Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  * * *

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

  * * *

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

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

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

  Several of my neighbours fingered strings of beads, but not in prayer; they spilt them between their fingers at random intervals, as though to scan their boundless leisure; and to my delight, one old man, embowered in a private cloud, was smoking a narghilé. Six feet of red tubing were cunningly coiled, and when he pulled on the amber mouthpiece, charcoal glowed on a damped wad of tobacco leaves from Ispahan and the bubbles, fighting their way through the water with the sound of a mating bull-frog, filled the glass vessel with smoke. A boy with small tongs arranged fresh charcoal. While he did so, the old man pointed towards me and whispered; and the boy came back in a few minutes with a laden tray on a circular table six inches from the ground. Seeing my quandary, a neighbour told me how to begin: first, to drink the small glass of raki; then eat the mouthful of delicious rose-petal jam lying ready spooned on a glass saucer, followed by half a tumbler of water; finally to sip at a dense and scalding thimbleful of coffee slotted in a filigree holder. The ritual should be completed by emptying the tumbler and accepting tobacco, in this case, an aromatic cigarette made by hand on the island. Meanwhile the old men sat in smiling silence, sighing occasionally, with a friendly word to me now and then in what sounded like very broken Rumanian; the doctor had said that their accent and style caused amusement on the shore. Among themselves they spoke Turkish, which I had never heard: astonishing strings of agglutinated syllables with a follow-through of identical vowels and dimly reminiscent of Magyar; all the words are different, but the two tongues are distant cousins in the Ural-Altaic group of languages. According to the doctor it had either drifted far from the metropolitan vernacular of Constantinople or remained immovably lodged in its ancient mould, like a long-marooned English community still talking the language of Chaucer.

  I didn’t know what to do when leaving; an attempt at payment was stopped by a smile and an enigmatic backward tilt of the head. Like everything else, this was the first time I came across the universal negative of the Levant; and, once more, there was that charming inclination, hand on breast.

  So these were the last descendants of those victorious nomads from the borders of China! They had conquered most of Asia, and North Africa to the Pillars of Hercules, enslaved half Christendom and battered on the gates of Vienna; victories long eclipsed, but commemorated here and there by a min
aret left in their lost possessions like a spear stuck in the ground.

  Balconied houses gathered about the mosque and small workshops for Turkish Delight and cigarettes, and all round these crumbled the remains of a massive fortress. Vine-trellises or an occasional awning shaded the cobbled lanes. There were hollyhocks and climbing roses and carnations in whitewashed petrol tins, and the heads and shoulders of the wives who flickered about among them were hidden by a dark feredjé—a veil pinned in a straight line above the brow and joining under the nose; and they wore tapering white trousers, an outfit which gave them the look of black-and-white ninepins. Children were identically-clad miniatures of the grown-ups and, except for their unveiled faces, the little girls might each have been the innermost of a set of Russian dolls. Tobacco leaves were hung to dry in the sun like strings of small kippers. Women carried bundles of sticks on their heads, scattered grain to poultry and returned from the shore with their sickles and armfuls of rushes. Lop-eared rabbits basked or hopped sluggishly about the little gardens and nibbled the leaves of ripening melons. Flotillas of ducks cruised among the nets and the canoes and multitudes of frogs had summoned all the storks from the roofs.

  Hunyadi had put up the first defensive walls, but the ramparts all round belonged to the interregnum after Prince Eugene had taken Belgrade and driven the Turks downstream, and the eastern end of the island looked as though it might sink under the weight of his fortifications. The vaults of the gun-galleries and the dank tremendous magazines had fallen in. Fissures split the ramparts and great blocks of masonry, tufted with grass, had broken away and goats tore at the leaves among the debris. A pathway among pear trees and mulberries led to a little cemetery where turbanned headstones leant askew and in one corner lay the tomb of a dervish prince from Bokhara who had ended his life here after wandering the world, ‘poor as a mouse,’ in search of the most beautiful place on earth and the one most sheltered from harm and mishap.

