Chapter VI

The poplars of Passau came in sight early on the morning of the Fourth of July, but we had no intention of celebrating the day, particularly as one-third of our party took only a languid interest in the event. Neither did we care to meet any more boating men, however agreeable they might be, for, besides the consciousness of our false position, we had a realizing sense of the value of our time, and almost begrudged the hours spent at these boating entertainments. We avoided the rowing club at Passau, and stole in behind a floating bath-house and hid our canoes away there. This move did not save us, however, for as we were crossing the bridge, two rowing men who had seen us come down-stream were on hand to waylay us, and before we could enter a protest we were whisked off to luncheon. The town is attractively situated on a high promontory at the junction of the Inn and the Danube, and is, indeed, as far as natural environments go, one of the most beautiful spots of the whole river. The town itself, or at least as much of it as we were allowed by our friends to examine, is full of interest, although not distinguished by any remarkable monuments of art. The unruly Inn, which is always ready to overflow at a moment’s notice, comes rushing into the Danube with a dirty yellow, rubbish-strewn flood, and gives the larger river a sturdy shouldering for a long distance down-stream. It is the contamination of the Danube by the Inn that changes its color below Passau. Above this town it is in ordinary seasons of a greenish color, and sometimes, in the deep, shady pools, of an intense and beautiful blue; but the Danube as we saw it from Villingen, near the source, to Vilkoff at its mouth, was always of nearly the same monotonous, pale color of _café au lait_.

From Ratisbon down we had met occasional freight steamers and tow-boats, and at Passau saw our first passenger steamers--comfortable little craft, which make the popular trip from this place to Linz, fifty-six miles below, in about four hours. The right bank of the Danube below the mouth of the Inn belongs to Austria, and the left bank, for fifteen miles or so, to Bavaria. The Austrian customs-station on the river is at a little hamlet called Engelhardszell, and just above this place the frontier line is marked by a peculiar isolated rock in mid-stream, surmounted by a shrine and crucifix and the rude figure of a saint. We were obliged to go ashore at Engelhardszell to pay river toll on our canoes, and, notwithstanding our strange appearance, each barefooted and sunburned, we met with the greatest civility and courtesy, and paid our sixteen kreutzers (eight cents) apiece without a murmur. Below the frontier the river narrows to half its width, and the speed of the current increases in proportion. The average fall per mile is also much greater in this part of the river than it is from Ulm to this point. From Ulm to Ratisbon the average fall per mile is 1.5 feet; from Ratisbon to Passau, 0.625; from Passau to Linz, 2.5, from Linz to Grein, 2.8, and from Grein to Vienna, 2.876. The flora has varied somewhat since the last reference was made to the botanist’s note-book, and the information on the subject is sure to be interesting:

“Below Weltenburg there are pinks and other rock flowers ... and at Kelheim, climbing to the Befreiungshalle, I found a herbaceous clematis with flowers like flammula, or erecta, and with glaucous leaves. The river-banks are mostly devoid of flowers, but on a shingly beach below Ratisbon, where we camped, I noticed a yellow sedum and a dwarf phlox, not in flower. Lower down, when getting near the hills, there were large patches of pink coronilla and a pale yellow mullen, also willow-herb and a white cruciferous plant.

“The high, woody hills below Passau are almost entirely covered with beech and pine, but round the houses near the river are walnuts, plums, cherry, and other trees. On the rocks grows a genista with slender twigs and a spike of yellow blossoms, and there are patches of evening-primroses in the more open places. Though vines, hops, and other tender crops grow well, the flora has quite a subalpine character, and the houses are often like Swiss chalets.

“In the woods behind our camp, opposite Rannariedl, I noticed pyrola, hepatica, lady-fern, and oak and beech fern, _Spiræa aruncus_, Solomon’s-seal, lactuca, and a fine campanula. In a meadow where we camped the next day were

herbaceous clematis and lychnis with drooping white flowers and a berry-like seed-pod, _Anthericum ramosum_ and loosestrife.

“By our camp at the mouth of the Traun (July 6th), I noticed purple and yellow loosestrife, meadowsweet, meadow-rue, white convolvulus, and the same flowers generally that grow by English rivers. Sea-buckthorn grew among the willows. By wood opposite Grein saw cyclamen, pyrola, hepatica, and various ferns, and monk’s-hood just below.”

A light rain, which began while we were in camp opposite the restored Castle of Rannariedl, continued during the whole day we were passing through the gorge, and, although we got a fair notion of the beauties of the scenery, we deplored the absence of sunshine more for esthetic reasons than for demands of personal comfort. We were cheered a good bit by a jolly luncheon at the little mountain village of Obermühl, and while the lowering clouds were still sweeping across the summits, and ragged patches of vapor were trailing along the mountain flanks, we paddled out of the gorge and past the town of Aschach, where we were diverted by the difficulty of dodging a curious ferry, which, as we floated down, seemed to blockade the river by an impassable line of great flat-boats chained closely together. The uppermost boat of the line we soon found to be moored in mid-stream a goodly distance above the town, while to the lowermost one was attached a great double-decked ferry-boat which, by ready adjustment of the angle of its side to the current, was forced across the river by the rush of the water in exactly the same way that a vessel is propelled at right angles to the wind. The net-work of side streams and lagoons between Aschach and Ottensheim, just above Linz, a distance of ten miles or more, is simplified to the boatman by a line of fine stone dikes on either bank, which confine the current to a comparatively straight and narrow channel, and we passed this tangle, which appeared on the map to be very difficult of navigation, almost without knowing it, certainly without recognizing any resemblance to our chart. A narrow chain of hills concealed Linz from our view until after Ottensheim was passed, and the sight of an ordinary four-wheeled cab, with the usual rawboned horse and red-faced driver, crawling along the level river-side road, was the first hint we received of the flourishing, modernized, and somewhat commonplace character of the prosperous city.

