for a convenient means of concealing stolen property, as articles of dress. Our military Lübecker thought they would be very useful as a foraging party. They sat laughing and sipping their wine, now and then handing a glass of the liquor, in an ungracious way, to the woman squatted on the ground; and who received it with a real or assumed humility which was, perhaps, the most curious part of the picture. Here three of our companions, Alcibiade, the Viennese silversmith, and one of the Lübeckers, were unable to proceed further on foot, and took places in the “fast coach;” while “Hannibal” and myself tramped the remaining twenty miles which lay between us and Brünn, the capital of Moravia.
It was again Sunday, our usual rest day, and I stood in the open square before the huge church at Brünn, watching the motley, shifting, and clamorous crowd which had converted its very steps into a market-place. There was something strikingly Eastern in the character of the women’s attire: intensely gaudy and highly contrasted; and their head-dresses the very next thing to a turban with double-frilled ends. There was also something peculiarly Catholic in the nature of the articles exposed for sale; beads, crosses, coloured pictures of saints, and tiny images of suffering Saviours; but more especially in the manner in which the Sunday had been turned into a market-day. Above all, and through all, the impressive tones of the solemn chant, mingled with bursts of inspiring music, pealed out of the open doorway, round which clustered the kneeling devotees.
Our lame companions started on the following day by rail for the Austrian capital, while we took the high road. The country through which we passed was beautifully undulated; hill and dale following each other in regular succession, and in a far different state of order and cultivation to the neglected plains of Bohemia. We were now in Austria proper, and everything spoke of prosperity and comfort. Neat, populous villages, hung upon every hill-side—the southern side invariably—and there were no shortcomings in the accommodation for man or horse. But our finances were in a miserable plight; and our sustenance during the two and a half days occupied in tramping the more than eighty miles between Brünn and Vienna, consisted for the most part of fruit, bread, and water. We crossed the Danube at a place called “Am Spitz,” where there is an interminable bridge across the broad flood, and entered Vienna almost penniless.
CHAPTER XVI.
the turks’ cellar.
You enter the old town of Vienna from Leopoldstadt by the Ferdinand Bridge; and, walking for a few minutes parallel with the river, come into a hollow called the Tiefer Grund; passing next under a broad arch which itself supports a street spanning the gulley, you find on the left hand a rising ground which must be climbed in order to reach a certain open space of a triangular form, walled in by lofty houses, called “Die Freiung,”—the Deliverance. In it there is an old wine-house, the Turks’ Cellar, and there belongs to this spot one of the legends of Vienna.
In the autumn of the year sixteen hundred and twenty-seven, when the city was so closely invested by the Turks, that the people were half famished, there stood in the place now called “Freiung,” or thereabouts, the military bakery for that portion of the garrison which had its quarters in the neighbourhood. The bakery had to supply not only the soldiers, but bread was made in it to be doled out to destitute civilians by the municipal authorities; and, as the number of the destitute was great, the bakers there employed had little rest. Once in the dead of the night, while some of the apprentices were getting their dough ready for the early morning batch, they were alarmed by a hollow ghostly sound as of spirits knocking in the earth. The blows were regular and quite distinct, and without cessation until cockcrow. The next night these awful sounds were again heard, and seemed to become louder and more urgent as the day drew near; but, with the first scent of morning air, they suddenly ceased. The apprentices gave information to the town authorities; a military watch was set, and the cause of the strange noises in the earth was very soon discovered. The enemy was under ground; the Turks, from their camp on the Leopoldiberg, were carrying a mine under the city; and, not knowing the levels, had approached so nearly to the surface that there was but a mere crust between them and the bakehouse floor.
What was to be done? The danger was imminent—the remedy must be prompt and decisive. A narrow arm of the Danube ran within a hundred yards of the place: pick and spade were vigorously plied, and in a short time a canal was cut between the river and the bakery. Little knew the Turks of the cold water that could then at any time be thrown upon their undertaking. All was still. The Viennese say that the hostile troops already filled the mine, armed to the teeth, and awaiting only a concerted signal to tell them that a proposed midnight attack on the walls had diverted the attention of the citizens. Then they were to rush up out of the earth and surprise the town. But the besieged, forewarned and forearmed, suddenly threw the flood-gates open and broke a way for the water through the new canal under the bakehouse floor; down it went bubbling, hissing, and gurgling into the dark cavern, where it swept the Mussulmans before it, and destroyed them to a man.
This was the origin of the Turks’ Cellar; and although the title is perhaps unjustly appropriated by the winehouse I have mentioned, yet there is no doubt that the tale is true, and that the house at any rate is near the spot from which its name is taken. Grave citizens even believe that the underground passage still exists, walled and roofed over with stone, and that it leads directly to the Turks’ camp, at the foot of the Leopoldiberg. They even know the size of it, namely, that it is of such dimensions as to admit the marching through it of six men abreast. Of this I know nothing; but I know from the testimony of a venerable old lady—who is not the oldest in Vienna—that the bakers’ apprentices were formerly allowed special privileges in consideration of the service once rendered by some of their body to the state. Indeed, the procession of the bakers, on every returning anniversary of the swamp-in of the Turks, when they marched horse and foot from the Freiung, with banners, emblems, and music, through the heart of the city to the grass-grown camp outside the city walls, was one of the spectacles that made the deepest impression on this chatty old lady in her childhood.
The Turks’ Cellar is still famous. It is noted now, not for its bread or its canal-water, but for its white wine, its baked veal, and its savoury chickens. Descend into its depths (for it is truly a cellar and nothing else) late in the evening, when citizens have time and money at their disposal, and you find it full of jolly company. As well as the tobacco-smoke will permit you to see what the place