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.”
The Bell tower
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.
Donauwörth.
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.