The rain still continued, and after a brief pause at Linz we paddled on in search of a camp. The shores were marshy and uninviting, and as the gray twilight deepened our prospects were far from encouraging. The light had almost gone from the sky before the camp finder turned the bow of his canoe across the stream in the direction of what appeared to be a backwater with a pleasant grassy bank in the shelter of a wood. With our eyes fixed on this goal we were paddling hard to stem the current which threatened to sweep us past the chosen spot, when we suddenly shot from the turbid flood of the main stream into the crystal-clear water of the Traun, at the mouth of which we had fortunately selected our camp-ground. We had become accustomed to the rain by this time, and as we were snug and dry when once inside our tents, we were more or less indifferent to the weather in camp. The next morning as we were cosily cooking our breakfast in the shelter of the great sketching umbrellas, a line of lumber rafts surged past the camp, scarcely a yard from the bushes on the bank, the raftsmen giving us a cheerful greeting as they went along. We were anxious to continue the acquaintance, but made no haste to follow them, because, in our ignorance of the rapidity of the current, we fancied we could easily overtake them. When we paddled out into the stream a few minutes later, not an

object was in sight on the broad surface of the Danube except a hideous, puffing tow-boat, which left a trail of black smoke behind it, and churned the river into a sea of vicious waves. As it turned out, we never once overtook the rafts while they were drifting down-stream. We passed them several times after they had tied up to the bank for the night, and they as often floated along near our camp in the morning while we were still at our toilets or at breakfast. We learned to know all the raftsmen by sight, but never succeeded in spending a moment in their company until we happened to land at the same village, their last station above Vienna, and within sight of that city.

After leaving Linz we began to look forward to the great bugbears of this part of the river, the Greiner Schwall, the Strudel, and the Wirbel, famous rapids and whirlpools whose very names are sufficient to strike dismay to the heart of the boatman, and bring confusion to the mind of the philologist. Friends of ours who had more than once made the trip from Donaueschingen to Vienna had given us dramatic descriptions of the terrors of this passage, and the oldest cruiser of them all had confessed that he had never ventured to run these rapids, but had always intrusted himself and his canoe to a native flat-boat. The long-shore people wherever we had stopped for the last day or two had volunteered warnings of the dangers that were awaiting us, and we made an unusually early camp the day we left the Traun in a delightful spot opposite Grein, so as to be prepared to take our chances with the river monster in the early morning. Accordingly, after storing our traps with unusual care, and diligently studying the map, we boldly paddled forth bright and early the next day, and rapidly approached the gorge just below the town. As we came near we saw before us a narrow chasm, scarcely a hundred feet wide, where the river forces its way between precipitous cliffs on the one hand and a lofty, rocky island on the other, with piled up ruins of old castles frowning from the crag on either side. We had no time to hesitate, and no power to stop the onward rush of the canoes, and were in the surging sea of yellow billows before we realized it. The canoes behaved like a charm, shipping not a teaspoonful of water, and riding the waves like water-fowl. So far as our experience went, we were unable to distinguish the Greiner Schwall, the Strudel, and the Wirbel apart, for they seemed like one long rapid. Half-way down, finding that the canoes kept their course with very little guidance, we whipped out our sketch-books and made hasty notes of the scenery in a spirit of bravado which might easily have had unpleasant results.

Long, straight reaches between wild hills carried us to Ybbs--the old Roman Pons Isidis--at the mouth of the river of the same name, and thence to Pöchlarn where we landed for our mid-day meal at a river-side inn with pretty waitresses who made our stay a joy, and on our departure decorated our coats with nosegays in souvenir of our visit. It was at Pöchlarn that Kriemhild, on her journey to Hungary, was so brilliantly entertained by Rüdiger, one of the heroes of the “Niebelungenlied.” Our experience proves that the traditional hospitality of the time has lost none of its charm in the lapses of many centuries.

It was but a short run from here to the heavily-wooded heights where the Benedictine monastery of Melk dominates the surrounding landscape with its magnificent pile of buildings, the most imposing edifice along the whole course of the Danube, and celebrated in song and story since its foundation in the eleventh century. From its grand terrace the full majesty of the river is disclosed to view, as the broad, shining sheet of water extends from the plain far beyond Pöchlarn to the shadowy reaches of the pass below,

where it forces its way between rugged heights, serrated with huge crags and castle ruins. There is no grander and no more romantic stretch of the river above Vienna than the few miles below Melk, for the summits are higher and bolder in outline and the rocks more wild and savage in character than in any other gorge. Ruins of old robber castles are perched upon every dizzy pinnacle, deep ravines with tumbling streams score the mountain-sides, and great walls of jagged rock rise above the dark foliage, often forming impassable barriers along the steep declivities. A whirling current carried us all too quickly through this enchantingly beautiful reach, and when at sunset we saw the great ruin of Dürrenstein lift its noble towers against the violet-colored sky, we chose a camp on the opposite bank and watched the last golden gleam of warm sunlight fade from its shattered battlements.