  It was getting late. The sun left the minaret, and then the new moon, a little less wraith-like than the night before, appeared on cue in a turquoise sky with a star next to it that might have been pinned there by an Ottoman herald. With equal promptitude, the hodja’s torso emerged on the balcony under the cone of the minaret. Craning into the dusk, he lifted his hands and the high and long-drawn-out summons of the izan floated across the air, each clause wavering and spreading like the rings of sound from pebbles dropped at intervals into a pool of air. I found myself still listening and holding my breath when the message had ended and the hodja must have been half-way down his dark spiral.

  Surrounded by pigeons, men were unhasteningly busy at the lustral fountain by the mosque and the row of slippers left by the door was soon lengthened by my gym shoes. Once inside, the Turks spread in a line on a vast carpet, with lowered eyes. There was no decoration except for the mihrab and the mimbar and the black calligraphy of a Koranic verse across the wall. The ritual gestures of preparation were performed in careful and unhurried unison, until, gathering momentum, the row of devotees sank like a wave; then tilted over until their foreheads touched the pile of the carpet, the soles of their feet all suddenly and disarmingly revealed; rocking back, they sat with their hands open in their laps, palms upward; all in dead silence. Every few minutes, the hodja sitting in front of them murmured “Allah akbar!” in a quiet voice, and another long silence followed. In the unornate and hushed concavity, the four isolated syllables sounded indescribably dignified and austere.[9]

  * * *

  The first time I had tried to sleep beside the Danube had been at the Easter full moon before crossing the bridge at Esztergom; and here I was, amidstream again, but between Carpathian and Balkan. The new moon had sunk, leaving a pearly light on the water. Settled near the western cape of the island in a clump of poplars, I lay listening to the frogs. A meteor shot across the other stars now and then. Nightingales had fallen silent weeks ago, but the island was full of owls. Barking dogs were answered from the Serbian shore, and carts creaked along the riverside path. A string of barges had tied up at the quay of Orșova, two miles upstream, waiting for daylight before tackling the Iron Gates. The little port dropped corkscrews of lamplight into the water and the sound of instruments and singing was clear enough for me to pick out the tunes. An occasional splash was a reminder of all the shoals on the move, and the seventy different kinds of fish that haunted the Danube. Some of them belonged to the fish-populations of the Dnieper and the Don, close kin to those of the Caspian and the Volga; they could swim a thousand miles uphill into the heart of Europe with not a single dam to bar the way... My head was too full of sights and sounds for sleep; better to lie and gaze up and listen to the night sounds and light another of those aromatic cigarettes exotically stamped with a gold crescent moon. No good squandering the short night in sleep, or in brooding on the eternity of rivers and that inexhaustible volume of liquid on the move:

  Rusticus exspectat dum defluat amnis, at ille

  Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.

  Yes. Exactly... There was plenty to think about.

  Early in the last chapter, when I was meditating on the links between myth and history in these regions, a procession of kings, prelates and knights suddenly wandered across the page, heading downstream. It was really an overlap of two separate campaigns, both of them disasters. One had taken place when Sigismund of Hungary and his allies were routed at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396; the other, half a century later, in 1444, when the twenty-year-old King Vladislav of Poland, John Hunyadi[10] and Cardinal Cesarini advanced to the Black Sea; the army was utterly destroyed at the battle of Varna by Sultan Murad II. Hunyadi lived to fight again, but the Cardinal vanished in the mêlée and the head of the young King ended on a spear above the gates of Brusa. This was Christendom’s last attempt to throw back the Turks before they laid their last fatal siege to Constantinople. They took the city nine years later.

  But it was the first campaign that I was brooding over. I had read all about it in the Telekis’ library, and, if I remembered it now, it was because it was here, at Orșova, that the Crusaders’ army had crossed the river into the Sultan’s dominions; and, what was more, exactly now.

