After a short half-day’s paddle down a tossing current, past scores of floating mills and along miles of stone embankments, we came to the point where the hills again close in from both sides and form a wall along the eastern horizon. Though less imposing than some other mountain ranges we had passed, and, indeed, very narrow where it touches the river, this is the barrier where for many centuries constant and successful resistance was kept up against the advance of the Mahometans. Here for a long time was the extreme eastern bulwark of Christendom, the advance outposts of the West; and here, after countless campaigns, the hereditary enemy suffered the crushing defeats which, a little over a century and a half ago, marked the beginning of the decline of his power in Europe. This gateway to the great Carpathian plain, and the political as well as geographical frontier of Hungary, is as perfect a natural rampart as could be imagined. At the very river’s edge rise, on either bank, high isolated hills, covered now with masses of ruins, but formerly part of a complete system of fortifications perfectly commanding the river from both sides. These fortifications enclosed, as the ruins now plainly show, the little town of Hainburg, on the right bank, and Theben, a few miles below on the other side of the river, the highest Danube town in the Hungarian kingdom.
THE WIENERTHOR, HAINBURG
The sentimental spirit generated in us on the occasion of the happy visit to Dürrenstein, though veiled a little by the distractions of Vienna, was now stimulated afresh as we landed in Hainburg. We had accidentally chosen it as a place for a few days’ quiet work, and found that we had stumbled unawares into a little walled town full of archæological and historical interest. Through an ancient arched gateway near the railway station, Blutgasse (blood lane) winds steeply up between crowded whitewashed houses to a broad open square, where a large church with intricately ugly copper-covered spire throws a shadow over rows of peasant women squatting on the pavement beside their baskets of market stuff, their blue dresses and bright kerchiefs adding an agreeable note of color to the blond tones of the surrounding architecture. Blutgasse! No stretch of the imagination is required to picture the carnage when the Turks, hunting the inoffensive citizens through the streets with fanatical ferocity, left only one alive to tell the tale. This narrow lane, offering a possible escape to the river, was piled high with headless corpses, and the blood ran in streams under the oaken gate into the turbid river, which washed the foundations of the town walls. Tradition says that the one survivor was a woman, who hid herself, with a small store of provisions, in a disused chimney, where for three days she listened to the horrid sounds of the massacre.
During the long centuries while history is silent this little town, with the neighboring region, has been the theatre of many another thrilling and dramatic episode now only faintly echoing in the murmur of tradition. On the whole length of this great water highway there has been no busier spot than this from the time when the goaded slaves first towed the ponderous Roman galleys against the rushing stream up to its docks until its complete destruction in the struggle against the Turks. Indeed, the whole neighboring country bears abundant witness to the importance of this point. Extensive Roman remains are scattered all over the fertile plateau a short distance above Hainburg, near the village of Deutsch-Altenburg and Petronell, where Carnuntum once stood. Military engineers, since the earliest mediæval days, have burned the shattered marbles for lime, and have built into hastily constructed defences tiles and mouldings, capitals and cornices; and in times of peace the local masons, with more deliberation and less excuse, have completed the work of destruction. Recent archæological explorations have uncovered the ruins of an amphitheatre, of villas and baths, and latterly a commendable local interest has been taken in these relics, a proof of which is the popularity of the little museum where are stored a multitude of objects of Roman origin. The farmers now point with pride to the crumbling ruins of the great triumphal arch, which they but recently considered an unsightly excrescence on the fair surface of a broad wheat-field, and speak of Carnuntum as familiarly as if its glories were but of recent date.
THE TOWN WALL, HAINBURG
Nearer Hainburg the hill-sides are scored with grassy mounds of ancient earthworks, and on the high, isolated peak behind the town the extensive ruin of a mediæval castle is a landmark visible for many miles both up and down the river. Immense Government tobacco factories and a school for military cadets have somewhat disturbed the mediæval aspect of the streets, and a railway has ruthlessly cut through the walls, and trains crunch and rumble high up on a row of ugly arches that disfigure the quay. The old side walls, with frequent towers of irregular shape and at various angles, converge from the water-front, and, narrowing the town limits as they go, join by a solid cross wall at the foot of the hill, and then clamber up the precipitous, rugged declivity to the angles of the great château which covers every yard of the summit. The hill itself is gay with numberless varieties of wild-flowers and shrubs—a botanist’s paradise. In Alfred Parsons’ botanical note-book is the following information concerning this region: