There was a heavy-sided Austrian who kept him company in such a fashion that I thought our boat had turned in to a high pressure one; and there was a Roumanian who had a fashion of dropping his jaw and biting off his snore every five minutes or so. In the first part of the night it was impossible to sleep, and our party turned to betting as to which of the performers would hold out the longest on a single spurt. We kept it up an hour or more, but the men we backed were so unreliable that we all lost money, and finally growing sleepy we gave up the game. Whether we added to the music when we fell asleep, I am unable to say, but I fancy that we did not diminish it. In the morning we heard that the boat was badly shaken at the stern, and the captain said she would have to lie up after the present trip. I will lay a wager that it was the old Servian that did the business.
We were aground in the night and detained by a fog, but the loss of time was a gain in sight-seeing. Without detention we should have passed Peterwarde in in the early morning; as it was we saw it after we had taken breakfast and were in a good mood for contemplation.
It is a picturesque fortress dominating the river and covering an escarped hill that shows a double façade pierced with portholes, with a complex arrangement of bastions, salient and reentering angles, casemates, and sheltered barracks. It can contain ten thousand men without serious crowding; its permanent garrison consists of about one-fourth that number. Here it was that Peter the Hermit assembled his soldiers for the first crusade, and it was from that religious enthusiast that the fortress received its modern name.
We saw here on this part of the Danube, as we had seen above, boats towed by horses, seven or eight in line, against the current; we saw droves of white cattle and we rarely saw any other color than white; we saw women working in the fields, and at Mohacs we saw them wheeling coal in barrows or carrying it in baskets. A little past noon we were looking ahead and saw a city perched on a hill above a fortress, and near it, and nearer to us, was another city on a low tongue of land.
The nearer city was Semlin—the more distant was Belgrade—they pronounce it with the accent on the last syllable and make it rhyme with “hard,” or very nearly so.
The river Save (rhymes with “halve”) here joins the Danube from the East and forms the boundary between Austro-Hungary on the one hand and Servia on the other. Semlin is on one side of the mouth of the Save and Belgrade on the other. Semlin is flat and low and offers nothing picturesque; Belgrade is elevated and pretty and merits the admiration which has been bestowed upon it.
The boat stopped a few moments at Semlin and then moved on to Belgrade, and the two Americans whose acquaintance I had made at Pesth determined to travel with me or I with them as we had a common object in view—to reach Constantinople. They were both reasonably well along in years; one was called “the Judge” for his fair round belly which he was accustomed to line with good capon or anything else that possessed the proper lining qualities. The other was called “the Doctor,” which we soon exchanged to “Doubter” for the reason that he doubted everything that he had not seen, and even after seeing it his doubts generally continued.
“I have known,” said the Judge one day, “a man that could lift a thousand pounds of lead at once.”