The Danube from the Black Forest to the Black Sea

by Francis Davis Millet

LUMBER RAFT

With the brilliant sunshine and drying air of the next morning returned the eager anticipations of the day before. The river was full of life. Great flat-boats and rafts, old friends from the river Traun, drifted past us as we prepared to start. The raftsmen laboring at the great sweeps gave us the morning greetings with a true ring of hearty and honest good-will, and shouted “Auf baldiges Wiedersehen” as they swung along down the reach. We had long since learned that the old adage that the race is not always to the swift might be as well illustrated by the active canoe and the cumbersome raft as by the hare and the tortoise, and we knew that while we were giving our boats their morning toilet the rafts would be surging along at the rate of three or four miles an hour, and would reach their destination near Vienna long before we should.

Tulln, seldom visited by the traveller on account of the superior attractions of Vienna, has more than one relic which repays careful examination and study. Adjoining the much-restored church stands a small decagonal Byzantine baptistery, with circular interior not over twenty feet in diameter. An Early Gothic doorway grafted on the original edifice, and a complete restoration of the whole as late as 1873, have not essentially altered its general appearance, for the naïve irregularity of its plan, the noble proportion of its sides, and the purity of its characteristic ornamentation survive all the eccentricities of ancient as well as modern tinkering. The great church has been distorted by successive additions and rebuildings during several centuries, and little remains of its original Byzantine dignity. As for the little dull town itself, the name, familiar to us in poetry as well as in the recorded events of history, is the chief proof to the casual observer that it is one of the oldest, and was for a long time one of the most important, towns on the Danube. Many of the houses are probably built out of material quarried from the ancient palaces and fine old mediæval churches which, ruined in the severe sieges and conflagrations, had yielded up the treasures of stone and marble which the wanton destruction of Roman temples had contributed to their erection. Little of the spirit of that ancient architecture has survived the change and destruction, for modern Tulln is as plain and meagre of invention as stone and mortar can make it. Of all the great Roman buildings which once stood here, a single broken altar, moss-grown and neglected, in the shadow of the baptistery, remains as a monument to the early splendor of this provincial town. By what chance it has escaped the stone-mason’s hammer no one can tell. Perhaps the delicate lines of its mouldings and the grace of its shattered figures may have secured it a place among the paraphernalia of the Byzantine church, and thus it had lost its identity as a relic of heathen worship. Would that the mute eloquence of its pathetic beauty had the voice of a brazen trumpet to denounce the modern restorer, whose touch is death to the charms of all art!

The commonplace aspect of the river-front let us down gently to the ugliness of the railway bridge, which stretches its rigid arm across the fine reach of the river just below Tulln, and screens with its hideous framework the beauties of the landscape below. The up-river navigation became hideously mechanical as well. Puffing, crawling, wheelless steamers groaned and clanked as they pulled their ugly black hulks against the current by a long chain lying in the bed of the stream. Huge iron barges, the most helpless of monsters without the partnership of a tug, added their shapeless masses to the procession of mechanical freaks that indicated the proximity of a large manufacturing city. Distracted by these new dangers to our navigation, and by the vigorous opposition of a strong head-wind, we had scarcely time to notice the great vine-clad hill which crowds the river on the right bank, and shelters under its towering declivity the extensive Augustinian abbey of Klosterneuberg, before we found ourselves slipping along a high stone-faced quay, and saw in the smoky distance the great rotunda on the Prater in Vienna, and the straight lines of the numerous railway bridges there. In the little village of Kahlenbergerdorf our waterman instincts led us to a humble inn, where we found, to our delight, all the raftsmen we had been meeting since the camp at the mouth of the Traun, assembled for their mid-day meal, and for a final friendly glass before returning up-river to start again on another downward voyage. We needed not to know their names; they did not even ask us ours, nor desire to learn about our customary occupation; the masonic bonds of kindred experiences and similar trials and dangers of the long journey made us friends without further introduction. They were old water-rats, they said, and though we could claim to be but the tiniest mice of aquatic tastes, our parting with them in the flickering shadows of the garden, surrounded by brigades of beer-glasses, was tinged with a genuine regret that we should no longer hear their cheery voices of a morning, nor see their honest faces again.

CHAPTER VIII

IENNA offers an unsightly water-front to the Danube navigator. A succession of huge passenger and railway bridges span the river, and but for the constant busy traffic seen upon them would appear unnecessarily numerous in full proportion to their ugliness. At one end they touch the marshy, desolate shores of the great plain of the Marschfeld, which stretches away to Hainburg and Theben at the Hungarian frontier, and at the other their solid piers and embankments either stand isolated on waste ground, or are supported by ragged and scattered settlements along the bank, with here and there a huge manufactory. From the level of the water a broad veil of smoke rising above the trees is the only visible indication of the proximity of the great city, except it be the bridges themselves and the numerous tow-boats and excursion steamers. The city lies in a semicircular valley between the hills of the Wienerwald and the Danube on both sides of the little river Wien, which drains the hills to the west and empties its muddy flood into the Danube three or four miles below the city. The northern angle of this little stream, in the very heart of Vienna, is connected by a canal with the Danube at some distance above the town, and the Wien has been canalized and enlarged from its junction with the canal to its mouth, so that there is a practicable waterway through the town. The large Danube passenger boats cannot enter the canal, however, but are waited upon by small steamers which connect with them at the mouth of the Wien. The great park, the Prater, where the International Exhibition of 1873 was held, and a broad flat of rough land adjoining, separate the city from the broad Danube, which, with wonderfully rapid current, rushes off to the east towards the distant hills which mark the Hungarian frontier.

A LITTLE GIRL OF HAINBURG