  The ferrying started at the beginning of August—perhaps on the 5th—and continued for about eight days; so that the last pikeman or sutler had probably reached the southern bank this very evening, five hundred and thirty-eight years ago. There were contingents from the whole of western Europe, and a dazzling array of leaders: Sigismund, with his Hungarian army, and his Wallachian feudatories under Mircea the Old; the Constable Count of Eu; John the Fearless, son of Philip the Bold of Burgundy; Marshall Boucicault, ‘inspired by the rapture of combat’; Guy de la Trémoille, John of Vienne, James de la Marche, Philip of Bar, Rupert Count Palatine of the Rhine; and best of all, Enguerrand VII of Coucy, Edward III of England’s valiant son-in-law.[11] Some accounts mention a thousand English men-at-arms under the Black Prince’s stepson (Richard II’s half-brother) the Earl of Huntingdon.[12] Moving downstream, they invested the Turkish fortress at Nicopolis.

  But, having learned of the invasion and siege, Sultan Bayazit hastened across the Balkans with all the speed of his Thunderbolt nickname. When the battle was joined, the vainglorious French brought down total catastrophe by the reckless and premature bravery of their attack. Rescued by the Hospitallers’ fleet, Sigismund survived and, later on, became Emperor; John of Burgundy was taken prisoner and ransomed, to be hacked to bits a few years later on the bridge of Montereau by his Orléans rivals; Boucicault was ransomed too, but was taken at Agincourt, and died a prisoner in Yorkshire; Coucy, though ransomed, died at Brusa before he could return. Some of those who escaped were killed by local inhabitants; some, weighted by their armour, drowned in the Danube; the Count Palatine reached home in rags, then died from the hardships he had endured; and the other great captains, in reprisal for Turkish garrisons massacred on their march downstream, were slain with all their followers in a shambles of beheadin
g lasting from dawn to Vespers. Three years later the victorious Sultan was defeated at Ankara and taken prisoner by Tamerlane: caged in a litter, he expired from grief and shame among his Mongol captors. Huntingdon—if, indeed, he was there—got safely back. But four years later, after his half-brother Richard’s dethronement and murder, he was condemned for taking up arms against Bolingbroke: his head was smitten off and exposed in an Essex market-place. Few of his supposed soldiers, if they were there, can have practised in the butts at Hereford again, or fished in the Wye.

  I was thinking vaguely of this disastrous crusade—not in this detail, which is the fruit of a dash to the bookcase—and of John of Burgundy’s retinue and their new green liveries and the twenty-four waggon-loads of green satin tents... All the contingents rivalled each other in splendour of banners and armour and saddlery and plate. I was wondering lazily about the Crusaders’ line of march from their general assembly-point at Buda. All chroniclers agreed on the route; and I was approaching that edge of drowsiness which is illustrated in strip-cartoons by a swarm of z’s gathering like bees over the heads of sleeping tramps: ‘They followed the left bank of the Danube as far as Orșova...’

  The z’s dispersed in a flash and I sat up, wide awake. They couldn’t have! What would they have trodden on? ‘Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving’—what? Trajan’s road had been useless for more than a thousand years, and, until Széchenyi’s was built five centuries later, most of the left bank, like the right, dropped plumb into the water like a fiord, and for mile after mile. And, though I didn’t know it then, the reference books are unanimous: until Széchenyi’s road was engineered in the 1830s, the whole of this reach of the river was totally impassable on both sides. Those thousands of horses, the waggons laden with coloured tents, the thousands of flour-sacks and the hay-wains, the bushels of Beaune, and the heralds in their new tabards and the gaudy bobtail of camp-followers that the chroniclers record with such disapproval—they would have had to make a two-hundred-mile sweep to the north, nearly to the Maros, and then through Lugos, and Caransebes, and along the Timis, valley and down the Mehadia to the last part of my own route to the mouth of the Cerna. This detour, which would have taken them many weeks, could never have gone unrecorded... But there is no mention of such a thing; let alone of the slightly more practicable cliff tops on the right bank. Nobody seemed to have noticed this insoluble clash of history and geography.