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Kotokin

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Vague speculation thrives in weather like this. The world is muffled in white, motor-roads and telegraph-poles vanish, a few castles appear in the middle distance; everything slips back hundreds of years. The details of the landscape—the leafless trees, the sheds, the church towers, the birds and the animals, the sledges and the woodmen, the sliced ricks and the occasional cowmen driving a floundering herd from barn to barn—all these stand out dark in isolation against the snow, distinct and momentous. Objects expand or shrink and the change makes the scenery resemble early woodcuts of winter husbandry. Sometimes the landscape moves it further back in time. Pictures from illuminated manuscripts take shape; they become the scenes which old breviaries and Books of Hours enclosed in the O of Orate, fratres. The snow falls; it is Carolingian weather... Set on the way by my Villon craze, I had discovered and devoured Helen Waddell's Mediaeval Latin Lyrics and the Wandering Scholars the year before and had seized on the Archpoet and the Carmina Burana; and I wasn't slow, in the present circumstances, to identify myself with one of those itinerant mediaeval clerks. In an inn or a cowshed, when I scratched away the ice-ferns in the morning and the winter scene widened, the illusion was complete:

Nec lympha caret alveus,

nec prata virent herbida,

sol nostra fugit aureus

confinia;

est inde dies niveus,

nox frigida.

It was the world all round me! 'De ramis cadunt folia...' they had fallen long ago. 'Modo frigescit quidquid est...' icicles, barring the scene out-of-doors, dripped from the eaves in confirmation.

There was something meditative and consoling about this dim season, except towards evening, when the sun—invisible through the clouds, reduced to a silvery blur or expanded to an orange globe like a winter cherry—began to set. Then rooks fell silent; the pink after-glow faded on faraway peaks; the light dwindled over the grey fields; and life ebbed with a shudder like a soul leaving the body. All was suddenly quiet and ghostly and I longed for the first glimpse of the lamplight streaming through the windows of my destined village. I lost my way now and then through misunderstanding instructions at a farm or a cottage; sometimes dialect or lack of teeth or the wind had garbled them. Heading in the twilight for one of those three uncharted villages, I had a moment of panic. I was long past the last signpost: it had pointed to Pfaffenbichl and Marwang—I remember these two names because the first was ridiculous and the second rather sinister. All at once it was dark and the snow was coming down fast. I was feeling my way by a wooden rail when I lost touch and fell stumbling in a drift and floundered in circles but couldn't find the rail. I must have strayed into a field. Luckily I found a ruined barn and fumbled my way to the door. I lit a match and cleared the snow and the ancient cow-pats and owls' pellets out of a corner and, pulling on every stitch of extra clothing from my rucksack, resigned myself to the thought of sheltering there till daybreak. The sun had only just set.

I usually had an apple and a hunk of bread and a flask, but not this time. There was no light to read by or dry wood for a fire, the cold was getting worse and the wind was driving snow through a score of gaps. I huddled in a ball with my arms round my knees, stirring every few minutes to stamp and flap my arms. Too low for wolves, I thought melodramatically; or was it? After a while I stopped the singing with which I was trying to pass the interminable hours. There was nothing for it but to sit clenched and shivering in this prehistoric burial posture and listen to my teeth rattling. Every now and then I seemed to fall into a sort of catalepsy. But suddenly—was it midnight, or one in the morning? or later perhaps?—the wind fell and I heard voices, quite near, and jumped up and ran out shouting. There was silence, then someone called back. I could make out two faint blurs. They were villagers returning home. What was I doing there, on such a night? I told them. "Der arme Bua!" They were all sympathy. But it was only half-past eight and the village was a mere two or three hundred metres away, just round the end of the hill... And within five minutes, there were the roofs and the belfry and the lighted doorway. The carpet of lamplight unrolled across the snow and the flakes floating past the windows were turning to sequins. Inside the inn the lamplit and steaming rustics round the table, veiled in the smoke of their lidded pipes, were maundering away with slurred vowels over their mugs. It was no good trying to explain.

"Hans."

"What?"

"Can you see me?"

"No."

"Well, the dumplings are enough."

The inn-keeper's wife, who was from Munich, was illustrating the difficulties of the dialect by an imaginary conversation between two Bavarian peasants. They are seated on either side of a table, helping themselves from a huge dish of Knödel, and it is only when the plate of one of them is piled high enough with dumplings to hide him from view that he stops. In ordinary German, this dialogue would run: "Hans!" "Was?" "Siehst Du mich?" "Nein." "Also, die Knödel sind genug." But in the speech of Lower Bavaria, as closely as I can remember, it turns into: "Schani!" "Woas?" "Siahst Du ma?" "Na." "Nacha, siang die Kniadel knua." Such sounds were mooing and rumbling in the background all through this Bavarian trudge.

The inns in these remote and winter-bound thorpes were warm and snug. There was usually a picture of Hitler and a compulsory poster or two, but they were outnumbered by pious symbols and more venerable mementoes. Perhaps because I was a foreigner, politics seldom entered the conversations I had to share in; rather surprisingly, considering the closeness of those villages to the fountain-head of the Party. (It was different in towns.) Inn-talk, when it concerned the regional oddities of Bavaria, was rife with semi-humorous bias. Even then, many decades after Bismarck's incorporation of the Bavarian Kingdom into the German Empire, Prussia was the chief target. A frequent butt of these stories was a hypothetical Prussian visitor to the province. Disciplined, blinkered, pig-headed and sharp-spoken, with thin vowels and stripped consonants—every "sch" turning into "s" and every hard "g" into "y"—this ridiculous figure was an unfailing prey for the easy-going but shrewd Bavarians. Affection for the former ruling family still lingered. The hoary origins and the thousand years' sway of the Wittelsbachs were remembered with pride and their past follies forgiven. So august and gifted and beautiful a dynasty had every right, these old people inferred, to be a bit cracked now and then. The unassuming demeanour of Prince Ruprecht, the actual Pretender—who was also the last Stuart Pretender to the British throne—was frequently extolled; he was a distinguished doctor in Munich, and much loved. All this breathed homesickness for a past now doubly removed and thickly overlaid by recent history. I liked them for these old loyalties. Not everyone is fond of Bavarians: their fame is mixed, both inside Germany and out and one hears damning tales of aggressive ruthlessness. They seemed a rougher race than the civilized Rhinelanders or the diligent and homely Swabians. They were, perhaps, more raw in aspect and more uncompromising in manner; and—trivial detail!—an impression remains, perhaps a mistaken one, of darker hair. But there was nothing sinister about the farm people and foresters and woodcutters I spent these evenings with. They have left a memory of whiskers and wrinkles and deep eye sockets, of slurred speech and friendly warmth and hospitable kindness. Carved wood teemed in every detail of their dwellings, for from the Norwegian fiords to Nepal, above certain contour-lines, the upshot of long winters, early nightfall, soft wood and sharp knives is the same. It soars to a feverish zenith in Switzerland, where each winter begets teeming millions of cuckoo clocks, chamois, dwarfs and brown bears.

On one of these evenings, an accordion player set everyone yodelling. I can't bear it now, but I listened in rapture then. In the last of these villages I found myself rolling about on the floor in a friendly wrestling match with a village boy of about my own age. It ended in an inextricable clinch and a draw, from which we rose covered in sweat and sawdust, limping through acclaim towards the reviving beer mugs.

In thanks for shelter in farms, or for sojourns that the parish had imposed, I sketched the farmers and inn-keepers and their wives and presented them with the results and through politeness or lack of sophistication, they looked pleased. I will go into the merits of this output later. At one point, it plays an important part in this story.

It was different in towns.

In all those chance conversations in coffee houses and beer-halls and wine-cellars I was a most inadequate foil. Just how inadequate, I must try to convey, even if it slows things up for a couple of pages.

'A dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness...' those words in my housemaster's report would have been nearer the mark if 'sophistication' had been replaced by 'precocity plus backwardness.' At all events, the mixture had produced nothing faintly resembling a grasp of politics and I'm forced to confess that, apart from a few predictable and almost subconscious prejudices, politically speaking, I didn't care a damn. It was still possible for people to know each other fairly well without the dimmest idea of their opinions; and, at the King's School, Canterbury, discussion raged on every theme but this.

It goes without saying that in a small, tradition-haunted public school of such improbable antiquity—founded a few decades after Justinian closed the pagan academy at Athens—the atmosphere was likely to be conservative, and it was; but it was conservatism of an inexplicit kind, unaggressive because it was unchallenged—at least, at the age of sixteen and a half it was, which is when I vanished from the scene; but deep in the bloodstream nevertheless. There were rumours of sporadic heterodoxy higher up but they were few, and not fierce, and no firebrands like the two-man jacquerie of Esmond Romilly and Philip Toynbee had ever broken in to scatter manifestos and drive away with a carload of straw boaters. Communism, in such surroundings, still suggested the beards, the fur hats and the steaming bombs of old-fashioned cartoons; it was a concept almost too exotic for conjecture. The few boys with Socialist leanings were thought to be harmless, but a bit odd; and, where they might have seemed dashing a couple of years later, they were then thought rather dim. Socialism sounded grey and without charm and Labour M.P.s conjured up visions of steelrimmed spectacles, homespun cloth, cocoa and seed-cake and long killjoy faces bent on dismantling—what? Here an odd medley of targets would be bandied across fifth-form studies: What indeed? Why, the Empire, for a start! The Fleet! The Army! Established religion—"except Methodist chapels"; Gibraltar, the Lords, judges' wigs, kilts, bearskins, public schools ("No, steady on!" ), Latin and Greek, Oxford and Cambridge—"the Boat race too, most likely"; "county cricket for a cert."—steeplechasing, shooting, fox-hunting, flat-racing, the Derby, betting, country-life, farming—("I bet they'd plough up everything for swedes and beetroots if they got the chance!") What about London? Why, the Palladium and the Aldwych would be turned into lecture halls or bloody temperance canteens. (The preceding notions were imported, rather than formed on the spot. They were fragments left over from outbursts and lamentations at home. The level may have been higher; but I think this reconstruction is about right.) Talk would languish and a pensive gloom descend. Then someone might say: "It's a pity something can't be done about those poor chaps on the dole"; and the gloom would deepen; then: "It's rotten luck on all those miners." Awkward silence would prolong itself while these liberal thoughts fluttered overhead. Then someone might tactfully put Rhapsody in Blue or Ain't Misbehavin' on the gramophone and steer the talk into happier channels: musical comedies, domestic scandal, Tallulah Bankhead, slow bowling or the fast passages in Juvenal.

My early days in London saw little advance on this; rather the reverse. The fellow crammers' pups from other establishments that I knocked about with at first were mostly a year older than me, or more; and their early departure from school had been prompted by backwardness rather than iniquity. They were wide-eyed, pink-cheeked and innocent boys with tidy hair; cornets and ensigns in the larva phase, cramming painfully for their exams and bent on an early mastery of the customs of their future regiments. They shunned flannel bags for whole suits and choked happily behind ties that were silk autobiographies knotted in high starched collars. Lock had helmetted them in hard hats till after Goodwood. Brigg, or Swaine & Adeney, sworded them with umbrellas that no cloud-burst would ever unfurl, and—ah! how enviably!—Lobb, Peel and Maxwell, on their fathers' accounts, had shod them in boned and gleaming shoes. With brows knit, they concentrated on not carrying parcels in London, on puffing at Turkish or Egyptian cigarettes rather than stinkers—even if they didn't want to smoke at all—and on eschewing the arcane blacklist of verbal usage that regimental traditions condemned. There was earnest talk, but it revolved round breeches-makers, gunsmiths and spurriers and hairdressers and their lotions, and the rival claims, in the evening, of carnations and gardenias. Arlen-ish anxieties! They were absurd and rather delightful. I was dazzled by all this juvenile dandyism; it seemed the height of worldly maturity and I did my best to keep up. With expert advice on pattern and cut I pondered eclectically in shops as hushed as cave-palaces at the bottom of the sea, and bills mounted up. In the fullness of time, there was a Simla-London row about them, with bewilderment more than anger at the Simla end; how could I be quite so silly? Some of the bills weren't paid till years after these travels ended. Decorous d'Orsay-esque canters under the plane trees with these new friends, especially when Hyde Park was still covered with dew, seemed a perfect beginning to the day and, in winter I sped across country on borrowed steeds. They were very nice to me, because I was the youngest and because genuine rashness, linked with a kind of clownish exhibitionism, whose secret I had learnt long ago and sedulously cultivated, always won a dubious popularity. I was even forgiven, after diving into a lake at a ball, for only remembering when climbing out covered in slime and duckweed that my tails were borrowed.

It was about then that the first doubts about soldiering in peacetime began. Mermaid voices—the world of Literature and the Arts—were secretly beckoning. My friends, however much they might grumble about shortness of ready cash, would have enough later to enliven soldiering with all the country pursuits they loved and plenty left over for painting London red, and in a more elaborate and seemly style than our uncomplex weekly binges allowed. These would begin among the brass and the baize-curtained settles and the print-covered walls of Stone's Chop-House in Panton Street—a Leach illustration for Surtees, destroyed in the Blitz—and twice they ended in Vine Street: ("Did you have a nice time last night, Richard?" "Perfect, Aunt Kitty. Just what I like: a vomit and a brush with the Police.") Also, if they tired of the Army, they could leave it. But what about living on one's pay, as I would have to? It might have worked had I felt utterly and exclusively vowed to a military life. But suddenly it seemed that the whole idea had taken shape faute de mieux; and, quite clearly, I was as ill-endowed for thrift in the face of temptation as I was for discipline. How would I manage, year after year, with no war in sight, never getting abroad, perhaps? As it happened, only one of this small set was destined for the infantry; armed at all points with arcane footguard vetoes, he was the one who was strictest, in a voice which had scarcely broken yet, about usage and attire; but dynastic loyalty had vowed the others, practically from birth, to paternal cavalry regiments and every so often, they were cast down by the thought that, Hussars and Lancers though they would be, the cavalry was being motorized fast. Wheels, armour-plating, nuts, bolts and caterpillar-tracks were closing in and soon, outside the Household Cavalry and the two first regiments of heavy Dragoons, there would not be a whinny within earshot except from their own loose-boxes. But all their longings remained true to boot and saddle, and these feelings were catching. I was infected with their equestrian yearnings and moments of hope would spring: Why not India? Plenty of horses there. And with the extra allowances, why not?

After this, at regular intervals, unloosed by my voices-in-the-next-room relationship to India, fostered by long gazing at faded photographs, and almost wholly unrelated to reality, unavowable dreams intoxicatingly and fleetingly took shape. Sashed, and in chain-mail epaulettes with a striped puggaree twisted round a conical Multani cap and its fringed tail flying loose with the speed of the charge, I would be pointing along a canyon with a sabre while a squadron of irregular horse, their pennanted lances lowered, thundered behind; the bullets of ten-rupee jezails, meanwhile, consistently missing, whistled past our ears. In another scene in this secret camera obscura I was seconded like Strickland Sahib, thanks to an effortless mastery of a dozen native tongues and their dialects, for special duties: unrecognizable under my rags I would disappear for months into the lanes and the bazaars of seething frontier cities. The scenery of the next slide was set beyond the Himalayas: how many weeks from Yarkand to Urumchi? There, sheltered from the blizzards of the Pamirs under the black and snowladen tent-flap, narrow-eyed over the hookah and indistinguishable from the shaggy chieftains cross-legged all round me, I played out the last chukkah of the Great Game... Invariably, as they dissolved, these deadly secret scenes made room for a final lantern-slide which was more convincing than all the rest and in much sharper focus. Squad-drill barked in the offing, recruits formed fours with a ragged triple crash, a bugler blew 'Defaulters,' and for miles around, Hampshire drizzle soaked into the gorse and pines and streamed over Aldershot windows. The adjutant meanwhile, pointing wearily at the mess-bills and cheques on his desk, said: "You realize this can't go on? The Colonel will see you now. He's waiting for you."

Once I dropped the idea of soldiering, the mermaid voices which had all the time been softly, and then less softly, calling me away from those friendly cornets of horse, now held me in thrall. The world of Literature and Art...I didn't find it. But through new friends and via the Cavendish Hotel, I think, I felt I had stepped through a looking-glass to wander in a bracing and brand new region. In this breezy, post-Stracheyan climate, it was cheerfully and explicitly held that all English life, thought and art were irredeemably provincial and a crashing bore and the sack from school, to my surprise, was hailed as a highly creditable feat; failure to join the Army was better still: "The Army! I should hope not indeed. The very idea!" I tried to explain that it had not been for ideological reasons and that I thought the King's commission a heavy honour; but, jovially overridden, I remained traitorously silent next time. An exotic radiance played over this new world. Bright with fireworks and shot with sulphuric sparks, it was an extension into real life of half a dozen books I had just read. The Left Wing opinions that I occasionally heard were uttered in such a way that they seemed a part merely, and a minor part, of a more general emancipation. This was composed of eclectic passwords and symbols—a fluent awareness of modern painting, for instance, or a familiarity with new trends in music; neither more important nor less than acquaintance with nightlife in Paris and Berlin and a smattering of the languages spoken there. The atmosphere was far removed from cocoa and Methodism; principle never interfered with fastidious hedonism—expensive clothes and elaborate ties—and the only proletarian leanings I could discern probably sprang more from a physiological need for tough company than from dogma. How brilliantly the author of 'Where Engels Fear to Tread' depicts the protagonist of this particular aspect of Thirties' London! He soars from the page like a genie out of a bottle, and the symbols he leaves on evaporation are not hammers or sickles but a scattering of jewels and the tail feather of a lyre-bird. No wonder that the 'Left Wing' and 'Communism' seemed little more than light siege-pieces aimed at the stuffiness of the old. This was the target, and shocks the tactics along the Ritz-Café Royal-Gargoyle front and a great salient of country houses. Of course I knew that these flashes were the frivolous symptoms of an enormous political movement. But I had no inkling of the immeasurable influence that it was about to exert on people of my age and not a hint of the unquestioning ardour and the disillusioned palinodes that lay in wait for most of my later friends. I never heard communism seriously propounded or argued; perhaps I was too deeply preoccupied with my own dissipations; and, as it turned out in the end it was a way of thought that I was denied or spared by a geographical fluke. From the end of these travels till the War, I lived, with a year's interruption, in Eastern Europe, among friends whom I must call old-fashioned liberals. They hated Nazi Germany; but it was impossible to look eastwards for inspiration and hope, as their western equivalents—peering from afar, and with the nightmare of only one kind of totalitarianism to vex them—felt able to do. For Russia began only a few fields away, the other side of a river; and there, as all her neighbours knew, great wrong was being done and terrible danger lay. All their fears came true. Living among them made me share those fears and they made stony ground for certain kinds of grain.

This is a long rigmarole, but it does show how ill-prepared I was for any form of political argument. In this respect, I might have been sleep-walking.

Those Bavarian inn conversations reflected opinions which ran from the total conviction of party-members to the total opposition of their opponents and victims; with the difference that the first were loud and voluble while the second remained either silent or non-committal until they were alone with a single interlocutor. Being English was relevant to all this, for though the Germans' attitude to England varied, it was never indifferent. A few, like the near-albino in Heidelberg, showed loathing. The War inevitably cropped up: they resented that we had been on the winning side, but didn't seem to blame us—always with the proviso that Germany would never have lost if she hadn't been stabbed in the back; and they admired England, in a certain measure, for reasons that were seldom heard in respectable English circles any more. For past conquests, that is, and the extent of the colonies, and the still apparently undiminished power of the Empire. When, with education and practice the colonies could rule themselves, I would urge at this point, they would be given their independence. Not at once, of course; it would take time...(This was the theory we had all been brought up on.) Looks of admiration, partly rueful and partly ironical, at what they considered the size of the lie and the extent of its hypocrisy, were the invariable response.

In these exchanges I was held up by ignorance and by anxiety to hide it; and my limited German, though it was often a stumbling block, sometimes helped to mask its true depths. How I longed to be better equipped! When they asked, and they always did, what the English thought of National Socialism, I would stick repetitively to three main objections: the burning of the books, of which lurid photographs had filled the newspapers; the concentration camps which had been set up a few months before; and the persecution of the Jews. This procedure was irritating, I could see, but not wholly ineffective. Anyway, the reactions and arguments are too familiar for repetition.

In all of these conversations there was one opening I particularly dreaded: I was English? Yes. A student? Yes. At Oxford, no? No. At this point I knew what we were in for.

The summer before, the Oxford Union had voted that 'under no circumstances would they fight for King and Country.' The stir it had made in England was nothing, I gathered, to the sensation in Germany. I didn't know much about it. In my explanation—for I was always pressed for one—I depicted the whole thing as merely another act of defiance against the older generation. The very phrasing of the motion—'Fight for King and Country'—was an obsolete cliché from an old recruiting poster: no-one, not even the fiercest patriot, would use it now to describe a deeply-felt sentiment. My interlocutors asked: "Why not?" 'Für König und Vaterland' sounded different in German ears: it was a bugle-call that had lost none of its resonance. What exactly did I mean? The motion was probably 'pour épater les bourgeois,' I floundered. Here someone speaking a little French would try to help. "Um die Bürger zu erstaunen? Ach, so!" A pause would follow. "A kind of joke, really," I went on. "Ein Scherz?" they would ask. "Ein Spass? Ein Witz?" I was surrounded by glaring eyeballs and teeth. Someone would shrug and let out a staccato laugh like three notches on a watchman's rattle. I could detect a kindling glint of scornful pity and triumph in the surrounding eyes which declared quite plainly their certainty that, were I right, England was too far gone in degeneracy and frivolity to present a problem. But the distress I could detect on the face of a silent opponent of the régime was still harder to bear: it hinted that the will or the capacity to save civilization was lacking where it might have been hoped for. Veterans of the War showed a sort of unpartisan sorrow at this falling-off. It sprang from the ambiguous love-hate for England that many Germans felt. They recalled the trenches and the stubborn fighting qualities of 'die Tommies'; then they compared them to the pacifist voters in the Union, and shook their heads. There was a sorrowing, Horatian note in this. Not from such sires, these veterans seemed to say, were sprung the youths who dyed the sea red with Punic blood and struck down Pyrrhus and mighty Antiochus and grim Hannibal.

These undergraduates had landed their wandering compatriots in a fix. I cursed their vote; and it wasn't even true, as events were to prove. But I was stung still more by the tacit and unjust implication that it was prompted by lack of spirit. I urged that there had always been an anti-militarist strain among the English in peace time. But when the blast of war blew in their ears, they imitated the action of the tiger, stiffened the sinews, summoned up the blood, and disguised fair nature with hard-favoured rage, etc. It didn't cut much ice.

Appalling things had happened since Hitler had come into power ten months earlier; but the range of horror was not yet fully unfolded. In the country the prevailing mood was a bewildered acquiescence. Occasionally it rose to fanaticism. Often when nobody was in earshot, it found utterance in pessimism, distrust and foreboding, and sometimes in shame and fear but only in private. The rumours of the concentration camps were still no louder than a murmur; but they hinted at countless unavowable tragedies.

In one of those lost Rhineland towns, I can't remember which, I had a glimpse of how quick the change-over had been for many Germans. In a workmen's bar late at night I made friends with several factory hands in overalls who had come off a late shift. They were about my age, and one of them, an amusing, clownish character, said: why didn't I doss down on his brother's camp bed at his place? When we climbed the ladder to his attic, the room turned out to be a shrine of Hitleriana. The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans and emblems. His S.A. uniform hung neatly ironed on a hanger. He explained these cult objects with fetishist zest, saving up till the last the centrepiece of his collection. It was an automatic pistol, a Luger parabellum, I think, carefully oiled and wrapped in mackintosh, accompanied by a pile of green cardboard boxes packed with bullets. He stripped and reassembled the pistol, loaded the magazine and smacked it home and ejected it again, put on a belt and crossbrace with a holster, whipped the gun in and out like a cowboy, tossed it in the air and caught it, spun it round by the trigger-guard and danced about with one eye shut, going through the motions of aiming and firing with loud clicks of the tongue... When I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on his bed, and said: "Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite! I used to punch the heads of anyone singing the Horst Wessel Lied! It was all the Red Flag and the International then! I wasn't only a Sozi, but a Kommi, ein echter Bolschewik!" He gave a clenched fist salute. "You should have seen me! Street fights! We used to beat the hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us. We laughed ourselves silly—Man hat sich totgelacht. Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!" He snapped his fingers in the air. "And here I am!" What about all his old pals, I asked. "They changed too!—all those chaps in the bar. Every single one! They're all in the S.A. now." Had a lot of people done the same, then? A lot? His eyes opened wide. "Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!" He shook his head dubiously for a moment. Then a wide, untroubled smile divided his face, as he spilled the bullets like rosary beads through the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other. "Sakra Haxen noch amal! We've scarcely got any Sozis or Kommis left to pitch into!" He laughed merrily. What did his parents think about it all? I had met them on the way up—rather a nice, seedy-looking old couple listening to the wireless by the kitchen stove. He shrugged and looked depressed. "Mensch! They don't understand anything. My father's old-fashioned: only thinks abut the Kaiser and Bismarck and old Hindenburg—and now he's dead, too—anyway, he helped the Führer to get where he is! And my mother, she knows nothing about politics. All she cares about is going to church. She's old-fashioned too."

On the road running east from my last Bavarian halt in Traunstein the sudden clear weather showed how close I was getting to the Alps. The clouds had vanished and the great range soared out of the plain as abruptly as a wall rises from a field. The snow-covered masses climbed and gleamed, slashed with blue shadows; dark loops of fir and the peaks of the Kitzbühel Alps and the East Tyrol overlapped in the sky above a deep mesh of shadowy valleys. A signpost pointed south and along a valley at the end of which Bad Reichenhall lay. On the ledge above, Berchtesgaden was perched, only known, as yet, for its abbey and its castle and its view over the wide Bavarian lowlands.

But I steered east and reached the banks of the Salzach late in the afternoon. A red, white and black pole barred the road. Inside the customs-house hung the last picture of the Führer. Uniform sleeves were ringed by the last swastika armbands and in a few minutes, beside a barrier striped red and white, an Austrian official was stamping my passport: 24 January 1934.

By nightfall I was gazing at the statues and wandering down the baroque colonnades of Salzburg in search of a café. The windows, when I found one, looked out on a fountain adorned by stampeding horses and stalactitic with icicles.

[ THE DANUBE: SEASONS AND CASTLES ]

Only glimpses of Salzburg remain: bell-towers, bridges, piazzas, fountains, a dome or two and an impression of cloisters which might all have been flown here by djinns and reassembled as an Italian Renaissance city the wrong side of the Alps.

But I didn't tarry, and for a depressing reason. The evocative smell of hot ski-wax drifted through many of the windows and swarms of people, little older than me and all bound for the mountains, were clumping the streets with skis over their shoulders. They filled the arcades and the cafés and shouted joyfully to each other as though they were already swooping about the high slopes; worse still, some were English. I loved ski-ing and all this made me feel lonely and out of things. So, early next morning, turning my back on the Salzkammergut and the lakes and the beckoning peaks of Styria and the Tyrol, I slipped away; and soon I was plodding north-west and ever further from temptation through the woods of Upper Austria. I slept in a barn near the village of Eigendorf—too small a hamlet for any map—and the next two nights in Frankenburg and Ried. One of them, spent in a loft where all the racks were filled with apples, was sweet-smelling almost to swooning point. Little has stuck from early Austrian days except the charm of these minor mountains.

St. Martin, one of Baron Liphart's castles, the earliest of those houses of friends to whom he had written on my behalf, is my first real landmark. To avoid arriving out of the blue, I telephoned before setting out, and learnt that the owner was in Vienna; but he had asked his agent to look after me if I turned up. Graf Arco-Valley, a great favourite of many English people, called 'Nando' (but not by me as we never met) had been at Oxford or Cambridge a couple of generations earlier. The schloss was shut up, the friendly agent told me. But we wandered through its twilit rooms and walked about under the trees in the park. Finally he gave me a feast in the cheerful and pretty inn, urging me to tuck in with the assiduity of a jolly uncle taking a nephew out from school. There were a couple of musicians, a zither-player and a violinist, and everybody sang. He told me at breakfast he had telephoned to the next schloss marked down on the Liphart itinerary: I would be welcome any time, they had said. (Things were beginning to look up! I would have given anything to know what my kind sponsor in Munich had written. It was a change to have favourable reports circulating.) As a result, after a second cow-shed sojourn near Riedau, I found myself in the corner tower of another castle two evenings later, wallowing in a bath of ancient shape, enclouded by the scent of the cones and the pine-logs that roared like caged lions in the huge copper stove.

The word 'schloss' means any degree of variation between a fortified castle and a baroque palace. This one was a fair sized manor house. I had felt shy as I ploughed through the snow of the long avenue late that afternoon; quite baselessly. To go by the solicitude of the trio at the stove-side in the drawing-room—the old Count and his wife and their daughter-in-law—I might, once again, have been a schoolboy asked out for a treat, or, better still, a polar explorer on the brink of expiring. "You must be famished after all that walking!" the younger Gräfin said, as a huge tea appeared: she was a beautiful dark-haired Hungarian and she spoke excellent English. "Yes," said the elder, with an anxious smile, "We've been told to feed you up!" Her husband radiated silent benevolence as yet another silver dish appeared. I spread a third hot croissant with butter and honey and inwardly blessed my benefactor in Munich.

The Count was old and frail. He resembled, a little, Max Beerbohm in later life, with a touch of Franz Joseph minus the white side-whiskers. (Next day he wrote a chit to some private gallery in Linz on the back of a visiting card. After his name was printed: K.u.K. Kämmerer u. Rittmeister i.R. 'Imperial and Royal Chamberlain,' that is, 'and retired Captain of Horse.' All through Central Europe the initials 'K.u.K.'—Kaiserlich und Königlich—were the alliterative epitome of the old Dual Monarchy. Only candidates with sixteen or thirty-two quarterings, I learnt later, were eligible for the symbolic gold key that court chamberlains wore on the back of their full-dress uniforms. But now the Empire and the Kingdom had been dismembered and their thrones were empty; no doors opened to the gold keys, the heralds were dispersed, the regiments disbanded and the horses dead long ago. The engraved words croaked loud of spent glories. Rare then, each of those symbols by now must be one with the translucent red button, the unicorn-embroidered robe and the ruby and jade clasp of a mandarin of the first class at the court of Manchus: 'Finis rerum, and an end of names and dignities and whatsoever is terrene...') I admired his attire, the soft buckskin knee-breeches and gleaming brogues and a grey and green loden jacket with horn buttons and green lapels. These were accompanied out-of-doors by the green felt hat with its curling blackcock's tail-feather which I had seen among a score of walking sticks in the hall. It was in Salzburg that I had first admired these Austrian country clothes. They were similar in kind, but less splendid in detail, to the livery of the footmen who kept bringing in those silver dishes. There was a feeling of Lincoln green about them, woodland elegance that the Count carried off with the ease of a courtier and a cuirassier.

I made myself as tidy as I could after my bath. At dinner the Count, drawing on a well-stored but failing memory, recalled ancient journeys he had made as a young A.D.C., attached to an Archduke who was a passionate shot. Out of affability to me, I think, his reminiscences were all connected with the British Isles. 'Grandes battues' in County Meath were recalled, and almost antediluvian pheasant-stands at Chatsworth and late-Victorian grouse-drives at Dunrobin; house parties of untold magnificence. "—Und die Herzogin von Sutherland!," he sighed: "eine Göttin!" A goddess! Ancient balls were conjured up and dinners at Marlborough House; there were discreet hints of half-forgotten scandals; and I saw, in my mind's eye, hansoms bound for assignations, bowling up St. James's and turning into a gaslit Jermyn Street. When the name of a vanished grandee escaped his memory, his wife would prompt him. His mind wandered back and away to the estates of a cousin in Bohemia—"The Czechs have taken them away now," he said with another sigh—and a wild boar shoot which had been held there in honour of Edward VII when he was still Prince of Wales: "Er war scharmant!" I was fascinated by all this. As I listened, the white gloved hand of the Lincoln green footman poured out coffee and placed little silver vermeil-lined goblets beside the Count's cup and mine. Then he filled them with what I thought was schnapps. I'd learnt what to do with that in recent weeks—or so I thought—and I was picking it up to tilt it into the coffee when the Count broke off his narrative with a quavering cry as though an arrow from some hidden archer had transfixed him: "NEIN! NEIN!," he faltered. A pleading, ringed and almost transparent hand was stretched out and the stress of the moment drove him into English: "No! No! Nononono—!"

I didn't know what had happened. Nor did the others. There was a moment of perplexity. Then, following the Count's troubled glance, all our eyes alighted simultaneously on the little poised silver goblet in my hand. Then both the Countesses, looking from the torment on the Count's face to the astonishment on mine, dissolved in saving laughter, which, as I put the goblet back on the table, spread to me and finally cleared the distress from the Count's features too, and replaced it with a worried smile. His anxiety had been for my sake, he said apologetically. The liquid wasn't schnapps at all, but incomparable nectar—the last of a bottle of a liqueur distilled from Tokay grapes and an elixir of fabulous rarity and age. When we had recovered I felt glad that this marvellous drink had been rescued, above all for the Count's sake—it was too late a stage in life for any more shocks—and ashamed of my pot-house ways; but they were too kind-hearted for the feeling to last long.

The Count retired early, kissing first the hands and then the cheeks of his wife and daughter-in-law. When he said goodnight to me, his hand felt as light as a leaf. With his free hand he gave my forearm a friendly pat and faded away down a lamplit grove of antlers. Then the elder Gräfin, who had put on spectacles and spread her needlework on her lap, said, "Now come and tell us all about your travels." So I did my best.

At this dead time of the year, when agriculture had come to a halt, most of the dwellers in these castles were dispersed until harvest or shooting or school holidays should muster them again. When I think of these havens, later castles at other seasons intrude their memories and the resulting confusion of unlabelled lantern-slides composes a kind of archetypal schloss, of which each separate building becomes a variation.

An archetypal schloss... At once, in my mind's eye, an angular relic of the Dark Ages confronts the wind on top of a crag. More slowly, a second vision begins to cohere. Staircases entwine. Allegorical ceilings unfold. Conch-blowing tritons, at the heart of radiating vistas of clipped hornbeam, shoot plumes of water at the sky. Both visions are true. But finally a third category emerges: a fair-sized country house, that is, which combines the castle-principle with a touch of the monastery and the farm. It is usually beautiful and always pleasing and sometimes age or venerability demand sterner epithets. A rustic baroque, even if it is only a later superimposition on a much older core, is the presiding style. There are shingle roofs, massive walls whitewashed or mottled with lichen and rectangular and cylindrical towers capped with pyramids or cones or with wasp-waisted cupolas of red or grey tiles. Cavernous gateways breach the arcades of thick and flattened arches. There is a chapel and stables and a coach-house full of obsolete carriages; barns and waggons and sledges and byres and a smithy; then fields and hayricks and woods. Indoors, a pattern of flagstones rings underfoot, or the lighter resonance of polished wood. The spans of elliptical and snow-white cross-vaults spring low in the corners of the rooms and between them flared embrasures taper to tall double windows that are tight shut and ice-flowered in winter, with bolsters between them to foil draughts. In summer the tilt of the slatted shutters guides the glance downwards to leaf-shadows on cobblestones and a battered fountain or a sundial. The pockmarked statues are curdled with lichen. Scythes swish through deep hayfields. There is an interlock of orchards and slanting meadows; and beyond them, cattle and woods and a herd of deer that lift all their antlers simultaneously at the sound of a footfall.

As I shut my eyes and explore, looking-glasses throw back the faded reflections: the corroborative detail assembles fast. In portraits, Others nurse a plumed shako, a dragoon's helmet or an uhlan's czapka with a square top like a mortar-board and tufted with a tall aigrette. In later pictures, pale blue replaces these snowy regimentals, in melancholy homage to the progress in firearms and marksmanship since the battle of Königgrätz. The passion for the chase breaks out over the walls and stags' antlers spread their points among the panoplies. There are elks' horns from the frontiers of Poland and Lithuania, bears from the Carpathians, the tushes of wild boars twisting up like moustaches, chamois from the Tyrol and bustards, capercaillies and blackcock; along every available inch of the passages, the twin prongs of roe deer, calligraphically inscribed with a faded date and the venue, multiply forever. A respectable assembly of books fills the library. There is a missal or two in the hall, the Wiener Salonblatt and Vogue lie anachronistically about the drawing room and perhaps a poetical grandson or great-niece has left a pocket-volume of Hyperion or the Duino Elegies on a window-sill. Miniatures and silhouettes constellate the spaces between the portraits and the looking-glasses. Heraldic details abound: crowns or circlets with nine, seven or five pearls celebrate the owner's rank and stamp his possessions as plentifully as brands on a ranch. On a handy shelf the small gilt volumes of the Almanach de Gotha, a different colour for each degree, fall open automatically, like the Baronetage in the hands of Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall, at the castellan's own family. Biedermeier tables are crowded with photographs. Scores of summers have faded the green, the royal blue, the canary and the claret-coloured velvet of their frames. Between his embossed crown and a signature turned yellow with age, Franz Joseph presides like an agathos daimon. The Empress, goddess-like among a photographer's cardboard turrets, gazes into the distance with her hand on the head of an enormous deer-hound. Sewn into her habit, she clears prodigious fences; or with a swan-like turn of her throat, she looks over her bare shoulder under piled-up tiers of thick plaits or cascading coils that are sprinkled with diamond stars.

The libraries of all these castles contained Meyer's Konversations-lexikon. As soon as I decently could, I would beg to be let loose among its many volumes, with the plea that questions had cropped up on the road that it was a torment to leave unsolved. This often caused surprise, always pleasure: at the least, it solved the problem of entertainment, and sometimes it stirred a kindred curiosity, leading to searches in the library through dense columns of Gothic type. Meyer was sometimes backed up by the Larousse XXème Siècle or the Encyclopaedia Britannica; once, miraculously, in Transylvania, and once, later on, in Moldavia, all three were present. Atlases, maps and picture books were loaded into one's arms at bedtime.

Shaded paraffin lamps, I think, not electricity, light up a few of these rooms after dark. I'm sure candles lit the music when I turned over for someone at the piano—I can see the glitter of their flames in the removed rings at the end of the keyboard as clearly as I can hear the lieder of Schubert and Strauss and Hugo Wolf, and Der Erlkönig at last. Music played a leading part in all these households. The sound of practising winds along passages, sheet music and bound scores scatter the furniture. The variously shaped instrument cases gathering dust in the attics, bear witness to palmier days when the family and its staff and its guests would assemble for symphonies. Now and then, the pipes of an organ cluster in the hall, and a gilt harp gleams in a corner of the library with all its strings intact.

After I had said goodnight and made my way book-laden along an antlered corridor and up a stone spiral to my room, it was hard to believe I had been sleeping in a byre the night before. There is much to recommend moving straight from straw to a four-poster, and then back again. Cocooned in smooth linen and lulled by the smell of logs and beeswax and lavender, I nevertheless stayed awake for hours, revelling in all these delights and contrasting them with joy to the now-familiar charms of cow-sheds and haylofts and barns. The feeling would still be there when I woke up next morning and looked down from the window.

The last sunrise of January was sliding across a lawn, catching the statues of Vertumnus and Pales and finally Pomona at the far end and stretching their thin and powdery shadows on the untouched snow. Rooky woods feathered the skyline and there was a feeling in the air that the Danube was not far.

Castles were seldom out of sight. Clustering on the edge of country towns, recumbent with sleepy baroque grace on wooded ledges or beetling above the tree tops, they loomed from afar. One is aware of their presence all the time, and when the traveller steps over the border of a new sphere, he feels like Puss-in-Boots when the peasants tell him that the distant chateau and the pastures and the mills and the barns belong to the Marquis of Carabas. A new name impinges. For a stretch it is Coreth or Harrach or Traun or Ledebur or Trautmannsdorff or Seilern; then it dies away and gives place to another. Perhaps I struck lucky; for when, on the road or during halts at an inn, the theme of the local castle-dwellers cropped up, as they invariably did, there were no Cobbett-like diatribes. The villagers would speak of the local castellan and his family in the possessive tones they might have used for a font or a roodscreen of great antiquity in the parish church. Feelings were often warmer than this; and when bad luck, gambling, extravagance or even total imbecility had sent a local dynasty into decline, this eclipse of a familiar landmark was bewailed as yet another symptom of dissolution.

This hovering Ichabod feeling was everywhere epitomized by old photographs of Franz Josef, battered and faded but cherished; rather strangely, perhaps. His reign had been a succession of private tragedies and public though peripheral erosion. Every few decades some irredentist-loosened fragment of the Empire was detached or—occasionally and worse still—rashly annexed. But these regions were far away at the Empire's fringes, their inhabitants were foreign, they spoke different languages, and life at the heart of the Empire was still serene and cheerful enough to muffle these shocks and omens. After all, most of that huge assembly of countries, slowly and peacefully acquired through centuries of brilliant dynastic marriage—'Bella gerunt alii; tu, felix Austria, nubes!'—was still intact; and until 1919—when the centrifugal break-up spared only the Austrian heartlands—a buoyant douceur de vivre had pervaded the whole of life. Or so it appeared to them now, and many seemed to look back to those times with the longing of the Virgilian farmers and shepherds in Latium when they remembered the kind reign of Saturn.

At Eferding, where I stayed the night, the baroque palace that filled one side of the central square belonged to a descendant of Rüdiger von Starhemberg, the great defender of Vienna in its second siege by the Turks. The name was once more on everyone's lips, owing to the present Prince Starhemberg's rôle as commander of the Heimwehr: a Home Guard or militia, I was told, ready to foil any attempted seizure of power by either of the political extremes. I had seen columns of this corps on country roads, dressed in grey uniforms and semi-military ski-caps, shouldering raw-hide knapsacks with the brindled and piebald marking turned outwards. Rather mild they had seemed, to eyes and ears attuned to the fiercer tempo and the stamping and barking the other side of the German border; but they did not escape the accusation of fascism by one half of their opponents. After Dr. Dollfuss, Starhemberg's picture was the one most often seen in public places: which—again compared to Germany—was not much. They showed a tall, handsome young man with a high-bridged nose and a rather weak chin.

The scene was beginning to change. My path followed a frozen woodland stream into a region where rushes and waterweed and marsh vegetation and brambles and shrubs were as densely entangled as a primeval forest. Opening on expanses of feathered ice, it was like a mangrove swamp in the Arctic circle. Encased in ice and snow, every twig sparkled. Frost had turned the rushes into palisades of brittle rods and the thickets were loaded with icicles and frozen rainbow-shooting drops. Of birds, I could only see the usual crows and rooks and magpies, but the snow was arrowed with forked prints. It must have teemed with water-fowl at a different time of year and with fish too. Nets were looped stiffly in the branches and a flat-bottomed boat, three-quarters sunk, was frozen in for the winter. It was a white, hushed region under a spell of catalepsy.

The hush was broken by a succession of claps from a lagoon. A heron was slowly hoisting itself off the ice; then a spiral of slower wingbeats lifted it to the top of a Lombardy poplar that was dark with a multitude of dishevelled nests. Its mate, looking enormous as it paced a white pool, cumbrously followed it; and a minute later, I could see their beaks projecting side by side. They were the only ones there, wintering it out in the nearly-empty heronry. The other nests would fill up towards the close of the tadpole season.

It was a marvellous place; an unusual place; I couldn't quite make it out—half mere, half frozen jungle. It finished at a bank where a row of poplars was interspersed with aspen and birch and willow among blackberry-thickets and hazel. On the other side of this barrier the sky suddenly widened and a great volume of water was flowing dark and fast. In midstream, cloudy with the hemispherical ghosts of weeping-willows, an island divided the rush of the current. There was an answering line of ice on the other bank, then reeds and woods and a fluctuation of timbered mountain.

This second meeting with the Danube had taken me unawares; I had reached it half a day sooner than I thought! As it streamed through those wooded and snowbound ranges the river made an overpowering impression of urgency and force.

My map, when I dug it out, said that the mountains opposite were part of the Bohemian Forest. They had followed the north bank ever since the river had entered Austria a mile or two east of Passau, about thirty miles upstream.

"In cold weather like this," said the innkeeper of a Gastwirtschaft further down, "I recommend Himbeergeist." I obeyed and it was a lightning conversion. Spirit of raspberries, or their ghost—this crystalline distillation, twinkling and ice-cold in its misty goblet, looked as though it were homoeopathically in league with the weather. Sipped or swallowed, it went shuddering through its new home and branched out in patterns—or so it seemed after a second glass—like the ice-ferns that covered the window panes, but radiating warmth and happiness instead of cold, and carrying a ghostly message of comfort to the uttermost fimbria. Fierce winters give birth to their antidotes: Kümmel, Vodka, Aquavit, Danziger Goldwasser. Oh for a thimble full of the cold north! Fiery-frosty potions, sequin-flashers, rife with spangles to spark fuses in the bloodstream, revive fainting limbs, and send travellers rocketing on through snow and ice. White fire, red cheek, heat me and speed me. This discovery cast a glow over the approach of Linz. A few miles on, round a loop of river, the city appeared. It was a vision of domes and belfries gathered under a stern fortress and linked by bridges to a smaller town at the foot of a mountain on the other bank.

When I got to the fine sweeping piazza in the middle of the city I chose a promising-looking coffee house, kicked off the snow, went in and ordered two boiled eggs. Eier im Glas! It was my latest passion. The delight of tapping the eggs all over with a bone spoon before removing the fragmented shell and sliding the fragile contents into a tumbler intact, then a slice of butter...travellers' joys. I had chosen more luckily than I knew; for as well as staying me with eggs, the young proprietor and his wife put me up for two nights in their flat over the shop. Better still, next day being Sunday, they lent me some boots and took me ski-ing. The whole of Linz was picnicking on the Pöstlingsberg—the mountain that rose from the opposite bank—and then swirling down its icy and rutted slopes. Starting without any practice, I was soon battered black and blue, but the sorrows of Salzburg were exorcized.

I hobbled round Linz by twilight. Pargeted façades rose up, painted chocolate, green, purple, cream and blue. They were adorned with medallions in high relief and the stone and plaster scroll-work gave them a feeling of motion and flow. Casemented half-hexagons jutted from the first storeys, and windowed three-quarter-cylinders blunted the corners, both of them soaring to the line of the eaves where they shelved into wasp-waists and re-expanded spherically to the same circumference, forming buoyant cupolas and globes; and domes and pinnacles and obelisks joined these decorative onions along the city's skyline. At ground-level, spiral commemorative columns rose twirling from the flagstones of the piazzas and hoisted radiating, monstrance-like, counter-Reformation bursts of gold spikes in mid-air. Except for the fierce keep on the rock, the entire town was built for pleasure and splendour. Beauty, space and amenity lay all about. In the evening Hans and Frieda, my hosts, took me to a party in an inn and next morning I set off down the Danube.

But not immediately. On their suggestion, I took a tram a few miles off my track and then a bus, to the Abbey of St. Florian. The great baroque convent of Augustinian Canons stood among low hills, and the branches of the thousands of apple trees all round it were crusted with lichen and bright with rime. The buildings, the treasures and the marvellous library, all—excepting the pictures—have merged in a universal and coruscating oblivion. Just before leaving, I stood for a moment in front of the twin belfries with a friendly Canon. Following his pointing forefinger, we gazed along a succession of freak gaps in the mountains. As the crow flies, this trough runs south-west for over a hundred and sixty miles, clean across Upper Austria to the northern marches of the Tyrol and Upper Bavaria to a point where the peak of the Zugspitze just discernibly floats, half-ghostly and half-gleaming.

When I turned my back on these ranges, the pictures indoors still crowded my mind. They unloosed vague broodings on how large a part geography and hazard play in one's knowledge and one's ignorance of painting.

It had struck me in Holland that an average non-expert, gallery-sauntering inhabitant of the British Isles would know the names, and a little of the work, of scores of Dutch, Flemish and Italian painters and of twenty Frenchmen at the very least. Equally certainly, of half a dozen Spaniards: all thanks to geography, religion, the Grand Tour and the vagaries of fashion. But his total—mine, that is—for the entire German-speaking world is three: Holbein; Dürer; and, palely loitering, Cranach. Holbein, because he seems almost English, and Dürer because he is the sort of genius one can't help knowing about, an original and universal phenomenon, well up on the slope leading to the Da Vinci class. Recent visits to a few German galleries, especially in Munich, had now given more substance to Cranach and added Altdorfer and Grünewald to this list.

Though these painters are unlike each other, they do have some important things in common. They all come from southern Germany. They were all born in the last forty years of the fifteenth century. All of them were active in the early decades of the sixteenth, first under the Emperor Maximilian—'the Last of the Knights,' a belated survivor of the Middle Ages—and then under his half-Spanish, High Renaissance grandson and successor, Charles V. The whole of German painting seems to crowd into this sixty years' span: a sudden abundance, with nothing but mediaeval workshops to herald it and no real follow-up. It was Germany's moment, brought about by the Renaissance in Italy and by the spread of humanist studies at home and stimulated and tormented by the rise of Protestantism. Luther's active life fits the time-span almost to a second; and all five painters finished on the Protestant side. (Grünewald, the oldest, was deeply troubled and finally reduced to inaction. Holbein, the youngest, took things in his stride. It is hard to think of them as contemporaries but their lives overlapped for forty years.) Two main channels of approach and flight linked south Germany with the outside world. The more natural one followed the Rhine to Flanders and led straight to the studios of Brussels and Bruges and Ghent and Antwerp. The other crossed the Alps through the Brenner Pass and followed the Adige to Verona, where an easy path unwound to Mantua, Padua and Venice. Fewer took the second way but it was the more decisive in the end. It was a fruitful polarity and German painting was spinning, as it were, on a Van der Weyden-Mantegna axis.

As I walked along the Danube, I was traversing, without knowing it, an important minor sub-division of art-history. 'The Danube School,' an arbitrary term which is often enclosed in inverted commas, covers exactly the period we have been talking about and it embraces the Danube basin from Regensburg to Vienna, taking in Bohemia to the north as far as Prague, and to the south the slopes of the Alps from the Tyrol to Lower Austria. Dürer and Holbein, although they are from the near-Danubian towns of Nuremberg and Augsburg, are not included: the one is too universal, the other, perhaps, too sophisticated or a decade or so too late. Grünewald, geographically, is a fraction too far west and they probably need him for an equally arbitrary Rhenish School. Otherwise, he would fit in admirably. This leaves Cranach and Altdorfer: Danubian stars of the first magnitude among a swarm of lesser-known regional masters.

On the evidence I encountered then, I hated Cranach more with each new picture. Those pale-haired, equivocal minxes, posturing in muslin against the dark, were eerie and uncongenial enough; but, in juxtaposition with the schadenfreude of his martyrdoms, they become deeply sinister; and this thought flowed on directly to the stark detail of the minor masters of the Danube School and perhaps, if one followed it through, to the whole disturbing theme of realism in Germany.

Some of these Danube School paintings are wonderful. Others are either moving or touching or likeable and, to a stranger like me, they had an immediate appeal which had no connection with their technical Renaissance advances, about which I knew nothing. Indeed, the aspect that took my fancy was precisely the mediaeval and the Teutonic spirit that completely changed the Renaissance atmosphere of these pictures: the emerald green of the sward, that is, the sap green of the woods, the dark conifer forests and bosky spurs of Jurassic limestone; the backgrounds full of snowy spikes—distant glimpses, without a doubt, of the Grossglockner, the Reifhorn, the Zugspitze and the Wildspitze. This is the scenery through which the flight into Egypt, the journey of the Magi and the footpaths to Cana and Bethany uncoil! A barn with leaky thatch shelters the Nativity in an Alpine glade. It is among fir-cones and edelweiss and gentians that the Transfigurations, Temptations, Crucifixions and Resurrections take place. The actors in a picture by Wolf Huber are Swabian peasant girls, bewildered gaffers with tangled beards, goodies with dumpling cheeks, crab-apple crones, marvelling ploughboys and puzzled woodmen—a cast of Danube rustics in fact, reinforced, in the wings, by a whole bumpkin throng. The scenes they present have enormous charm. They are not naïve pictures, very far from it; but the balance between rusticity and sophistication is such that to contemplate one of them is to sit on a log under a northern welkin while the incidents of scripture are wonderingly and urgently whispered in one's ear. They affect one like folk-tales in thick Swabian or in Tyrolese or Bavarian or Upper Austrian dialect. Everything rustic and simple in these pictures is wonderfully real; a convincing earthiness reigns side by side with a most melting piety. But, unless the woods and the undergrowth are goblin country, there is little hint of a spiritual or supernatural feeling in these happenings—except in a different and an adverse sense. For example, in some of these canvasses and panels the laws of gravity seem to exert an unnaturally powerful pull. The angels, unlike their soaring congeners in Italy or Flanders, are poor flyers and ill-equipped for staying up long. The severe Bürgermeister's features of the Holy Child have the ferocity, sometimes, of a snake-strangling infant Hercules. He looks heavier than most mortal babies. Once these symptoms have been observed, everything else begins to go wrong, and in a way that is rather hard to define. Complexions become pasty and suet-like, eyes narrow to knowing and spiteful slits and sparks of madness kindle. The middles of faces are simultaneously flaccid and clenched, as though a bad diet had prematurely rotted away every tooth in their heads, and often, for no clear reason, features start sliding out of shape. Noses fall askew, eyes grow bleary and mouths hang open like those of snowmen or village idiots. There is something enigmatic and unexplained about this spreading collapse. It has no bearing on the holiness or the villainy of the character affected and, clearly, nothing to do with technical capacity. It is as though a toxin of instability and dissolution had crept into the painter's brain.

But, when the theme shifts from pastoral scenes to martyrdoms, their intentions become baffling beyond all conjecture. These pictures are the opposite of their equivalent Byzantine scenes. There the executioner and his victim wear an identical expression of benign aloofness, and the headsman, as an artisan of beatitude flourishing a sword-shaped key to salvation, has an equal claim on our approval. Italians may not attempt this detachment in their martyrdoms, but feelings for sacredness and dignity in the painter's mood engage both the striker and the struck in a ceremonial choreography of grandeur that keeps horror at a distance.

Not here. Meaty, unshaven louts with breastplates crooked, hanging shirt-tails and codpieces half-undone have just reeled out of the Hofbräuhaus, as it were, reeking of beer and sauerkraut and bent on beating someone insensible. A victim is found and they fall on him. Leering and winking with bared teeth and lolling tongues, they are soon sweating with exertion. These ostlers, butchers, barrel-makers, and apprentices, and Landsknechts in moulting frippery are expert limb-twisters, lamers, stoners, floggers, unsocketers and beheaders to a man, deft with their bright tools and rejoicing at their task. The painters' windows must have looked out on scaffolds where the wheel, the block and the gallows drew frequent crowds. Certain details, which are more rare in other painters, recur with great regularity here. Four burly tormentors, with their crossed staves bending under their weight, force an enormous crown of thorns on their victim's head and a fifth batters it home with a three-legged stool. When another prepares him for scourging, he places a boot for purchase in the small of the victim's back and hauls on the bound wrists till his veins project. The heavy birch-rods need both hands to wield them and broken twigs and smashed scourges soon litter the floor. At first the victim's body looks flea-bitten. It is spotted later on, like an ocelot's, with hundreds of embedded thorns. At last, after a score of indignities, the moribund carcass is nailed in place and hoisted aloft between two pot-bellied felons whose legs are snapped askew like bleeding sticks. The last touch of squalor is the cross itself. Ragged-ended and roughly barked lengths of fir and silver-birch have been so clumsily botched together that they bend under the weight of the victim as though about to collapse, and the special law of gravity, tearing the nail-holes wider, dislocates the fingers and expands them like a spider's legs. Wounds fester, bones break through the flesh and the grey lips, wrinkling concentrically round a tooth-set hole, gape in a cringing spasm of pain. The body, mangled, dishonoured and lynched, twists in rigor mortis. It hangs, as Huysmans says in his description of Grünewald's altarpiece in Colmar, 'comme un bandit, comme un chien.' The wounds turn blue; there is a hint of gangrene and putrefaction in the air.

Yet somehow, and most contradictorily, Grünewald escapes the category I have in mind. The thorn-speckled carcass on the cross is part of an old formula; the horror is extreme; but, thanks to the harrowing poignancy of the attendant mourners and some exempting streak of genius, it is a feeling of drama and tragedy that has the last word,

Critics and apologists blame these cruel scenes on the infectious savagery of the Peasants' War of 1523. This shattering sequel to the religious conflict left few southern Germans untouched. Even if some of these pictures were painted earlier—and the Isenheim altarpiece, for one, ante-dates it by a decade—the cruel temper of the times may well have influenced contemporary painting. But, even if it did, the results are unusual and ambiguous: the horrors of the Thirty Years' and Peninsula Wars affected Callot and Goya in a way that leaves no doubt about their attitude to those wars or the purpose of their work. What, then, are these? Grim heirlooms from the Dark Ages, unenlightened by the Renaissance but animated by its techniques, bursting out under savage stimuli? Perhaps. But religious painting is, ipso facto, didactic. What do these pictures enjoin? It is impossible to say. At Byzantium, an impartial grace exalted both the virtuous and the wicked and joined their hands in abstraction. Here, an opposite agency is at work. Good and evil, kneaded from the same yeastless dough, are united in squalor until both become equally base; and in this equality in abjection, horror chases pity away. Dignity and tragedy take wing together, and one gazes in perplexity. Are saints being martyred or felons slowly despatched? On whose side is the painter? No answer comes.

Perhaps the mood was inescapable. There are certainly traces of it, much reduced, in a few of Altdorfer's pictures. But he outshines his fellow-Danubians like a lyre-bird among carrion-crows. He was from Regensburg. I hadn't been there yet—I missed it when I turned south at Ulm—but I have seen it since, and it explains much. Here, at the northernmost point of the river, a hundred and thirty miles upstream from the Abbey of St. Florian, the ancient stronghold of Ratisbon spans the Danube with a bridge that rivals all the great bridges of the Middle Ages. Those battlements and steeples, wrapped in myth, dominate one of the most complete and convincing mediaeval cities of the world. Anyone who has wandered in these streets can understand why the holy pastorals which his colleagues turned into dialect folk-tales, shift, under his hand, into the mood and the scenery of legends. The episodes of scripture—which are nowhere more splendidly manifest than in his great altarpiece at St. Florian's—are suddenly clothed in the magic and the glamour of fairy stories; fairy stories, moreover, where the Mantua-Antwerp axis, uncoiling brilliant strands into the fabric, has been most potently spinning. Under the gothic interlock of cold whites and greys that canopy hallowed scenes in Flanders, the Biblical characters, clad in robes of lilac and mulberry and lemon and the shrill sulphur hue Mantegna loved, evolve and posture with convincing Renaissance splendour. Pontius Pilate—velvet-clad, mantled in dark sapphire, tasselled and collared like an Elector and turbanned like a Caliph—twists his sprinkled hands between ewer and salver under a magnificent baldaquin of scumbled gold. Through the lancets and the cinquefoils and beyond the diamond panes, the fluted rocks ascend and the woods and cliffs and cloud-banks of Gethsemane frame a luminous and incandescent sunset that presages Patinir. Though the centurions are knights in dark armour, no mortal smith ever wrought those helmet-wings and metal flourishes and knee-flutes and elbow-fans, even on the anvils of Augsburg and Milan in Maximilian's reign. It is the fabulous harness that flashed later on every pre-Raphaelite Grail-seeker and greaved and gauntleted the paladins in the Coloured Fairy Books. Shifting from Divinity to sacred fable, the same ambience of magic isolates lonely knights among millions of leaves and confronts St. Eustace and the stag with its antlered crucifix in a forest full of hazards and spells.

He is very various. Tufted with spurge and dockweed, a tumble-down cowshed flickers strangely across the meadows with the grisaille highlights of the Nativity. Transparent Babylonian palaces pile capricious tiers of arcaded galleries among shoals of cloud. Palaces, moreover which are elaborated with the almost-completely mastered secrets of perspective which Dürer had brought back from Bologna and Venice. Intoxicating times! It must have been as though Dürer, from the tallest tower in Nuremberg, had floated an invisible geometry over Franconia: a geometry which webbed the air with dotted lines, gridded mountainous duchies, soared across Swabia and Austria and Saxony in chessboard vistas and carelessly loosed off volleys of parallels towards the sovereign bishoprics of the Rhine.

I didn't know it then but some of his country-pictures—wildernesses with no scriptural episode, nothing human, not even a tumbling Icarus to justify their existence—are the first pure landscape paintings in Europe. I only understood on a journey years later how faithfully his landscape echoes the actual Danube. It was his amazing Alexander-schlacht—Alexander's victory over Darius at Issus—that pointed the way: I was looking upstream from Dürnstein (on that later journey) with my mind full of the great pictures I had been recently gazing at, when an apocalyptic flash revealed that the painted stretch of water in the picture was no Asian river, not even the Granicus. It was the valley of the Danube in the throes of one of its hundreds of battles. It must have been. But, on this first visit, how could I have realized it? The battle in the painted canyon is fought out under a lurid October sunset and the rival armies, like windswept cornfields bristling with lances and poppied with banners, collide in an autumnal light. Whereas the battlefield on my first encounter was dulled with snow, with all contours muffled and fanfares hushed.

The link between journeys and painting, especially this sort of journey, is very close. There was plenty to think about as I made my way through the snow-bound monastic orchards; and it occurred to me, in the silent fields that followed, and for the hundredth time since my landing in Holland, that so far one painter had presided over every stage of this Winterreise. When no buildings were in sight, I was back in the Dark Ages. But the moment a farmhouse or a village impinged, I was in the world of Peter Brueghel. The white flakes falling beside the Waal—or the Rhine or the Neckar or the Danube—and the zigzag gables and the muffled roofs, were all his. The icicles, too, and the trampled snow, the logs piled on the sledges and the peasants stooped double under loads of faggots. When children with woollen hoods and satchels burst out of a village school with a sudden scamper of miniature clogs, I knew in advance that in a moment they would be flapping their arms and blowing on mittened fingers and clearing a space to beat a top in, or galloping down a lane to slide on the nearest brook, with everyone—children, grown-ups, cattle and dogs—moving about in the wake of their own cloudy breath. When the wintry light crept dimly from slits close to the horizon or an orange sun was setting through the branches of a frozen osier-bed, the identity was complete.

I headed north-east, treading downhill through the snow, and each step sank deeper. Rooks crowded the trees and the fields below were white and grey parallelograms bordered by many willows. Streams crossed them under lids of ice to join a slatey loop of the river; and the hushed and muffled scenery was the background of Brueghel's Hunters in the Snow. Only the hunters themselves were missing, with their spears and their curly-tailed dogs.

I crossed the river to the lights of Mauthausen by a massive and ancient bridge. A tall fifteenth-century castle thrust out into the river and, under its walls, Hans and Frieda were on the quay, true to the vaguest of rendezvous; and I realized, as we waved to each other from afar, that another cheerful evening lay ahead.

A foothill path next day. The river Enns, which I had crossed by twilight, came winding out of its valley and into the Danube, where it turned downstream to plait a long pale green strand of clear mountain water into the dun-coloured flux. I fetched up at Perg, which lies a few miles from the northern shore. The river, flooding the frozen fields, had been wandering in a tangle of deviant and rejoining streams; at Ardagger, the mountains closed in again. Each time this happened, solemnity invaded.

I slept in the village of Grein that night, just upstream from a wooded and many-legended island. Old perils haunt these defiles. The name itself is thought to be onomatopoeia for the cry of a sailor drowning in one of the whirlpools, for the rapids and reefs of this stretch of the Danube smashed up shipping for centuries. Sailors who fell overboard were allowed to drown: they were looked upon as propitiatory offerings to some Celtic or Teutonic god still surviving in secret from both pre-Roman and pre-Christian times. The Romans, before confronting this menacing reach, threw coins into the stream to placate the river-god Danubius; and later travellers took the sacrament before making the passage. Maria Theresa's engineers made the journey safer, but the hidden spikes were never completely destroyed till the 1890's. Until then everything hung on the pilot's skill and to some degree it still does; the creases and ruffles turning into sudden cartwheel-twirls amidstream, bear witness to the commotion below. To outwit these hazards, vessels were lashed together like catamarans and steadied by hawsers from the shore. Those travelling upstream were towed by teams of horses and oxen—twenty, thirty and sometimes fifty strong—and escorted by troops of pikemen, to keep robbers at bay. The battlements of Werfenstein, whose castellans lived by wrecking and by plunder, beetle greedily over the rapids; but Barbarossa's army, heading for the Third Crusade, was too numerous to tackle. The castle-dwellers gazed through the arrow-slits and gnawed their knuckles with frustration as the Crusaders trudged downstream.

The Danube, particularly in this deep gorge, seemed far wilder than the Rhine and much lonelier. How scarce was the river traffic by comparison! Perhaps the fear of ice-jams kept boats at anchor. I could walk for hours without hearing a siren. At rare intervals a string of barges, usually from one of the Balkan Kingdoms, would toil upstream with a cargo of wheat. After delivering their freight and loading up with planks or paving stones, they would glide downstream again with the current. These cargoes were quarried and felled from the banks. Huge horseshoe-cavities were blasted out of the cliffs, and the mountains, from the water's edge to their summits, were a never-ending stand of timber. Deep in snow, the nearly perpendicular rides sundered the forests in long white stripes that were scattered with thousands of felled tree-trunks like the contents of spilled match-boxes. Smaller trunks were cut and stacked in clearings and I could hear the sound of the felling and the voices of the woodmen long before I saw them. From the riverside, every mile or so, rose the zing of a circular saw and the echo of planks falling, where cloudy ghosts covered in sawdust were dismembering sledge-load after sledge-load of forest giants.

The only other men in these woods were foresters: loden-clad figures in clouted boots who live among deer and squirrels and badgers and polecats. One of them, every now and then, with a gun in the crook of his arm and ice on his whiskers and his eyebrows and a pipe with a lidded china bowl, would materialize among the trees like a vision of Jack Frost. Sometimes we would keep each other company for a mile or two while Breughel dogs trotted alertly ahead. There was plenty of game in these mountains; the cloven slots I noticed in the snow were the prints of roedeer, as I had thought, and once or twice I caught brief glimpses of them, standing at gaze for a moment, then bounding for cover with a scattering of snow from the low branches. But Styria and the Tyrol, the gamekeepers all agreed, those were the places! I learnt that when a young hunter stalks and lays low his first stag, his Jäger marks the occasion with a sort of wood-land blooding that sounds so hoarily ancient and redolent of feudal forest law—or the defiance of it—that the little ceremony has stuck in my mind ever since. The Jäger breaks off a branch and strikes the novice three times across the shoulders, quite hard, saying as he does so, a line for each swish:

Eins für den Herrn,

Eins für den Knecht,

Eins für das alte Weidmannsrecht!

Massed shadows, tilting down from the sierras, filled the bottom of the canyon. Here the Danube followed a winding corridor which expanded without warning to giant circular ballrooms and closed again just as abruptly; and for leagues on end this widening and shrinking ravine was empty of all but a cottage and a barn or two and a scattering of castles and lonely towers and hermitages, all crumbling to fragments. They broke through the forest mass, disintegrating on vertiginous spikes of rock high overhead. As I climbed the hill-path, the ruins fell level and then dropped below and the mountains opposite changed from a wall of branches into a maze of moraines and clefts and buttresses with a ripple of meadows and solitary hamlets along their crests, all of them invisible till now and basking in the sunlight which was denied the lower world. Increasing height laid bare new reaches of the river like an ever-lengthening chain of lakes, and for those rare stretches where the valley ran east and west, the sunrise and the sunset lay reflected and still and an illusion lifted each lake a step higher than its predecessor until they formed gleaming staircases climbing in either direction; and at last the intervening headlands lost touch with the other shore and the watery stairs, now far below, cohered in a single liquid serpent.

At first, only a saw or an axe or the bang of a gun broke the silence of these forests. Soon other sounds would impinge: snow sliding from a branch, a loose rock starting a small avalanche, an occasional barge sending its siren ricochetting from cliff to cliff. Hidden streams, hardly noticed at first, were seldom out of earshot; but the waterfalls, though they were visible for miles, seemed inaudible until I was on them. I could see them cataracting from ledge to ledge, dividing and joining again, vanishing under the trees and dropping in long parabolas to the river; and all in silence, with seemingly as little motion as white horsetails swaying in the faintest of breezes. Then my path would round a spur of rock and a murmur which had been growing slowly was all at once loud as thunder. From a ledge stalactitic with icicles tons of pale liquid jadeite crashed among the rocks, and the spray of its impact loaded the branches with fans of frozen drops. A trough of boulders and a tunnel of ice and frozen bracken rushed it to the cliff's edge and there, in a cloud of mist, flung it clear of the clustering stalactites and the tree-tops and sent it booming into the abyss and out of sight. Then the ensuing furlongs would hush the roar and slow the headlong pace to the ruffle of a faraway horsetail again.

The millions of pine needles that cross-hatched the sunbeams sprinkled the paths with an entrancing broken light. An icy zest crackled among the branches, and I paced through these sparkling woods like a Huron. But there were moments in the early morning when the dense conifers and the diaphanous skeletons of the hardwoods were as insubstantial as plumage, and the early mists, hovering in the valleys, floated the transparent peaks on air and enclosed the rock-pinnacles in diminishing smoke-rings of vapour. At these moments the landscape below seemed to have moved far from Central Europe, further even than Red Indian forests; all the way to China. The painter's red-inkstone cypher, trailing its lightly brushed-in kite's tail of ideograms, should have stamped the pallor of the sky.

Footpaths corkscrewed down-hill from these uplands; down, down until the trees thinned and the sunlight died away. Meadows would appear, then a barn, then an orchard and a churchyard and threads of smoke ascending from the chimney-pots of a riverside hamlet; and I was back among the shadows.

Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant

Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.

There was always a Golden Hart or a White Rose for bread and cheese among the huddle of roofs, or for a coffee and Himbeergeist. Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in the tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures...a widowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.

After supper and filling in my diary in the front room of the inn in Persenbeug—I think I must have been staying there on the charitable-burgomaster principle—I started to sketch the innkeeper's daughter Maria while she busied herself over a basket of darning. I was talking to her about my visit to St. Florian: either it had been the wrong time for sightseers or a day when the Abbey was officially shut. The janitor was adamant. I told him it was my only chance—I had come all the way across Europe to see the Abbey; and at last, when I must have sounded on the brink of tears, he had begun to melt. He had handed me over to the friendly Canon in the end, who showed me all. Maria laughed. So did a man at the next table who lowered the Neue Freie Presse, and looked over his spectacles. He was a tall and scholarly-looking figure with a long amusing face and large blue eyes. He was dressed in leather breeches and a loden-jacket, and a big dark dog with Breughel tendencies called Dick lay quietly beside his chair. "You did the right thing," he said. "In Germany you would only have got in by shouting." Maria and two watermen, the only other people in the Gastzimmer, laughed and agreed.

The Danube inspires those who live on its banks with an infectious passion. My companions knew everything about the river. They rejoiced in the fact that, after the Volga, which was almost too far away to count, it was the largest river in Europe; and the man in loden added that it was the only one that flowed from west to east. The watermen were full of lurid descriptions of the hazards of the Strudengau and their tales were amply borne out by the others. The man in loden, I discovered, spoke perfect English, but except in the frequent case of a word I didn't understand, he stuck to German out of politeness to the others. The Danube, he said, played a rôle in the Nibelungenlied that was just as important as that of the Rhine. I hadn't read it yet but I admitted I had never connected the story with any river but the latter. "Nor has anyone!" he said. "That's because of Dr. Wagner! Magnificent sounds, but very little to do with the actual legend." Which part of the Danube? "Exactly here! All the way downstream, right into Hungary."

We looked out of the window. The flood was rushing by under the stars. It was the widest river in Europe, he went on, and the richest by far in interesting life. Over seventy different kinds of fish swim in it. It had its own species of salmon and two distinct kinds of pike-perch—stuffed specimens of a few of them were hung round the walls in glass cases. The river was a link between the fish of Western Europe and those that populated the Dniestr, the Dniepr, the Don and the Volga. "The Danube has always been an invasion route," he said. "Even above Vienna, you get fish that never venture west of the Black Sea otherwise. At least, extremely seldom. True sturgeon stay in the Delta—alas!—but we get plenty of their relations up here." One of them, the sterlet, was quite common in Vienna. It was delicious, he said. Sometimes they ventured as far upstream as Regensburg and Ulm. The biggest of them, another sturgeon-cousin called the Hausen, or Acipenser Huso, was a giant that sometimes attained the length of twenty-five feet, and, in very rare cases, thirty; and it could weigh as much as two thousand pounds. "But it's a harmless creature," he went on. "It only eats small stuff. All the sturgeon family are short-sighted, like me. They just fumble their way along the bottom with their feelers, grazing on water plants." He shut his eyes and then, with a comic expression of bewilderment, extended his fingers among the wine glasses with an exploratory flutter. "Its true home is the Black Sea and the Caspian and the Sea of Azov. But the real terror of the Danube is the Wels!" Maria and the watermen nodded their heads in sad assent, as though a Kraken or the Grendel had been mentioned. The Silurus glanis or Giant Catfish! Though it was smaller than the Hausen, it was the largest purely European fish and it sometimes measured thirteen feet.

"People say they eat babies if they fall in the water," Maria said, dropping a half-darned sock into her lap.