Chapter XIII

From the heights of Belgrade we had seen the blue summits of mountains far away to the south--the outlying spurs of the great Carpathian range--and having threaded a tortuous way through the great Hungarian plain, we now looked forward with exhilaration to the rugged scenery we were soon to enjoy, and were eager to welcome a change in the horizon. We saw on the map no town of importance between the Servian frontier and Orsova, at the Iron Gates; and since we were not unwilling to have a little quiet after so many days of excitement among novelties of type and costume, we noticed with satisfaction as we went along that the flat shore on the Hungarian side and the low hills opposite offered us no temptation to land. To be sure, we were still in some doubt as to our probable reception in a Servian village, for Belgrade was the only Servian place we had visited, and we could not judge from our experience at the capital what might happen if we went ashore in a remote town. We had heard many tales of the difficulties of travelling in the remote districts of Servia, and had provided ourselves with passports properly viséd in many languages. As we had no occasion to show them in Belgrade, we now began to have some curiosity about their usefulness, and we contemplated going ashore at a Servian village for no better reason than to test this question. But, before we found an attractive landing-place, we saw far below us in the distance,

about noon on the day after leaving the frontier, what appeared to be a curious row of buildings on the low Servian shore, stretching out into the river like piers of a great railway bridge, or a line of grain elevators.

At first we thought it was mirage, which had hitherto often deceived us by its distortion of forms and exaggeration of heights, but as we paddled on against the wind we soon saw it was a collection of solid architectural forms. It was, however, only when we were within a mile or so of the town that we recognized in what we had taken to be a modern landmark the huge towers and walls of the great mediæval citadel of Semendria (Smédérévo, in Servian), rising in all their ancient dignity from the very waters of the Danube, and overtopping with their masses of solid masonry the little town modestly nestling in the shadow of the great fortress. Of recent years Semendria has become of commercial importance as a shipping port for grain, and when we entered the town its narrow streets were blocked by hundreds of laden ox-carts, all patiently waiting their turn at the public scales, where the weight of the grain is guaranteed by the town officers before it is delivered to the lighters. Through a motley crowd of Servians in barbaric fur caps, red sashes, rawhide sandals, and the coarsest of homespun garments, we made our way to the fortress. The great walls enclose a triangular space of ten or twelve acres, occupying the whole of a low point between the River Jessava and the Danube. The apex of the triangle at the junction of the rivers is a citadel of great strength, built in 1432 by the despot George Brankovitch. It is still in wonderful preservation. Indeed, the walls of the whole enclosure and the twenty-three great square towers show remarkably few signs of decay, and, with the exception of the destruction of the wooden platforms, are almost as sound as the day they were built. Here and there an inscription, or a fragment of a statue built into the walls, proves that the importance of the town dates as far back as the Roman occupation, when this was undoubtedly one of a series of strongholds along the river.

The barracks of the Servian garrison which stand in the great enclosure appear like huts in comparison with the immense towers and high walls of the mediæval structure, and a regiment of infantry may be quite lost sight of among the tangled bushes and the thick foliage of the trees which cover a large part of the ground. From the top of one of the great towers we saw below and before us a panorama of varied beauty, extending from the heights of Belgrade to the Carpathian range, faintly shadowed in the distance beyond the glittering expanse of the Danube, which spreads out into great broad reaches, with numerous islands, and, like its smaller self among the mountains of Baden, pauses and gathers volume and strength for the dash into the great gorge that cleaves the jagged mass of mountains for fifty miles or more before again resuming its quiet flow.

As we went away from Semendria the chief of police was among the party assembled to see us off, and here, we thought, was the opportunity to see whether our passports would be honored. We offered them to the official, modestly at first, but he would not even look at the envelopes.

“But they are our passports,” we urged. “They cost us a lot of money and trouble, and if no official looks at them they will be wasted, for they are only good for one year!”

But he resolutely declined to have anything to do with them, although we increased the urgency of our request almost to the strength of a demand, and we left, quite ready to believe the statement of a scoffing friend in Budapest, who declared that any one could travel the whole length of the Danube with no more of a passport than a restaurant bill of fare, which would satisfy the officials as well as the best parchment with signatures and seals.

At Bazias, on the Hungarian side of the river, the terminus of the railway from Temesvár, and the point where the tourist usually takes a steamer for the trip through the Kasan defile and the Iron Gates, there is nothing on shore more interesting than a railway restaurant; but the landscape is very grand and beautiful. The hills completely mask the course of the river as the traveller approaches them from up-stream, and the fine ruin of Castle Rama, on the Servian side, seems to stand on the shore of a large lake with a southern boundary of great mountains. From Rama the river sweeps majestically around to the south past Bazias, and narrows somewhat as it winds among the first great foot-hills of the mountain range, spreading out again after a few miles into another lake-like reach, which in turn has on its southern horizon an apparently impassable chain of mountains--this time the real Carpathians.

