Chapter IV

It was on Saturday, June 27th, at about five o’clock in the afternoon that we left Ulm, and the following day about noon we reached Lauingen, having spent most of the forenoon in camp rigging our sails, properly adjusting the tents, and doing a hundred other odd jobs which the ownership of every boat entails. The Admiral, who had preceded the rest of the fleet by an hour or more, was in the centre of an interested group of natives when we hauled alongside at the landing, and all Lauingen in its Sunday best was lounging near by, happy in the entertainment which the arrival of the strange craft offered. The old town walls are half hidden by excrescences of modern construction which cling to them for their whole extent, sheltering a notable proportion of the inhabitants. With this exception the place is not materially changed since the sixteenth century, and still has to a very remarkable degree the character of an old Dutch town both in details of construction and in the general character of the domestic architecture. Most of the large buildings are warehouses and residences combined, and there are few front doors which are not provided with a little side window or squint set in at an angle so that the street can be seen without opening the door. All distinctive costume has been modernized out of the place. The people look cheerful, active, and prosperous to a degree unusual in such a remote town, and we were fain to believe that this vitality was due to the leaven of those of the inhabitants who had been to America, not a few of whom greeted us with an exaggerated Hoboken dialect. But the modern spirit has not obliterated all the queer old customs, and Sunday was busy with parades of turnvereins and sporting clubs with all the pageantry common to the ancient guilds. In the midst of the festivities a stately carriage drove into the market-place where the statue of Albertus Magnus, the famous scholar of the thirteenth century, was erected ten years ago in the shadow of the great tower with its sixteen stories. It was a wonderful old vehicle, with broad leathern springs and great hood, a huge rack behind piled high with luggage, a seat in front occupied by a servant--a buxom country girl--and with a long pole like a single shaft, to which one horse was attached in a sort of casual fashion by a harness of the most antiquated and peculiar pattern. Under the hood sat a young man who held the lines and guided the horse across the square towards the inn, while the servant-girl, with folded arms, occasionally nodded and smiled at friends in the multitude. We fancied this must be some local dignitary, such was the grandeur and stateliness of the turnout, but we found on inquiry that it was only a conveyance from a neighboring town bringing a commercial traveller with his packs. Truly, even this much-derided occupation has its agreeable features in Bavaria.

It was an exceedingly hot day, and the river for the next dozen miles or so was not very interesting, as its channel had been confined between dike-like banks through a great steaming marsh. Every two hundred metres of the distance is marked by a numbered post, and from our low position these were often the most prominent objects in view. The hissing of the water, which began at the confluence of the Iller, was always plainly heard, but the water was so muddy that we could not discover whether or not the cause of the sound was, as it is said to be, the rolling of pebbles on the river-bed. The reaction from our brief but busy visit to Lauingen put us in rather a quiet frame of mind. The drowsy heat was not stimulating to the ambition for sight-seeing, and we scarcely looked at the hills where the battle-fields of Höchstädt and Blenheim are located, they were so far away from the river and the events seemed so very long ago. We had more interest, moreover, in the near foreground with its occasional clusters of brilliant bloom. Alfred Parsons says of this region: “For a long way above and below Ulm the banks are lined with small willows and coarse grasses; occasional bunches of forget-me-not and some iris and valerian are the only flowers. On a hill-side near Donauwörth I saw bright pink dog-roses, campanulas, geranium, veronica, epipactis, Turk’s-cap lilies, pink coronilla, which is abundant, and a tall white composite with groups of daisy-like flowers and a leaf like the tansy; also a white erigeron.”

_Lauingen._]

The glorious, lazy afternoon was well on the wane when we came to Donauwörth, a blaze of richly-colored roofs and lichen-stained walls and with an enchanting skyline of gables and towers. We left it with reluctance before we had seen half of its beauties. The restlessness of the Danube had begun to eat into our souls and, without our knowing it, had created in us a new appetite--a craving for constant motion.

