Island on ice-island rears;
Dissolution battles fast,
Big the senseless Titans loom,
Through a mist of common doom
Striving which shall die the last.”[13]
Meredith might, when writing his poem, have remembered the awful episode of 1838. When the ice broke, the water dashed through the improvised embankment, until within a few hours it was twenty-seven feet deep in some parts of the city. Street after street, building after building collapsed, until, when the waters went down and the damage could be estimated, it was said that a thousand lives have been lost and over two thousand houses entirely destroyed. Indeed, out of 4255 houses but 1147 were left intact.
“The day of horror, the acme of misery, was 15 March. Pest will probably never number in her annals so dark a day again—she might perhaps not be able to survive such another—the maddened river as that day dawned, rioted in ruin; and many looked upwards to the clear cold sky, and wondered whether the Almighty promise was forgotten. Thousands of men, women and children, homeless, houseless, hopeless beings, clinging to life, when they had lost nearly all that made life a blessing; parents and children, and sisters and lovers—the young helpless in their first weakness and the old trembling in their last—the strong man whose weapon was stricken from his hand by a power against which the strongest contends in vain; the philosopher who in all his abstraction had found no preparation for so hideous a death as this; the mother whose hope had withered as her babe died upon her bosom, who clung to life rather from instinct than volition; the fond, the beautiful, the delicately nurtured—all were huddled together during that fearful day, upon the narrow spaces scattered over the town and suburbs, which the water had not yet reached. And, as it wore by, every half-hour added to the devastation around them; houses and buildings which had survived the first shock, seemed to have been preserved only to add to the horrors of that day. Many of them fell and perished from roof to base; others became rent by the heavy dashings of the waters, and through the yawning apertures the wasting tide poured in and ruined all it touched; while, to add to the confusion, in some quarters of the city the heavy barges, which had been procured to remove the sufferers from their threatened houses, broke loose, and went driving onward through the streets on the crests of the foaming waters.”
Many of the nobles and other inhabitants devoted themselves to the succouring of their fellows, and a memorial of such service is to be seen on a wall in the Kossuth Lajos Ut, where there is a fine tablet in relief depicting Baron Nicholas Wesselényi engaged as boatman in rescuing sufferers from almost submerged houses.
So great was the devastation that we may well marvel over the energy and determination of the people who set about rebuilding the place. Indeed, it was said when the new Pest began to rise where the old had been ruined that, but for the terrible loss of life, the disaster was a blessing in disguise, so boldly was the new town planned, so solidly were the new buildings designed. Since then it may be hoped that the improvements of the Danube for navigation have also had the effect of greatly reducing the chance of any repetition of such a visitation. Certainly it is difficult to realize any such disaster in connexion with the far-spreading city on which we look down from any of the heights on the western side of the river.
And it is the river that inevitably draws one; the river to which this strangely fascinating city owes no small measure of its fascination. Even when we have been up and down its broad streets, and its “Rings”; have visited the fine museums; have inspected some of the many statues—Budapest bids fair to become known as a city of beautiful sculpture—have wandered about the attractive Városliget or public park, it is as though we were insensibly drawn back to the Danube; to the lovely park-like Margaret’s Island; to the fashionable promenade along the left bank, where for a time in the afternoon it is as though everybody in the place walked up and down; to the quays to watch the ever-attractive operations of lading and unlading the barges, the arrival or departure of the up and down river steamers or the busy traffic of the bridge.