As we crossed the river from Rama towards the cluster of houses on the water’s edge at Bazias, we observed that the little village, dwarfed to insignificance by the towering hills above it, was all gay with flags. On closer approach we distinguished near the landing the form of a low gray vessel quite unlike any craft we had hitherto seen. This proved to be an Austrian gunboat, and the occasion of the display of bunting was the birthday of the Emperor Francis Joseph. As we drifted down towards the man-of-war we hoisted all the flags we had, and, as we were passing in review with all the dignity we could command, we were startled by the loud report of a champagne cork pointed in our direction, and fired, as it were, across our bows. We surrendered at once and unconditionally, and exchanged cards with a group of officers celebrating the Emperor’s birthday on the quarter-deck. We found our captivity so little irksome that we willingly prolonged it until we were admonished by the position of the sun in the heavens that we must be off if we would reach the entrance to the Carpathian gorge before dark. Our haste was due to no more cogent reason than ambition to begin the fight with the river at the so-called cataracts. These obstructions had been described to us by friends who had made the journey in a steamer as extremely dangerous, and, as we neared the mountains, all the river-men we talked with warned us of the perils of the stream below, and advised us on no account to attempt the passage of the cataracts without a pilot. But we could not forget the collapse of the Strudel and Wirbel bugbear in the upper river, and could not bring ourselves to apprehend any great danger in rapids where steamers are constantly passing up and down with loaded lighters in tow. Even our new-found friends on the gunboat, who had just made the trip, cautioned us not to attempt the passage in our frail canoes, and took great pains to show us the dangerous points on their charts. Of course, the more we heard of these terrors to navigation the more eager we became to look upon them ourselves, and, while we did not propose to spoil our trip by the loss of our canoes, we also did not intend to take anybody’s testimony of the dangers, which were, after all, only relative. The last words our naval advisers said to us, as we regretfully left them, was to be sure to take a pilot at Drenkova, the last steamboat-landing above the rapids.

From the broad reach just below Bazias the whole horizon to the south and east appears to be a solid wall of rocky heights, and is without a break visible to the eye. For about twenty miles the river winds gently across a pleasant valley, divides around a large island, and then sweeps straight down towards the huge barrier, which extends to the right and left as far as the eye can see. As we paddled along in the quiet current past the Servian town of Gradistje, and came nearer and nearer to the mass of rugged peaks which cut sharply against the sky, we grew more and more impatient to discover the course of the river through the chain, and unconsciously increased the rapidity and the force of our stroke until we sped along as if paddling a race. Suddenly, as we were passing the end of the large island, the landscape opened to the eastward like the shifting scenes on a stage, and the river, sweeping past a high isolated rock in mid-stream, was seen to plunge with accelerated speed directly into a narrow cleft between immense limestone cliffs, and to disappear in the depths of the gorge. Guarding the entrance to this defile, the ruin of the Castle of Golubáç, on the Servian shore, piles its towers high on a spur which juts out boldly over the river, and shades a pleasant little green meadow by the water-side. The foundations of the castle are said to be Roman, and there is a tradition that Helen, the Empress of Greece, was imprisoned here; but the ruins now visible are those of the fortress built by Maria Térésa in the middle of last century. Along the Hungarian bank the famous highway of Count Széchényi, leading from the town of Moldova just above to Orsova, at the Roumanian frontier, shows the straight line of its cuttings and embankments but a few feet above the water. The smooth, perpendicular cliffs are perforated by numerous caverns, one of which tradition has marked as the place whence issue the swarms of vicious flies which persecute the cattle in the summer-time. A local legend attributes the origin of these flies to the body of the dragon killed by St. George.

The green meadow under Golubáç invited us to a pleasant camp, for night was fast coming on as we finished our sketching, and we were loath to leave the charming, romantic spot. But one of our party, unable to resist the impulse to penetrate the gathering gloom of the defile, had drifted on and was lost to sight. The whole sky was tinged with the coppery red of sunset when we set out to overtake him. The river whirled and rushed and wrestled with our paddles as we floated on into the deepening twilight. Now and then a great boiling under our very keels would throw us out of our course, and make the light canoes bound along with an unfamiliar and disturbing motion. On and on we went, unable longer to see a map, and with no means of determining where and when we should come upon the dangerous rapids and whirlpools that lay somewhere in our path. Frequent camp-fires sparkled at the water’s edge, and from one to another we paddled, waking the echoes with the shrill notes of our whistles, until at last, just as we had concluded to give up the search, certain that we had passed our companion in the darkness, we heard his welcome hail, and were soon in camp.

