Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor Read Free Book Online Page B

all this foreign nonsense that James I made him Lord Arundell of Wardour. [3]
    Later, in Rilke’s Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke , I came on an evocation of these old Turkish campaigns which suddenly brought all the chronicles to life. The poem commemorates a vague, perhaps imaginary, kinsman of the poet, a young cornet and standard-bearer in a regiment of horse in 1663. Billeted for a night in a Hungarian frontier castle beyond the Raab, he is woken by frenzied neighing and trumpets sounding boot-and-saddle; there is a roar of burning. The enemy have surrounded and set light to the castle. Tearing himself from the arms of the young châtelaine, he is only just in time to seize the smouldering Colour and rush down the stone steps; the flag bursts into a great flame as he charges into the turbaned ranks and he is lost to sight at last under a sixteen-fold flash of scimitars.
    * * *

    I explored the Vár—the fortress of Buda, that is—with Micky and Tim, the huge black Alsatian, and began to get the hang of this lofty quarter and the old houses there, the lanes, the churches and the steep streets; they sank like trenches between silent walls where branches and creepers showered over the coping. On a bus trip a mile of two north to Roman Aquincum, we were joined by a beautiful girl of about fourteen called Harry, part-Croatian and part-Polish as well as Hungarian. Tim bounded about among the sarcophagi and broken walls and the ruined amphitheatre and dug for bones in the Temple of the Unconquered Sun; and in the museum we gazed at one of those disturbing bas-reliefs of Mithras in a Phrygian cap, plunging a dagger into the bull’s throat. (The god always wears an expression of unbearable anguish as though the throat were his own; a hound leaps up to drink the blood and, down below, a furtive scorpion wages scrotal war.) A favourite of the legions, he was worshipped all along the frontier and there was hardly a camp between Carlisle and the Black Sea without one of his shrines.
    This last gasp of the Alpine range was also the last bastion of Roman Pannonia, for the Empire stopped at the river’s bank. The Iberian cavalry stationed here must have peered across with misgiving: beyond the vague settlements of Celts, or Quadi, or Sarmatians, the grim plain ran away to infinity. Gepids, Vandals and finally the Huns replaced them in turn, until Rome itself collapsed and the Dark Ages set in. The Avars came next. Deserta Avororum! Their name hung bleakly over the waste for dim unchronicled centuries until Charlemagne scattered them, and, without knowing it, cleared a space for the westernmost settlements of the Bulgars. The new state bombinated briefly in the vacuum, until— at last! —the hour struck for the Magyars. After centuries of shadowy Asian wandering, they streamed out of the wings and settled on centre stage forever.
    Except for the old quarter along the opposite bank, modern Pest only really came into existence in the last century. It spreadinsatiably across the plain and I could see great Oxford Streets, like the Andrássy út and the Rákóczi út, slicing their canyons through the boom city; the quiet citadel my side of the water had long ago been outstripped. Precariously linked by boat or, briefly each year, by the ice, Buda and Pest, the names as well as the places, were joined to each other only in the 1840s. One was often told that the tremendous Széchényi chain-bridge was built by two Scotsmen, the Brothers Clark.
    Apart from a few old streets and squares, the smart Dunapalota Hotel and the cheerful and pleasure-loving waterfront—especially the Patisserie Gerbaud, a dashing Gunters-like meeting-place by the statue of the poet Vörösmarty—I liked Pest much less than my own side of the town, but I never tired of surveying it from the Fisher Bastion. This vantage point by the Coronation Church commanded steep descending layers plumed all