercer. But what they do not know is that he also has a ewe lamb, Mioritza, the one the poem is named after, and she has the gift of second sight. Overhearing the whispered plot, she stops grazing and bleats desperately and without stopping for three days on end to give the alarm; and when the young shepherd asks what ails her, she bursts into speech), “O kind young man,” she says, “Drive down your flock / to the wood by the brook! / There is shade there for you / and grass for us, too. / Master, O master, / drive them down faster! / Call the dogs, call / one strong and tall, / the staunchest of all! / When the sun leaves the sky / they have said you must die / —that shepherd, the Vrancean, / and that Transylvanian!”

The shepherd says, “Little ewe, all unbidden / you speak what is hidden! / Should I chance on my death / on this stretch of heath, / tell that Transylvanian / and the other, the Vrancean, / they should bury me near / in the pen, over here, / so I may sleep / among you, my sheep, / in my fold in the dark / and hear my dogs bark!” He gives the ewe lamb further instructions: “This too must be said: / Let them place at my head / A small flute of beech / —of love, all its speech— / and a small flute of bone / that mourns long and lone, / and a small flute of elder / —quicker-noted and wilder— / so when wind blows through / it will play on them too, / and make my sheep crowd / and mourn me out loud / and shed tears of blood!” The mood shifts significantly now. “But of the murder,” he says, “tell them no word! / Just tell them outright / that I married tonight / a king’s daughter, the bride / of the world, and its pride. / At my wedding, tell / how a star fell, / how the guests at the feast / were maples and firs, / the high mountains, priests, / and minstrels, the birds, / a thousand small birds, / and our candles the stars.”

“But,” he goes on, “if you should pass / running over the grass / in a sash made of wool / and with tears her eyes full, / a little old crone / astray and alone, / who asks everyone: / ‘Have you seen my son? / A young shepherd boy / as handsome and slim / as though drawn through a ring? / The white of his brow, / foam milked from the cow? / His whiskers as neat / as two young ears of wheat? / And thick curls that grow / like the plumes on a crow? / And two pretty eyes / like wild blackberries?’ / Then, little ewe,” the young shepherd concludes:

But all this, a strange adumbration of a still unknown Rumania, lay far ahead. Meanwhile, a change was on the way. Thoughts of wolves had receded and the sheepfolds below the path were now flimsy rings of osier and brushwood. Sometimes the massif flung out peninsulas that dropped away into the void; and for once the bias of the mountains was more a help than a decoy and the circuit of the last of these headlands led to a high saddle and the brim of a tremendous valley.

On the one hand a canyon thrust a deep gash north-east into the range I had been skirting for days, and its climb into the Carpathians reached the foot of the great ashen peaks. On the other, it plunged south-west down a gorge that would lead to the lowlands, and, at last, to the everyday world: but there was no hint of this yet. The chasm was silent except for the sound of water and the echo of an occasional rock falling. But while I gazed, clouds at the head of the ravine were breaking loose and spreading crumpled shadows across the juts and the clefts; then they blotted out the sun in an abrupt upland storm. The wind sent a few sighting shots, followed by a swish of raindrops. Sheltering under an overhang, I watched them turn into hailstones the size of mothballs: they bounced and scattered downhill by the million; and in half an hour, their white drifts were all that was left. The washed rocks looked newly cut, there was not a cloud in sight and a breeze smelling of bracken and wet earth kept the air from stagnating.