Not far below Donauwörth the Lech contributes its pale-green waters, flowing northerly from the water-shed of the distant Alps beyond Lake Constance, and it brought down to us for our entertainment several rafts with cheery river folk, and we began the next day in their company. They ran ashore at the upper end of the town of Neuburg, where the Danube is crossed by a large stone bridge, and we stopped there as well. Finding, however, that we were uncomfortably far from the centre of the town, we soon paddled off again, shot the seething rapids under the bridge and, hurried along by the current, landed after some difficulty and serious bumping against the perpendicular stone wall, at a broad flight of stone steps opposite a cheerful-looking hotel with a formal row of standard roses all along in front, tied to neatly-painted sticks surmounted by gilded balls. We had already gone ashore when our attention was called to our canoes by the excited shouts of the crowd hanging over the stone parapet. To our horror we saw one of the long rafts swinging down under the bridge with irresistible momentum directly upon our canoes, and the raftsmen making frantic gestures at us. We understood that in order to check the raft they were obliged to beach her in the shallow water near the steps, and, indeed, she was headed for that point, and no human power could stop her. For a moment it seemed as if our canoes must be ground to splinters, but we rushed down and promptly dragged them a few yards up-stream, utilizing the noisome mouth of a sewer for a harbor for one, and lifting the others bodily out upon a narrow ledge of broken rock. Then, dashing into the water, we put all our strength against the raft and she ground along within a foot of our precious boats, and we were saved from our friends.

It took an unusual quantity of beer to cool us off after this exertion, and our afternoon cruise was not further remarkable except for the sight of various immense ferry-boats swinging across the stream attached to wire guys and bearing two great loads of hay, cattle and all, and for a visit to Ingolstadt, a military post of great importance and correspondingly unattractive aspect. We camped that night on the beautiful point of a low meadow where our shadows fell in long lines towards the neighboring town of Vohburg, almost too picturesque to be real, and were promptly and unwillingly introduced to our first Danube mosquitoes, who kept us diverted if not very much amused during dinner, and until we had crawled into our curtained berths and let them buzz and pipe in futile rage against the impenetrable gauze.

Vohburg is said to be the most virtuous town in Bavaria, the reward of virtue there being a dowry of 50 guldens ($25) to each maiden of unblemished reputation when she takes the marriage vows. One of the notable results of this bounty is the encouragement of intermarriage, for the youths are of frugal dispositions, and fifty guldens are fifty guldens here quite as much as anywhere. Our first visitors the next morning were the storks of the town who solemnly sought the early worm and the casual frog, and they took flight at the approach of a troop of the ugliest children to be found where the German language is heard--and that is saying a great deal. They stood a long time in a circle around our camp, either too much astonished or too stupid to reply to our volley of questions. We couldn’t help thinking, as we looked at their unintelligent faces, that it would be much better for the race if the dowry fund should be embezzled by the town-clerk and vice rule triumphant for a while. Our curiosity was not satisfied by this slight glimpse of the inhabitants of Vohburg, and besides, the ancient town gates, the massive ruins of the burgh--which was destroyed, like everything else about here, by the Swiss in 1641--and the old church-tower, stuck full of great stone cannon balls, tempted us to land. Possibly the impression gained from a brief visit was not a just one, but although we found the architecture interesting and the people friendly and courteous, we could distinguish nothing of the charm which our imaginations had pictured to us as the result of generations of prosperity, peace, and domestic virtue.

