Chapter XII

We had crossed the line of active melon consumption soon after leaving Budapest; we had for days revelled in a superabundance of them, and, indeed, had quite become accustomed to the sight of every human being, old and young, either carrying a melon or preoccupied with eating it. We had contributed our generous share to the flotsam of melon rinds which bobbed down the current, and had sampled every unfamiliar variety of the delicious fruit which had met our notice. It was chiefly, then, from the unæsthetic motives of appetite that we proposed to land at Vukovár, which had long been held up to us by melon-eaters as the one place on the Danube where the fruit was found in perfection. As we came near the town, remarkable mainly for a new synagogue of doubtful taste, we saw piles of huge round objects ranged along in the shade of small trees on the bank, like cannon-balls in an arsenal, and we needed no further identification of this metropolis of the melon trade. Our approach seemed to cause an unusual commotion at the landing, and we naturally attributed this to the activity among the merchants, induced by the arrival of possible purchasers of the abundant stock in hand. But we learned from a German-speaking policeman who met us as we went ashore that the market-women had taken our fleet for the torpedo-boats of which they had heard, and were in a great fright, believing we were about to attack the place. We begged him to assure them that we had no use for the town, but only for some of the projectiles we saw piled up there under the trees, and feminine terrors were slowly forgotten in the excitement of trade. Whoever has seen the Southern negro busy with a watermelon may be able to imagine our satisfaction at the quality of the fruit we found, and any one familiar with the capacity of a canoe may appreciate the size of the melons from the fact that we were unable to take in the monsters. But Vukovár is not all watermelons and timid market-women, as we found when we strolled up into the town, puzzled over the signs in the Cyrillic alphabet, and marvelled at the embroidered garments festooned at the shop doors, at the pretentious cafés, and the Franco-Italian architecture--the most imposing we had seen since leaving Budapest.

The heat was intense and the streets almost deserted as we paddled away directly after mid-day, and floated down past great bluffs, with hot gullies filled with herds of swine seeking to avoid the heat by frequent baths, and scarcely distinguishable in color from the baked mud on which they slept. Late in the day, having joined company with some lumber rafts we had been passing and repassing for the last day or two, we drew up the canoes on a pleasant park-like meadow, only a foot or two above the water, with great trees and firmer turf than we had seen for a long time. The rafts tied up to the shore just above us, and the smoke of our several camp-fires soon curled up among the trees, and floated away in the clear air of the perfect summer evening. Our first visitor was a Croatian, who, having served in the Austrian army, had learned a little German, and was only too anxious to air his knowledge. He prepared us for the visit of a band of gypsies who were camping in the vicinity, cautioned us to watch all our loose articles, and loudly sang the praises of one of the gypsy women but lately married,

who, he declared, was as beautiful as a queen--probably meaning the Queen of Servia. To be sure, the next morning, shortly after dawn, a motley crowd straggled up to our encampment, among them the gypsy belle, with the bearing

and gait of a duchess. Tobacco stood in the place of a formal introduction, and even the conscious beauty asked for a cigarette, and puffed away like a veteran smoker. The keen-eyed old rascal who, by virtue of advanced age or superior cunning, was recognized as the chief of the party, took the liveliest interest in our attempts to sketch the beauty, and when the sketch was done, calmly proposed to give us the model to carry away with us. As the offer was made in Roumanian, a language not then familiar to our ears, we did not at first comprehend the generous nature of the gift.

“Take her with you,” he said. “You’ll go, won’t you?”

“Indeed I will,” replied the dusky beauty, “if they’ll take me to Bucharest.”

“But if she goes away with us it will make a scandal, and the husband will have something to say about it,” we timidly suggested.

“Not at all,” insisted the old heathen; “he’s away now, and if he finds her gone when he comes back, he’ll easily get another wife.”

This morality of the Red Indian order so astonished us that we did not readily offer the excuse that our boats could carry but one person apiece, but we sweetened our refusal of the gift by an abundance of tobacco and a few old clothes, hastily launched our canoes, and retreated down the river.

The railway from Budapest to Belgrade crosses the Danube at Peterwardein, little less than a day’s paddle from Vukovár, and the iron bridge is the last one of the ugly series that disfigures the river at intervals from its source. Peterwardein, the Gibraltar of the Danube, is a great fortress, elaborately intricate in construction, towering high above the stream, and overlooking the modern town of Neusatz opposite, at the mouth of a branch of the Franzens Canal. A bridge of boats connects the fortress with the town a short distance below the railway, and is actually the last bridge over the Danube. The commercial life of the river seemed to revive again at the mouth of the canal, and as we sailed past the vine-covered hills of Carlowitz and the town of that name, our old enemies the freight steamers puffed up-stream, leaving a dangerous wake, and fouling the sweet air with noisome smoke.