Even jumping from ledge to ledge and sliding on wet pine-needles, the downward climb lasted for hours. Scree slowed the pace and buttresses of rock, smooth as boiler-plates or spiked like iguanas, imposed gruelling swerves. Gleams across the cliffs revealed faraway threads of water; close to, they coiled and cataracted through the tree-trunks as the ledges of the forest dropped. The conifers abdicated when the hardwoods began to outnumber them; and the ravine, deepening fast, coaxed the trees higher and higher until the oaks, mantled with ivy, pronged with the antlers of dead boughs and tufted with mistletoe, grew into giants. Clearings of beech opened their forest-chambers and bracken gave way to mares’ tails, hemlock and the tatters of old man’s beard. The damp, which covered everything with moss, looped the branches with creepers and plumed the clefts and forks overhead, and the flaking bark, shaggy with lichen, greaved the tree-trunks like metal tainted with verdigris, filling the slanting world underneath with a stagey green-grey light. The woods had become an undercroft of acorns, beech-nuts and moaning wood-pigeons; the sound of water grew louder; and soon, flecked by leaf-shadows and askim with wagtails and redstarts, the ice-cold Cerna was rushing by under the branches. The mysterious river split and joined again round blades of rock, slid over shelves that combed it into symmetrical waterfalls and rushed on chopping and changing down the gorge. Then I came down into quieter reaches. Shoals of trout anchored themselves among the reflections of elderflower or glided to new retreats, deep in the shade, where only a few wrinkles hinted at the current, and the black rocks, which gave the river its dark Slavonic name, cumbered the depths.

* * *

On a path along the bank, a ring of women on the way back from market—alert, fine-featured, rather shy-looking folk—were sitting under a walnut tree with their bundles. After greetings, an old squaw, whose face was a cobweb of amused lines, patted the place beside her, so I joined them on the grass.

Except for brown aprons, they were dressed in the same way as the women at the sheepfold: a subdued harmony of dark blues and whites, with black braid sashes and heavily embroidered rectangles on the sleeves and those curious soft leather breast-plates lacing at the side; they wore white pleated skirts, black stockings and moccasins, and there was not a thread on any of them—shorn, carded, spun, woven, dyed, cut out and sewn—that had not come off the backs of their flocks.

The old woman picked the antler off the grass and asked me something I could not understand. When she saw how little Rumanian I knew, she placed her finger and thumb on either side of her flat silver wedding-ring, twiddled it to and fro and then pointed to me enquiringly: was I married? No? She murmured something to the others that had them all in stitches and as their exchanges went on with growing hilarity, several racy and comic interpretations began to dawn on me too. Soon they stood up and hoisted their striped woven sacks on their heads. The old woman handed the antler back, wishing me a happy journey and good luck in the town. Still exchanging jokes, they set off for their high sheepfolds. One of them was spinning as she went, and in a little while a green-leaf song was mounting the hillside and then slowly fading out of earshot.

[1] In the Mitylene brothel scene in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, it is the other way about:

Pandar: “The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage.”

Boult: “Ay, she quickly pooped him.”

[2] Taken to the war, this little book disappeared six years later when an aerial torpedo sank our escaping caique on the east coast of the Peloponnese. The lost kit was just too deep for diving. The fish in the little scala of Leonidion must have crowded round it for a time, nibbled at the pages, then left it to fall to pieces and dissolve in the Aegean.

[3] ‘Who loves not wine, woman and song remains a fool his whole life long!’ The innkeeper’s attribution was quite right. I’ve just looked it up.

[4] The mountains to the left of the road were the Banat, too, as far as the line of crests which forms the western edge of the Retezat, which is part of Transylvania still. I am not sure if, or how far, I crossed this dotted line during the erratic zigzag of the following days. This is the stretch where I feel the sequence of memories is most in peril of confusion; but not too seriously, I hope.

[5] I think some classical authorities connect this prehistoric technique with the legend of the Golden Fleece. Transylvania was the oldest source of gold in the classical world, and the ancient treasures of Egypt may have been mined or gathered here. It was prized for its warm ‘red-gold’ hue.

[6] Fabio is the word Ausonius uses in the Mosella. But, from the Baltic to Macedonia, the Slav word is roughly the same, except in Russia where they call it Forel, obviously a borrowing from the German Forelle, perhaps owing to the lack of mountain streams in Russia proper, and thus of trout... They probably used to get them from the Carpathians, smoked, after the First Partition of Poland in 1772. Otherwise, the Urals and the Caucasus would have been the nearest streams.

[7] I have recently learned that they actually evolved something similar to Greek fire for attacking palisades. But all the same...

[8] Warning: There is another of these ‘black rivers’ later on. The area is confusingly repetitive in these matters.

[9] The only solution is to go there and climb it.

[10] See A Time of Gifts, p. 245.