The plaintive song of a peasant girl, spinning from a distaff as she walked through the rustling maize-field behind our camp, brought us to our feet long before we had slept off the effects of our sixty miles’ paddle of the day before; and, eager to be at the rapids, we ate a hasty breakfast and were off down the reach, very like the Hudson in scenery, to the little coaling station of Drenkova, where we had been told to take a pilot. We trimmed our canoes with unusual care, tested our paddles, stowed away all loose articles, and put everything in fighting trim. Although we did not propose to undergo the humiliation of following a pilot through the rapids, we thought it best to take all reasonable means to find the best channel, and we therefore landed at Drenkova, and consulted the agent of the steamship company there. He could give us but very few directions which were of any use, but offered us a pilot, and advised us strongly not to attempt the passage alone. But the sight of puffing steamers slowly dragging loaded barges up the stream was to our minds satisfactory proof of the nature of the obstructions, and, a little impatient at the delay, we pushed off, followed by repeated cautions and confused directions. From our long experience with the Danube, we had come to believe that it was a thoroughly well-behaved and well-regulated river, whose mild tricks were easily understood, and whose current would not endanger the veriest tub that ever disgraced a navigable stream. We were only too anxious, then, to see what the river could really do in the way of making navigation difficult and dangerous; and, besides, never having tested our canoes except in the choppy seas of the sudden wind-storms, we were ready to risk a good deal to find out how they would act in the baffling currents and waves of a real rapid.

Just below Drenkova the Danube bends to the south, and makes its first angry dash over the ledges of rock that stretch between the sheer cliffs on the Servian side and the rocky, wooded heights opposite. The river was about its average height on the day we went down, and no rocks showed above the surface. A strong head-wind so disturbed the water that we were unable to judge of the run of the currents, nor exactly tell where the rapids really were until we were in the midst of them. To add to our difficulties, several steamers were towing up-stream, and the wash from their paddles, necessary to be avoided at all times, increased the turmoil of the rushing waters. There was nothing to do, then, but to take our own course far enough away to avoid the steamer wash, if possible, and still near enough the main channel to escape the whirlpools, which we had been told were the greatest dangers of the passage. Between this Scylla and Charybdis the way was not easy, but we paddled steadily forward, breasting the waves, throwing spray mast-high, and plunging along with great speed. Suddenly, between two of the canoes a great vortex appeared, and with giddy revolving motion seemed to rush on viciously in chase of the foremost boat. Never were paddles used with greater vigor or better skill, and the dainty crafts swept gracefully around on the outer ring of the whirlpool, just out of reach of the resistless clutch of the swirl, until the yawning vortex gradually closed up again and its force was idly spent. The Danube had given us a notion of what it might do if trifled with.

A second rapid followed the first, not far below it, at the end of a broad reach surrounded by high mountains, and although we were not conscious of any great increase in the speed of the current, we heard in a few moments the roar of the Greben rapids--the longest and most difficult of navigation above those at the Iron Gates. As we came near, we saw a line of white water reaching across from shore to shore, apparently without a break. We were speedily approaching this rank of tossing waves, where jets of glittering spray flew high in the air, when we fortunately saw a steamer passing up near the Servian shore, and paddled rapidly across to find the channel, where we would be less likely to meet the only enemy we feared--the whirlpools. Before we had time to deliberate on the best passage among the rocks we were in the midst of the tumbling, dashing waters, and almost before we caught our breath again we were in a comparatively still pool under the immense crag of Greben, which, pushing far out into the stream and narrowing the channel, causes the current to flow with great swiftness over the jagged ledges of rock that dam the river at this point. In our exhilarating dashes through the waves we had not shipped a spoonful of water, although our decks had been constantly awash, even to the very top of the coamings. As we neared the last pitch of the river at this point, we had acquired such confidence in our canoes that we dashed boldly into the roughest of the leaping waves, fired with enthusiasm for the unaccustomed sport, and filled with the excitement of our adventure. The canoes fairly leaped from crest to crest of the billows, and we could not see each other for the screen of dashing spray. A moment or two of active dodging and very hard paddling and we came out breathless at the landing of a temporary station where the international corps of engineers are quartered while the great work of improving the navigation is in progress.