of wooded islands. Away to the south-east the great Benedictine monastery of Göttweig shows an imposing mass of white on the rounded hills that bound the Tullnfeld, and stretch off to mingle their summits with the broad, dark patch of the Wienerwald in the extreme distance. Far beyond the low islands lies Tulln, one of the oldest towns on the Danube, the Comagenæ of the Romans, referred to in the “Niebelungenlied” as an important place, and of historical interest as the point where the great army assembled in 1683 to deliver Vienna from the hands of the hated Turk. Dotted along the hill-sides and in the broad valley on the left bank of the river are many prosperous little towns.
The insidious influence of the guide-book stole upon us unawares as we began to ponder over the history of the region within the range of our uninterrupted vision. Our imaginations, stimulated now by the mention of these names, wandered from the realities of the Napoleonic campaigns, through the dim traditions of crusading days, back to the times when the Roman fleets crowded the narrow channels at the busy stations on the river-bank. The germ of latent restlessness thus grew like a noxious fungus in our minds; contentment and peace vanished like a faint odor. This history was but stale, and the study of it unprofitable. Myths and legends were like poetry and music, to be taken only when the spirit yearns for them. Reality is now before us; teeming modern life awaits us beyond those distant hills. A new nervousness and a new ambition of progress are upon us—new because there opened to our mental vision, at the mention of Islam, broad and fascinating vistas of the Orient, of strange lands and stranger peoples, of types new to our pencils, of colors to tempt the strongest tints on our palettes.
Vienna, hidden from us by the dark mass of the Wienerwald, is, for us at least, the last station before that mysterious East towards which the resistless current rushes below us, and whither our impatient canoes shall carry us through bewitching plains of Hungary, wild Carpathian gorges, and savage regions of Servia, Bulgaria, Roumania, and Russia, to the shores of the Black Sea. What a force the very mention of these names has upon us, and how we chafe at a moment’s delay! Castles and churches will keep, but what of that great mysterious land beyond those distant hills? Railroads have scarred the fertile plains, and have made the remote valleys and mountain gorges hideous with iron and raw stone. Customs have changed and costumes have disappeared. Even the Turk, so long the master of the lower Danube, has now sullenly withdrawn to the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. We must get on, for in our impatience it seems as if these changes are but the work of a day, not of a generation, and unless we hasten we shall be too late.
FROM DÜRRENSTEIN TO BUDAPEST
Many and many a time had we roundly cursed the canalization of the river which gave us for a water-line only the dull angle of a stone dike. But after leaving the village of Dürrenstein, which at the last moment we found, to our surprise, to be a favorite resort of Viennese artists, and after a brief pause for luncheon at Stein, with its obnoxious river improvements, we found ourselves very glad to follow the stone dikes through the maze of channels, and later in the day to utilize the stone-work in a way we had never anticipated. We were swept along by a current so rapid that our pace permitted no hesitation in the choice of route among the monotonous willow islands. Through openings in the trees along the bank we occasionally saw pleasant villas and clusters of houses reflected in the glassy lagoons, and here and there a sportsman in search of wild-fowl paddled along behind the dike. Sudden wind and rain squalls swept across the river in the late afternoon, rudely interrupting our sentimental meditations, and approaching darkness forced us at last to land. Under the friendly lee of bushes growing in the crevices of the masonry embankment we at last succeeded in checking our too willing canoes, and drew them up reluctantly, and only after it was evident that we had to choose between the ragged platform of the dike and the sodden swamps which extended for miles away from the main stream. It must be understood, by-the-way, that the embankments follow the large curves of the main channel, not forming a continuous dike like that along a canal or a polder, but leaving here and there an opening where the stiller water from the artificial lagoons joins the flowing stream. In these side branches or lagoons the water is frequently clear and pellucid, and in them, indeed, we found the first and only “blue Danube” we had seen from the start. Our visions of the sunny East had been forgotten in the struggle with the violent squalls and at the prospect of a night on the water, and as we hauled the canoes up on the firm stone-work of the dike and explored the snail-infested morass behind it, we accepted the unæsthetic situation on the well-drained platform, and were even grateful to the engineers who had spoiled the river for sketching, but had improved it, at this point at least, for camping purposes. In the alder swamp behind our camp a great gushing spring of clean Danube water, filtering through the dike, abundantly supplied this the most desirable luxury of a bivouac. There is more than one compensation, we thought, for this annoying desecration of the river scenery.
