Now, instead of a thicket of reeds, and every reed a man, the steamer slips along the shrub-grown banks of the island. When ashore, crossing the great plain of the Marchfeld, we find wide-spreading rich agricultural land, with small villages and groups of houses or farm buildings, and occasional factories about the country that but a century ago was the scene of a titanic but inconclusive struggle. Inland from one of the heights—as at Wolkersdorf, from which the poet shows the Austrian Emperor watching the struggle—we may get a view of the whole field with the plateau of Wagram, about which the contest was most severe. The Marchfeld is associated, too, with an even more momentous struggle, for here, in 1278, Rudolph of Habsburg defeated King Ottokar of Bohemia and won the duchy of Austria and the crown of the Empire, so that on this plain may be said to have been founded the fortunes of the Habsburg dynasty, which still rules the Austrian Empire.
The greater part of the journey along the river from Vienna until we approach the Hungarian frontier is between green, wooded islands or banks, without any points of special interest after we leave the island of Lobau. The bends of the river make it occasionally appear to the eye as though closed in at either end, so that with its shrub and tree-fringed borders it reminds the traveller of some of the lakes of Eastern Canada. Occasionally we pass along sandy or stony banks and islets, unless the water be very high, with many rooks, daws, and gulls flying about or settling on the exposed ground in search of food. Gulls, it should be said, are common objects of a journey down the Danube. I cannot recall the point at which I first observed them, but certainly before reaching Vienna.
The principal places of note before we reach Hungary are on the right bank. Near Petronell—about twenty miles below Vienna—is a massive bit of Roman ruin in the form of an archway, known as the Heidentor, and shortly beyond we reach Deutsch-Altenburg, the ancient Carnuntum of the Romans, celebrated for its sulphur springs, its handsome old church, and its “Hütelberg” or Hat Hill, a mound which is said to have been formed by the inhabitants bringing the earth in hatfuls to raise a simple memorial of the expulsion of the Turks.
Though, according to Gibbon, Petronell on the one side and Hainburg on the other, disputed with Altenburg the honour of being Carnuntum, excavations in the neighbourhood of the last-named place established its claim, despite the fact that each of the others has Roman relics to show. An amphitheatre and other buildings have been revealed, which are made the more interesting from the fact that it was at Carnuntum that Severus Septimus was proclaimed Emperor, and that it was at Carnuntum that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius spent three years, while the Germanic tribes of the Quadi and the Marcomanni were threatening, and from Carnuntum that the philosopher-emperor dated the second of those “Meditations,” that have given him a fame more enduring than his conquests. Here the Fourteenth Legion was stationed, and near here was the harbourage of the Roman Danube flotilla.
In the museum, opened in 1904, are preserved many of the recovered links of the place with its Roman past. It was at Carnuntum, too, that Theodoric the Ostrogoth was born, it is said, two days after the death of Attila. The next town, Hainburg, backed by the high, flattened, conical Schlossberg, is another very old place, now first noticeable for its extensive Government tobacco factory. Its old walls and towers afford many picturesque bits. A sculptured figure on one of the gates is said to represent King Etzel, thus serving to keep alive the tradition that the ruins of the castle on the conical berg, are the remains of the one in which King Etzel and Kriemhilda rested on their journey from Vienna to the Hunnish King’s capital.
After the earlier flat country through which the river has brought us from Vienna, the scenery has now become more picturesque with the rising ground on the right, and soon we see ahead of us the rocky frontier of the kingdom of Hungary, and the broad extent of the frontier boundary river, the March, flowing in on the left around it.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] “The Danube,” by William Beattie, M.D., 1844.