"That is Veterani's Cavern," said the captain. "There, more than a century ago, three hundred men and five cannon held out for forty days against a whole Turkish army." Timéa shook her head. But the skipper knew more still about the cavern.
"Forty years ago our people defended that cave in a bloody struggle against the Turks; the Osmanli lost over two thousand men among the rocks."
Timéa drew together her delicate eyebrows and threw the narrator an icy-cold glance, so that all his eloquence died in his throat. She hid her mouth with her burnoose, turned from Timar, went into the cabin, and did not reappear till evening. She only looked through the little window at the toppling crags on the bank, the massive watch-towers now deserted, the wooded cliffs of the Klissura valley, and the rock-colossi projecting from the stream, as they swept by her. She did not even ask for the history of the octagonal castle-donjon, with three small ones beside it inside a bastion. And yet she would have heard the fate of the lovely Cecilia Rozgonyi, the danger of King Sigismund, and the defeat of the Hungarians. This ruin is the Galamboczer Tower.
From first to last this double shore is a petrified history of two nations, mutually shadowed by a mad vagary of fate with the lust of conquest, which makes them fly at each other's throats directly a war begins.
It is a long crypt containing the bones of many a hundred thousand heroes.
Timéa did not come out that day or the next. She sketched little views in her book, which she could hold quite steady on the smoothly gliding vessel.
Three days passed before the "St. Barbara" arrived where the Morava falls into the Danube.
At the junction lies Semendria. On the thirty-six towers of this fortress have waved the banners sometimes of the Blessed Virgin and anon of the Crescent, and their circular brown walls are sprinkled with the blood of many nations. On the other shore of the Morava stand only the bare walls of the forsaken "Veste Kulics," and beyond the Ostrovaer Island frown down from a peak the ruins of the castle of Rama, now only a monument.
But this is not the moment to stand gazing at them—no one is inclined to indulge in melancholy reflections on the vanished greatness of fallen nations, for there is more pressing work on hand.
As soon as the Hungarian plains open out, the north wind storms down on the ship with such force that the towing-horses can not make head against it, and the wind drives the vessel toward the opposite shore.