Ó SZLANKAMEN
The happy chant of Servian girls marching down the steep paths in the bluffs, laden with jugs for Danube water, was our accompaniment as we paddled along in the early morning towards the steamer-landing at Semlin, the last Hungarian town on the right bank of the Danube, a busy little commercial place with all the fascinating characteristics of a frontier town. A populous market-place, numerous cafés of the Turkish order—the first we had seen—and a population largely Servian, with more barbaric types, and wearing costumes plainly transitional between the Hungarian and the Turkish, kept us interested longer than we anticipated, and well repaid the delay.
SERVIAN WOMEN
From Semlin to Belgrade is but a half-hour’s paddle down a bend behind the Krieg’s Insel and across the clear, green stream of the Save. Above the great fortress which occupies the whole area of a high promontory at the junction
FORTRESS AT THE JUNCTION OF THE DANUBE AND THE SAVE—BELGRADE
of the rivers, where a church and other edifices are half hidden among bastions and parapets, an immense cream-colored Government building extends an imposing mass, and, as seen from the river, divides the town into two parts. To the left is the old Turkish quarter on the Danube, in recent years almost depopulated of Mahometans, and with only one insignificant mosque still preserved; and to the right, Belgrade proper, along the Save and the heights which extend back into the country. Lumberyards and the usual motley collection of buildings hid the town from us as we slowly paddled up the sluggish current of the Save to a great bathing establishment, all gay with flowers, where a large contingent of the youthful population of the city were disporting themselves, naked, in canoes of simple construction and gaudy color. Our arrival caused very little flutter on the shore. We saw one fez on a small boy, and fancied that on landing we should find everything suggesting the East, and fierce officials haughtily demanding our passports. But we moored our canoes alongside the bath-house and went ashore without a question, found everybody in European dress, and met a polite soldier-policeman who volunteered to look out for our craft, and immediately busied himself with boxing the ears of the inquisitive youngsters who ventured too near the dainty vessels. We were not long, however, in finding novelties of dress and architecture, for at a short distance from our landing-place we entered the outskirts of the city, and passed through a street quite as Eastern in aspect as any in the heart of Stamboul. Wretched wooden hovels with shattered tiles and crumbling plaster; dingy low cafés with pallid Turks inhaling with indolent sighs the stupefying smoke of nargiléhs; open air cooking-places where unsavory messes sizzled on gridirons; and general squalor, mustiness, and filth everywhere. From this quarter, steep, ill-paved streets mount to the higher part of the town, where the hotels, theatres, and palaces are, and pleasant avenues lead out to the luxurious residential suburb on the heights beyond. But all Belgrade, at the date of our visit, was much like the normal condition of Broadway, and New York in general. The streets were everywhere torn up for water-pipes and sewers, sidewalks were being widened and levelled, and there was every indication of a serious attempt to improve the city, or some job in the control of the City Fathers. The heat was intense and almost unbearable as we explored the streets and park and wandered through the fortress. When the sun reached the zenith, all Belgrade was as quiet as Pompeii, for the inhabitants withdrew in-doors, and left the streets void of life and movement. Even the hissing of frying fat in the numerous cook-shops seemed hushed for the time; the vender of kukurutz (green corn on the ear) slept in a shadow; and