On the perfect summer morning when we left our lovely camping-ground on a meadow below Carlowitz, and drifted down into the silvery light of morning which glorified the river, the hills, and the distant landscape, we were in the mood to enjoy exactly what the Danube offered for our entertainment. On one bank peasants gathered in large parties at every convenient spot, and were engaged in various domestic operations, quite as frank and unconscious in their actions as if they were in the shelter of their own homes. From the villages at some distance back from the river whole families migrate at frequent intervals to temporary camps by the water’s edge, bringing with them their live-stock, cart-loads of corn, and their accumulated washing. While the women are busy with soap and mallet, the men winnow grain, and carry it to the current mills to be ground, and the children watch the pigs and fowls, who are enjoying in their way this brief outing. On the opposite shore may sometimes be seen, on a level piece of public land, great collections of ricks of all sizes and shapes, when the neighboring farmers assemble to thresh their harvest in common, each according to his own means and methods. Some beat it out with flails and pitchforks, others drive horses around on it, and a few make use of the improved machinery of English manufacture. Here it is readily loaded on lighters, to be towed up to Budapest or Vienna, or perhaps to be floated down-stream to the English steamers on the Black Sea. From one group to another, from one shore to the

other, we went as slowly as the resistless current would let us, fascinated by the cheerful busy life, and always finding each new scene more attractive than the last. Here the Servian women were beating their coarse garments, and hanging them untidily to dry on the framework of the carts. A few rods lower down, at a bivouac of Saxons, piles of beautiful white linen and the freshest of blue garments contrasted agreeably with the squalor of the neighboring camp. These peasants we found polite but reserved; the Servians were usually noisy and talkative, and the Magyars cheery, sympathetic, and communicative.

Far down the glassy reach beyond Ó Szlankamen to the east a long range of flat hills now appeared, marking the course of the sluggish Theiss, and on the opposite bank we saw great rocks, scarcely distinguishable from the hard mud bluffs, but marking a distinct geological change in the landscape. Here on the scorched hill-sides frequent villages were baking in the hot sun, and copper-covered monstrosities of church-spires flashed and glistened in the brilliant light. A ruined castle towered high above the river where the hills crowd the stream out of its course, and then the river broadened into a lake-like expanse, and stretched away until the left bank, always flat and without a break, lost itself entirely in the distance, and sky and water seemed to meet as at the sea horizon. Far away to the south bold blue peaks, the sentinels of the northern range of mountainous Servia, showed where Belgrade stands; and, in pleasant perspective, high bluffs on the right bank, with here and there a church spire, were reflected with all the glories of the midsummer sky in the perfect mirror of the majestic stream. A wonderful sunset glow colored all the landscape as we encamped under a high bluff, in full sight of Semlin and the Servian capital beyond. We fancied we could see in the glowing distance slender minarets behind the great fortress which guards the frontier, and in the perfect quiet of the lingering twilight imagined we could hear the hum of the busy towns. The song of the shepherd on the opposite meadows echoed sweetly as we lay by the camp-fire that

beautiful evening and enjoyed for the first time in our wanderings an hour or two of delightful leisure in the open air.

It was now nearly eight weeks since we launched our fleet in the head-waters of the Danube, and, with the exception of a few days spent at Vienna, Hainburg, Budapest, and on the Franzens Canal, we had passed the greater part of our time, day and night, in the canoes. On the upper river, where we cooked over spirit-lamps because we were never able to have a fire, we had no great inducement to sit up after dark, and consequently sought our snug beds in the canoes very soon after dinner. After we reached Hungary, however, we found it not only practicable but more convenient to use wood for cooking, and from the frontier downward we always had the proper and agreeable accompaniment of every comfortable bivouac--a cheerful fire. But it also happened that all through Hungary we found so much to interest us we could never manage to stop for the night before dark; and since it always took us two hours or more to make camp, cook and eat our dinner, and tidy up afterwards, we were obliged to continue our custom of turning in (literally) as soon as possible, in order to be able to rise at daybreak. The evening we camped in sight of Belgrade, the dewless, balmy air of the river so soothed our nerves, and the glowing landscape was such a pleasure to our eyes, that we lay in the firelight and, regardless of the morrow, watched for a long time the glittering constellations as they slowly came in sight; and when at last we slept, we dreamed of Turks and sieges and the turmoil of belligerent races, whose territory now lay within reach of a few paddle strokes.

The happy chant of Servian girls marching down the steep paths in the bluffs, laden with jugs for Danube water, was our accompaniment as we paddled along in the early morning towards the steamer-landing at Semlin, the last Hungarian town on the right bank of the Danube, a busy little commercial place with all the fascinating characteristics of a frontier town. A populous market-place, numerous cafés of the Turkish order--the first we had seen--and a population largely Servian, with more barbaric types, and wearing costumes plainly transitional between the Hungarian and the Turkish, kept us interested longer than we anticipated, and well repaid the delay.

From Semlin to Belgrade is but a half-hour’s paddle down a bend behind the Krieg’s Insel and across the clear, green stream of the Save. Above the great fortress which occupies the whole area of a high promontory at the junction

of the rivers, where a church and other edifices are half hidden among bastions and parapets, an immense cream-colored Government building extends an imposing mass, and, as seen from the river, divides the town into two parts. To the left is the old Turkish quarter on the Danube, in recent years almost depopulated of Mahometans, and with only one insignificant mosque still preserved; and to the right, Belgrade proper, along the Save and the heights which extend back into the country. Lumberyards and the usual motley collection of buildings hid the town from us as we slowly paddled up the sluggish current of the Save to a great bathing establishment, all gay with flowers, where a large contingent of the youthful population of the city were disporting themselves, naked, in canoes of simple construction and gaudy color. Our arrival caused very little flutter on the shore. We saw one fez on a small boy, and fancied that on landing we should find everything suggesting the East, and fierce officials haughtily demanding our passports. But we moored our canoes alongside the bath-house and went ashore without a question, found everybody in European dress, and met a polite soldier-policeman who volunteered to look out for our craft, and immediately busied himself with boxing the ears of the inquisitive youngsters who ventured too near the dainty vessels. We were not long, however, in finding novelties of dress and architecture, for at a short distance from our landing-place we entered the outskirts of the city, and passed through a street quite as Eastern in aspect as any in the heart of Stamboul. Wretched wooden hovels with shattered tiles and crumbling plaster; dingy low cafés with pallid Turks inhaling with indolent sighs the stupefying smoke of nargiléhs; open air cooking-places where unsavory messes sizzled on gridirons; and general squalor, mustiness, and filth everywhere. From this quarter, steep, ill-paved streets mount to the higher part of the town, where the hotels, theatres, and palaces are, and pleasant avenues lead out to the luxurious residential suburb on the heights beyond. But all Belgrade, at the date of our visit, was much like the normal condition of Broadway, and New York in general. The streets were everywhere torn up for water-pipes and sewers, sidewalks were being widened and levelled, and there was every indication of a serious attempt to improve the city, or some job in the control of the City Fathers. The heat was intense and almost unbearable as we explored the streets and park and wandered through the fortress. When the sun reached the zenith, all Belgrade was as quiet as Pompeii, for the inhabitants withdrew in-doors, and left the streets void of life and movement. Even the hissing of frying fat in the numerous cook-shops seemed hushed for the time; the vender of kukurutz (green corn on the ear) slept in a shadow; and

the Bulgarian bozaji, selling slightly fermented maize beer, alone broke the drowsy silence with his mournful cries. There was absolutely nothing to see, and therefore we also sought shelter, and sleepily waited for the town to come to life again. In the middle of the afternoon a few hurrying peasant women, their brilliant dresses quite out of harmony with the commonplace aspect of the streets, flashed along in the sunshine; one or two men with effeminate lace-trimmed tunics, plaited like imitations of the Albanian fustinella, strode proudly past, unconscious that hats of London make and elastic-sided boots made them look extremely ridiculous; and so the streets gradually resumed their normal activity as the afternoon coolness came on. We soon yielded to the tempting invitation of a fresh breeze and sailed away into the Danube again, escorted by a fleet of Servian canoes with naked crews.

We began to think that in crossing the frontier we had passed the limit beyond which the modern invention of modesty has not yet been universally accepted. It certainly seemed so, for the bronzed figures of the naked youths excited no comment on the shore as we passed. Rounding the water-battery and drifting along the old Turkish quarter, we came to a large pleasant meadow, glowing in the rich light of the afternoon sun. Here scores of men, as unclothed as the horses they bestrode, were riding their animals out into the shallows, bathing with them in the yellow stream. Like so many figures from the frieze of the Parthenon, they sat their horses with perfect grace, saddleless and bridleless, and now dashed along, throwing up clouds of spray, and again disappeared in a golden cloud of dust on the meadow. A party of young men and boys, equally in Spartan attire, were having an exciting foot-race along the level turf, and this little spot was for the time a sculptors’ paradise. We drifted slowly along, watching the athletic figures in the wonderful light, all unconscious in our preoccupation that the current was carrying us into a scene of still more surprising simplicity and innocence. Our canoes, if left to themselves, would always turn round and float down-stream stern foremost; and that afternoon, as on many other occasions, we found the trick to be of advantage, for we could longer watch the unusual spectacle on the meadow. When we could see no more in the direction of the dazzling sun, we paddled the canoes around, and found ourselves, to our surprise, quite near a number of Servian families, who were taking a refreshing bath--old and young, men, women, and children--in the sandy shallows. No bath-house had given them refuge on the bank, nor had they considered it necessary to disfigure themselves with drapery, except a few of the women, who wore an apology for an apron tied around the waist.

It was a sudden change from the contemplation of figures of classical grace to the unwitting interruption of the bath of a dozen unlovely families, and it was a parallel plunge from the accustomed luxuries of pleasant camp grounds above Belgrade to the mud flats on the river-side below. We had drifted along the meadow so slowly that we found the daylight already waning and a threatening storm close at hand before we thought of camping. Then we hastened to the first spot where there was a possible landing. Here we slept until the ring of scythes at the very bows of our canoes brought us to consciousness again, and we opened the tents to see a sunny meadow among the trees, all dotted over with the white figures of peasants slashing at the ranks of coarse grass that fringed the sun-baked shore.