BUDA-PESTH AND BELGRADE
Buda-Pesth and Its Language—From Buda-Pesth to Belgrade—The Servian Passport System—First Impressions of Belgrade—Garden Spots in and about the Servian Metropolis.
Buda-Pesth, with its imposing buildings, its kaleidoscopic market scenes and its impossible language, seems to be the Eastern jumping-off place, so to speak, of Continental travel. It is the suburb of Europe; but what a fascinating suburb it is, to be sure! Its architectural beauty is unsurpassed; its situation unrivalled, with the Danube coursing between the old city, Buda, and the new city, Pesth; its parks are veritable bowers of refreshing green; its cafés are interesting and its military music delightful. It is the Mecca of Magyar aristocracy and, if one can infer aught from natural proof, it has been well adopted.
But the language! The atrocious combinations of vowels and consonants fairly numb your powers of pronunciation. In order that your attempts to even read the signs may be made all the more tantalizing, our own, the Roman, alphabet is used to muddle the brain of the foreign visitor. When we see the writings of the Chinese or the Greeks, for instance, we are not inclined to regard these tongues as altogether unmasterable, but to behold the letters of our alphabet so haphazardly jumbled together and capped with many accents, grave and acute, seems bitter indeed. Taking it all in all the Hungarian tongue seems analogous to a waste of talent.
THE FISCHER RAMPARTS, PESTH.
One delightful evening I summoned my courage and ventured into a trolley-car, hoping that it might eventually take me near the Casino of the principal park. It did, mirabile dictu, and I alighted. But a week in Buda-Pesth had not passed without many and varied experiences. In order to be doubly cautious and not mistake my car to return to the hotel—for, luckily, this one made the park its terminus and returned by the same route—I unsheathed my note book and copied then and there the name of the route from a sign on the side of the car. Fortified with this valuable data I was prepared to enjoy the evening with reckless abandon, mingling with the crowds, listening to the music and concerning myself not at all as to the way to get home, for I had only to wait until a car came along marked [a]“Városlíget-Eskü-Tér-Podmaniczy-Utcka,”] whatever that means, and I would be among friends.
If you do not stop to look at the signs—for what is a city of this era without a host of glaring, gilded advertisements—Buda-Pesth is just as enticing, but on a somewhat smaller scale, as Vienna, and at the end of a fortnight we were loth to leave. As the next slip of our Rundreise book read “Belgrade,” we jammed ourselves into one of the dusty compartments of a crowded railway train bound for the Servian frontier.
Among our fellow-passengers was an aged, rheumatic Jewish woman, travelling from Vienna to Constantinople, who became very sociable, despite her affliction, and lighted one cigarette from the stub of the other as she unveiled to us her past history in broken German.
The railway line from Buda-Pesth to Belgrade, traversing the great Hungarian steppes, is devoid of attractive scenery and the journey of seven hours becomes somewhat tiresome, especially if the season is summer with its accompanying heat and the train is uncomfortably crowded. Agriculture along the route seems to be very much on the wane, but enormous herds of long-horned cattle, flocks of sheep and tens of thousands of pigs tell succinctly of the product of that portion of Hungary. Now and again you may see a native driver in heavy leather boots, white petticoat, or smock, to his knees, and a derby hat (not a very dignified-appearing combination of apparel), tending a large flock of unusually huge geese, tapping the laggards deftly with his long willow switch.