"Look! that building over there was just like the church at Debreczen with the two towers. And that other one that has just fallen to pieces is like the watch-tower at the gates of Grosswardein—it is just as crazy looking."
"Girls, girls!" scolded a young bride, who was suckling her plump little baby at the foot of the hill, "one ought not to joke about such things. It is not right to recognize any place in the Fata Morgana. Woe will befall the town which she shows. Have done with such profane prattling!"
"Look!" suddenly cried they all, and the word died away on their lips; every one looked, with eyes petrified by wonder and terror.
What was it that had suddenly come to light in the sky?
Towards Hadház, high above the aërial road, the misty shape of a horseman was suddenly sketched out against the pallid sky—a real warrior on horseback, with a quiver on his shoulder, a peaked turban on his head, and his hand on his hip. The whole shape was magnified against the distant horizon into gigantic proportions, which made one's heart beat to look at it; the feet of the horse did not touch the ground, and below and through them one could see the sky. The whole thing looked like the bright-blue shape of an armed phantom cast upon the pale, yellow sky.
"O Lord, forsake us not!" murmured the terrified and helpless crowd at the sight of this strange apparition, which natural philosophers have seen so often and in so many places, and have since explained, though they know neither the why nor the wherefore of it.
The shapes of men far away swam forth into the sky, magnified into gigantic spirits of the mist. Every moment fresh and fresh shapes emerged from the aërial billows, all of them armed giants. Some only emerged from the surface of the delusive sea as far as the bodies of their horses; of others one could only see the heads and shoulders; some had their shadows joined on to their bodies, others showed double shadows glued together at different ends with heads, arms, and weapons turned upwards and downwards, and suddenly the whole thing slowly dissolved, and nought remained behind in the sky but two broad wheel-like spokes, two bright-blue ribbons of light on a misty, yellowish background, shining upwards from the earth.
"Alas, alas! the Turks and Tartars are lying in wait for us," exclaimed the women, confused, terrified, without friend or counsellor, in the midst of the wilderness.
The mothers clasped their children to their breasts, the girls scattered about their precious kerchiefs and ornaments, that while the robbers were picking them up they themselves might have time to escape. Every one believed that the danger was at their very heels.
"Let's be off! Let's be off! By the Böszörmény road! Let us fly through the pasture lands! Hasten! hasten!"