A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor Read Free Book Online

forest of raffish murals and graffiti. They even gave me a bowl of coffee and quarter of a loaf before I set off. Thank God I had put ‘student’ in my passport: it was an amulet and an Open Sesame. In European tradition, the word suggested a youthful, needy, and earnest figure, spurred along the highways of the West by a thirst for learning—thus, notwithstanding high spirits and a proneness to dog-Latin drinking songs, a fit candidate for succour.
    During these first three days I was never far from a towpath, but so many and confused are the waterways that unconsciously I changed rivers three times: the Noorwede was the first of them, the Merwede followed, then came the Waal; and at Gorinchem the Waal was joined by the Maas. In the morning I could see thegreat stream of the Maas winding across the plain towards this rendezvous; it had risen in France under the more famous name of Meuse and then flowed across the whole of Belgium; a river only less imposing than the Waal itself, to whose banks I clung for the remainder of my Dutch journey. The Waal is tremendous; no wonder, for it is really the Rhine. ‘The Rijn,’ in Holland, Rembrandt’s native stream, is a minor northern branch of the main flow, and it subdivides again and again, loses itself in the delta and finally enters the North Sea through a drainage-canal; while the Waal, gorged with Alpine snows and the waters of Lake Constance and the Black Forest and the tribute of a thousand Rhenish streams, rolls sea-ward in usurped and stately magnificence. Between this tangle of rivers, meanwhile—whose defections and reunions enclosed islands as big as English shires—the geometric despotism of canal and polder and windmill held firm; those turning sails were for drainage, not grinding corn.
    All the country I had traversed so far was below sea-level and without this discipline, which everlastingly redressed the balance between solid and liquid, the whole region would have been wild sea, or a brackish waste of flood and fen. When one looked down from a dyke, the infinity of polders and canals and the meanderings of the many streams were plain to the eye; from a lower vantage-point, only the nearest waters were discernible. But, at ground-level, they all vanished. I was sitting and smoking on a millstone by a barn near the old town of Zaltbommel, when I was alerted by the wail of a siren. In the field a quarter of a mile away, between a church and some woods, serenely though invisibly afloat on the hidden Maas, a big white ship a-flutter with pennants was apparently mooing its way across solid meadows under a cloud of gulls.
    The Maas advanced and retreated all day long, and towards evening it vanished to the south. Once out of sight, its wide bed climbed the invisible gradients of Brabant and Limburg, bound for a faraway Carolingian hinterland beyond the Ardennes.
    Dark fell while I was trudging along a never-ending path besidethe Waal. It was lined with skeleton trees; the frozen ice-puddles creaked under my hobnails; and, beyond the branches, the Great Bear and a retinue of winter constellations blazed in a clear cold sky. At last the distant lights of Tiel, poised on the first hill I had seen in Holland, twinkled into being on the other bank. An opportune bridge carried me over and I reached the market-place soon after ten, somnambulant with fatigue after traversing a vast stretch of country. I can’t remember under what mountainous eiderdown or in what dank cell I slept the night.
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    A change came over the country. For the first time, next day, the ground was higher than sea-level and with every step the equipoise of the elements tilted more decisively in favour of dry land. A gentle rolling landscape of water-meadow and ploughland and heath, with the snow melting here and there, stretched away northward through the province of Guelderland and south into Brabant. The roadside calvaries and the twinkle of sanctuary lamps in the