The Danube is never really monotonous, for, apart from the ever-changing landscape, the life on the bank offers endless interest to the observer. We had drifted for a couple of days through a broad, flat country, and never had experienced a dull moment. Although we were not impatient for a change of scenery, we began to look forward with pleasant anticipations, soon after leaving Vohburg, to the chain of hills that formed the horizon to the east and north, promising narrow gorges and rapid water. Except for our increasing eagerness for progress as the hills began to take definite shape in detail towards the middle of the forenoon, we should have undoubtedly landed at Eining, a little cluster of houses on the right bank, near which are the remains of the great Roman frontier station Abusina, which, from its topographical situation, and also from its geographical position near the most northerly point of the river’s course, was chosen as the chief outpost of the Danube provinces against the German barbarians. This station was maintained with two or three interruptions from its establishment in 15 B.C. until the end of the fifth century. Across the river are distinctly visible the outlines of Trajan’s wall, which extended from this point to Wiesbaden on the Rhine. We were much interested by what we could see of these remains, for we knew that to be but the first in the long series of similar monuments along the Danube to the Roman occupation, which never fail to excite the wonder of the traveller at the enterprise and persistent courage of the great Roman general. Near at hand, too, is Vergen of the “Niebelungenlied,” where King Gunther and his Niebelungen crossed the Danube on their way to Budapest and the court of King Attila. It was at this spot that Hagen tried to drown the priest of the expedition because the water witches had predicted that the holy man alone out of the 10,000 in the expedition should return safe to Worms. The facts of history and the fascinating figments of tradition seemed to draw for us across this smiling valley a frontier clearly defined in our imaginations, beyond which limit we were to enter upon a new phase of our journey.

The Benedictine abbey of Weltenburg, with its crenellated walls and extensive façades, placed in exactly the right spot on the river-bank, like the composition of the theatrical drop-curtain, stands at the head of a narrow, rocky gorge, about four miles in length, more grand and impressive than any on the river above. Weltenburg is an easy excursion from Kelheim, and divides the attraction of the neighborhood with the Befreiungshalle, or Hall of Liberation, near the latter place. Knowing this fact, we were not surprised to find in the midst of the mournful relics of past grandeur the liveliest kind of a beer-garden, with a half-acre of tables under shade trees in the court-yard, and regiments of stone mugs waiting to be filled at the convenient tap of

a great brewery in one of the monastery buildings. The clock struck twelve as we entered the enclosure. Every one rose and uncovered his head, and stood like the scattered supernumeraries on the operatic stage. The peal of the organ in the adjacent church added to the dramatic effect, and if the whole company had burst forth in a chorus we would have been little surprised at it. The gorgeousness of the church interior contrasts painfully with the poverty of the establishment, only too plainly indicated by the

ill-kept grounds and the general air of neglect on all sides. Excursionists frequently take the short trip through the gorge in small flat-boats rowed by women, and there is another monastery on the left bank, half-way down, so there need be no more than thirty minutes between jorums of beer, the important adjuncts of these trips. The river, narrowed to one-third of its width above, winds between perpendicular limestone cliffs so smooth that it has been necessary to attach iron rings to the rock at intervals near the water’s edge for the use of boatmen, and the women rowers often tie up their boats to these rings to rest during the upward trip. The heavily-wooded hills overhanging the left bank at the lower end of the gorge are crowned by the Befreiungshalle, a huge, circular building in classical style, begun by Lewis I. of Bavaria in 1852, and inaugurated on October 18, 1863, the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Leipsic. This monumental structure is of imposing dimensions, the dome rising nearly 200 feet above the great stone platform, reached by a noble flight of steps. On the exterior the different provinces of Germany are represented by eighteen colossal female figures, with corresponding trophies and candelabra, and the interior, which is lined with polished marble of various colors, is surrounded by white marble angels symbolical of victory, with tablets bearing the names of famous German generals, bronze shields made from captured French guns, and inscriptions celebrating various battles.

Landing at Kelheim we toiled up the steep hill in the hot sun, and then cooled ourselves in the twilight of the interior, skating in felt slippers over the mirror-like pavement, and listening to the remarkable echoes which magnified the slightest sound into thunder. We were waylaid on our descent from the hill by a garrulous ex-citizen of Brooklyn, whose fulsome praise of Americans and everything American finally drove us out of the cool shelter of a river-side beer-garden and into the blistering cockpits of the canoes. We set forth with the vague intention of passing the night somewhere above and near Ratisbon. Even before we came in sight of the town we looked everywhere for a camp ground, but a high-road on either side left not an acre of ground at the water’s edge where we could land without becoming the focus of observation from a dozen farm-houses. We therefore pushed on until sunset, and just as the beautiful twin towers of Ratisbon cathedral loomed up across a wide open valley to the east, we landed on a quiet meadow, carpeted with sweet grass, and there we slept until the peasants trudging to market along the bank in the early morning awoke us with their voices.