Timar's sharp eyes discovered that above the tops of the poplars rising from the reeds a faint smoke hovered in the air. "There must be a house there. I will go and see who lives in it."
There was a small skiff on board, which the captain used on sporting expeditions, at times when the ship was delayed by foul winds, and he had leisure for wildfowl-shooting. He lowered it into the water, took his gun, his game-bag, and a landing-net—one never knows what may come in one's way, a bird or a fish—and went toward the bed of rushes, rowing and steering with one and the same oar. Being an experienced marsh-sportsman, he soon found the one opening in the reeds through which it was possible to penetrate, and recognized by the vegetation the depth of the channel.
Where the great leaves and snowy cups of the water-lily float on the surface, there is deep water which scours the weeds and mud away; in other places duckweed forms a green carpet on the top, and on this floating velvet cowers the poisonous water-fungus in the form of a turnip-radish, blue and round, and swelled like a puff ball—deadly poison to every living thing. When Timar's oar struck one of these polyp-like fungi, the venomous dust shot out like a blue flame. The roots of this plant live in a fetid slime which would suffocate man or beast who should fall into it; nature has given this vegetable murderer a habitat where it is least accessible. But where the cardinal-flower spreads its clubbed suckers, and where the beautiful bells of the water-violet sway among the rushes, there is gravel, which is not always under water. And where the manna tendrils begin to form a thicket, in pressing through which the sailor finds the brim of his hat full of little seeds—the food of the poor, manna of the wilderness—there must be higher ground, so that only the root of the plant is submerged.
The boatman who does not know these vegetable guides might lose himself in the reed-beds, and not get out all day.
When Timar had worked his way through the brake, which formed a labyrinth of flesh-colored flower-clusters, he saw before him what he sought—an island.
No doubt this was a new alluvial formation, of which no trace was to be found on the latest maps.
In the bed of the right arm of the Danube lay long ago a great bowlder, at whose base the sluggish current had deposited a sand-bank.
During some winter flood, the ice-floes tore from the Ostrova Island a spit of land bearing earth, stones, and a small wood. This mingled deluge of ice, gravel, and trees flung itself on the sand-bank near the bowlder. Repeated inundations spread over it year by year layers of mud, and enlarged its circumference by fresh deposits of pebbles: from the moldering tree-trunks sprung a luxuriant vegetation as quickly as the natural creations of the New World; and so arose a nameless island, of which no one had taken possession, over which was no landlord, no king, no authority, and no church—which belonged to no country and no diocese. In Turco-Servian territory there are many such paradises, neither plowed nor sown, not even used for pasture. They are the home of wild flowers and wild beasts, and God knows what besides.
The northern shore plainly proclaims its genesis. The gravel moraine is heaped there like a barricade, often in pieces larger than a man's head; between are tufts of rushes and rotten branches; the shallows are covered with green and brown river-shells; on the marshy parts round holes are washed out, in which, at the sound of approaching footsteps, hundreds of crabs rush to hide. The shore is covered along its whole length with prickly willow, which the ice-floes shave off every winter close to the root.
Here Timar drew his boat ashore and tied it to a tree. Pressing forward, he had to push his way through a thicket of huge willows and poplars—overthrown in many places by repeated storms—and there the fruitful bramble forms a thorny undergrowth, and tall valerian, shooting upward from the weather-beaten soil, mixes its aromatic scent with the wholesome smell of the poplar.