As we went away from Semendria the chief of police was among the party assembled to see us off, and here, we thought, was the opportunity to see whether our passports would be honored. We offered them to the official, modestly at first, but he would not even look at the envelopes.
“But they are our passports,” we urged. “They cost us a lot of money and trouble, and if no official looks at them they will be wasted, for they are only good for one year!”
But he resolutely declined to have anything to do with them, although we increased the urgency of our request almost to the strength of a demand, and we left, quite ready to believe the statement of a scoffing friend in Budapest, who declared that any one could travel the whole length of the Danube with no more of a passport than a restaurant bill of fare, which would satisfy the officials as well as the best parchment with signatures and seals.
RAMA
At Bazias, on the Hungarian side of the river, the terminus of the railway from Temesvár, and the point where the tourist usually takes a steamer for the trip through the Kasan defile and the Iron Gates, there is nothing on shore more interesting than a railway restaurant; but the landscape is very grand and beautiful. The hills completely mask the course of the river as the traveller approaches them from up-stream, and the fine ruin of Castle Rama, on the Servian side, seems to stand on the shore of a large lake with a southern boundary of great mountains. From Rama the river sweeps majestically around to the south past Bazias, and narrows somewhat as it winds among the first great foot-hills of the mountain range, spreading out again after a few miles into another lake-like reach, which in turn has on its southern horizon an apparently impassable chain of mountains—this time the real Carpathians.
As we crossed the river from Rama towards the cluster of houses on the water’s edge at Bazias, we observed that the little village, dwarfed to insignificance by the towering hills above it, was all gay with flags. On closer approach we distinguished near the landing the form of a low gray vessel quite unlike any craft we had hitherto seen. This proved to be an Austrian gunboat, and the occasion of the display of bunting was the birthday of the Emperor Francis Joseph. As we drifted down towards the man-of-war we hoisted all the flags we had, and, as we were passing in review with all the dignity we could command, we were startled by the loud report of a champagne cork pointed in our direction, and fired, as it were, across our bows. We surrendered at once and unconditionally, and exchanged cards with a group of officers celebrating the Emperor’s birthday on the quarter-deck. We found our captivity so little irksome that we willingly prolonged it until we were admonished by the position of the sun in the heavens that we must be off if we would reach the entrance to the Carpathian gorge before dark. Our haste was due to no more cogent reason than ambition to begin the fight with the river at the so-called cataracts. These obstructions had been described to us by friends who had made the journey in a steamer as extremely dangerous, and, as we neared the mountains, all the river-men we talked with warned us of the perils of the stream below, and advised us on no account to attempt the passage of the cataracts without a pilot. But we could not forget the collapse of the Strudel and Wirbel bugbear in the upper river, and could not bring ourselves to apprehend any great danger in rapids where steamers are constantly passing up and down with loaded lighters in tow. Even our new-found friends on the gunboat, who had just made the trip, cautioned us not to attempt the passage in our frail canoes, and took great pains to show us the dangerous points on their charts. Of course, the more we heard of these terrors to navigation the more eager we became to look upon them ourselves, and, while we did not propose to spoil our trip by the loss of our canoes, we also did not intend to take anybody’s testimony of the dangers, which were, after all, only relative. The last words our naval advisers said to us, as we regretfully left them, was to be sure to take a pilot at Drenkova, the last steamboat-landing above the rapids.
