The next day the Hungarian plain came to an end and the Transylvanian Alps drew nearer and nearer. In the evening they descended into a little mining town whose forges and furnaces were all illuminated in honour of the arriving guests. Henrietta then learnt that this mining town also belonged to her husband.
On the third day, quite early in the morning, they crossed the Transylvanian frontier. The whole of that splendid region seemed to smile, but the faces of its inhabitants are sad and mysterious. Henrietta had a peculiar sense of anxiety during her stay among these angry looking people who spoke a language she had never heard before. At intervals of a mile all along the road a roughly carved cross shot up, covered with clumsily carved letters, which did not in the least resemble those we are accustomed to. Clementina once asked the coachman what these crosses might mean and repented doing so immediately afterwards, for he informed her that they marked the places where unlucky travellers had come by an untimely death; the inscriptions were the records of the tragic romances through the scene of which they were passing.
The valleys grew narrower and narrower, the road wound upward among precipices, and the loquacious coachman attached horrible stories to every rock and ruin. Each valley seemed to have its own particular ghost.
Here and there by the roadside stood silent houses not one of which had an inviting appearance, it would never have occurred to a human soul to knock at any of them, even at midnight, to ask for a night's lodging. They were all of them sooty dilapidated shanties, which might easily have been taken for stables, consisting of a single room in which the whole family lived, livestock and all. The church often lay far away from the settlement as if it belonged to two villages equally.
Then the road rose again between bare and barren cliffs, where only here and there a solitary bush seemed to cling to the rocky wall. There was no trace of a garden, but here and there was a fenced in space in which the Roumanians are wont to unload their hay, with a long pole sticking up in the midst of the hay ricks to prevent the wind from carrying it away, or else the hay was piled up on the branch of a living tree like a bird's nest.
Down-pouring mountain streams traversed the path at intervals, over which never a bridge is built, all cars and coaches must cross by the fords. From the depths of the wooded mountain slopes was reflected the blood-red glare of iron works and foundries, and the droaning monotonous din of the machinery scares away the stillness till it loses itself in the loud murmuring of the mountain torrents.
At every fresh mile, Henrietta felt how lonely she was in this strange world, whose giant mountains shut her out from the very prospect of the familiar places from which she had come and from every possibility of returning; and whose inhabitants would not even be able to answer her if she were to ask them: "Which is the way back to my native place?"
They travelled onwards till late at night by the light of the moon. Hidvár was now close at hand. As the prospect opened out on both sides, at the turn of a narrow defile, suddenly, like a picture in a black frame, between two mountain slopes, thickly covered with dark beech-trees, the castle of Hidvár came full in view, standing lonely and isolated on the summit of a hill. The mountain torrent shot swiftly down beneath a shaky bridge. The round moon stood straight over the tower of the castle, as if it had been impaled on the point of it, and painted everything with its silvery light, the tower, the bastions, the brook and the valley—only one thing it brightened not, the heart of the young wife.