Between the Woods and the Water (7 page)

By the approach of evening, all trace of the capital and the western hills had vanished. We were in the middle of a limitless space, scattered with woods, and pronged here and there with the solitary and, at first, enigmatic perpendiculars of sweep-wells. These primordial devices (called
shadoofs
in the Egyptian desert) have two posts erected side by side crossed by a bar six feet up—or the branches of a tree lopped until only a fork remains—which is pivot for a cross-beam several yards long. Weights—usually boulders—are lashed to the short end, until the yards of beam beyond the pivot tilt upright; from this lofty tip hangs a pole—or, if necessary, two linked together—from which a bucket hangs. This is sent down the well-shaft by hauling hand over hand while the weighted end of the beam swings aloft: hold is then loosened and the weight sinks, lifting a full bucket to the surface, ready for pouring into a cattle-trough like a dug-out canoe. These lonely uprights give an air of desolation to the plain: they resemble derelict siege-engines by day and the failing light turns them into gibbets or those wheel-topped stakes in pictures by Hieronymus Bosch where vultures wrangle over skeletons spreadeagled in mid-air.

The evening was full of the see-saw creak of their timbers. At one of them, by a ruined farmhouse with a stork's nest in the rafters, two dismounted drovers were toiling; their wide, white linen trousers, worn loose outside black knee-boots, came half-way down the calves of their legs. They had finished watering a large herd of remarkable pale cattle with nearly straight horns of enormous span that filled the air with trampling and lowing and dust. When the drovers had remounted, I waved a greeting. They lifted their black hats with ceremony and wheeled their horses round, then, abetted by rough-coated white dogs, they spurred after the herd, trotting or cantering on the outskirts and whirling long goads to keep strays from wandering. The declining sun outlined all their silhouettes. Haloed in dust and trailing long shadows, they moved westward with a noise of harsh cries, dogs and a jangle of horns and bells. A stork joined its mate in the rafters, probably after swallowing a last frog captured at some quieter oasis and I
trotted east towards the darker end of the plain. The clouds had flushed an astounding pink.

But this was not to be compared with the sky behind. The flatness of the Alföld leaves a stage for cloud-events at sunset that are dangerous to describe: levitated armies in deadlock and riderless squadrons descending in slow motion to smouldering and sulphurous lagoons where barbicans gradually collapse and fleets of burning triremes turn dark before sinking. These are black vesper's pageants...the least said the better.

* * *

Whenever he got a chance, Malek broke into a canter, and one of these bursts turned into a long twilight gallop; he may have thought we were far from home and ought to get a move on; and when we had settled to a milder gait, falling dark gave lustre to a thin new moon. A distant string of lights, which I knew must be the town of Cegléd, was behind us to the right, and, here and there as it grew darker, lights of farmsteads showed across the flatness like ships. I had planned to seek shelter at one of them but suddenly there were none, and by the time night had really fallen only a single glow was left. It was hard to tell the distance but the nearer we got the less it resembled a farm, except for the barking of half a dozen dogs that finally rushed forward in a frenzy.

Three camp-fires, spreading spokes of light through the tree-trunks, lit up the canvas of tents and shapes of men and horses. A party of Gypsies had settled for the night by yet another sweep-well, and our arrival caused bewilderment. Except for the fires, there was no glimmer in any direction and I saw, half with excitement and half with a touch of fright, that we would have to spend the night there. I had heard many hair-raising stories about Gypsies recently and I was chiefly scared about Malek. When I dismounted they crowded about him and patted and stroked his neck and his flanks and scanned his points with eyes like shrewd blackberries. Shaggy and unkempt, they were the darkest Gypsies I had
ever seen. Some of the men wore loose white Hungarian trousers, the others were in ordinary town clothes and black hats, all in the last stage of decay. Snotty mites and lithe tar-babies wore vests that came to their middles and some had nothing on at all, except one or two insecurely hatted in cast-off trilbies so loose they swivelled as they walked. Beautiful girls, flounced and bedraggled in green and yellow and magenta, stared with effulgent eyes. Beyond the fires there was a munching of unyoked oxen; horses were hobbled under the branches and a couple of mares grazed loose with tall foals beside them. Dogs bickered and snarled and the poultry, loosed from their travelling coop, pecked about the dust. Black and brown tents were stretched over crossed poles and the ramshackle style and the jumbled scattering of household stuff gave no hint of a thousand or two thousand years' practice in pitching camp; except for the reeds and withies and the half-woven baskets on which brown hands were already busy, the whole tribe might have fled half-an-hour ago from a burning slum. I think they were heading for the banks of the Tisza to cut a new stock.

I escaped the hubbub for ten minutes by walking Malek up and down before watering him at the trough, where a man called György helped with the bucket. I had been wondering whether to tether Malek to a tree; there were some oats and a headstall in the saddle-bag, but the halter was far too short for him to graze. Best to hobble him as the Gypsies had done with theirs, but I had no idea how to set about it. György showed me, linking Malek's forelegs with a neat figure of eight. I was anxious about this: Malek couldn't have been used to it; but he behaved with great forbearance. I gave him some of his feed and some hay from the Gypsy, then took the saddle and tack and settled with the rest of them by the fire.

Thank heavens, their informal supper was over! Apart from hedge-hogs, delicious by hearsay, the untoothsomeness and even danger of their usual food were famous. There was a sound of rattling metal: a dog was licking out a cooking-pot by the fire. Seeing my worried look, a girl of ten, who had just begged for a cigarette,
hurled an accurate stone at the dog, which scuttled off with a surprised yelp; then, tossing up the vessel so that it caught on a convenient twig, she coiled to the ground again with an indulgent smile as she let the smoke stream lazily from her nostrils. The chief item of Berta's supplies was a salami nearly a yard long, ribboned half-way down with the national colours. I made a good impression by cutting off a third and handing it over; it was the signal for a brief uproar of grabs and curses and blows. Then thirty pairs of eyes, accompanied by a soft chorus of whispers, watched raptly as I ate a sandwich and an apple. I took three fast gigantic gulps out of my wine-bottle before surrendering it. They seemed half-fascinated; also, and I couldn't make out why, half-alarmed by my presence: perhaps all strangers, except as prey, boded ill. We were incommunicado at first; but I had been alerted by what the oldest man had said to György before he helped me give Malek a drink: the mumbled sentence had ended, I thought, with the word
pani
—immediately recognisable, to anyone at all in touch with Anglo-India, as the Hindi for water. When I pointed questioningly at the water-jar and asked what was inside, they said “Víz,” using the Magyar word; I cunningly answered, “Nem [not] víz! Pani.” There was a sensation! Bewilderment and wonder were written on their firelit features.
[2]
When I held up the fingers of my hand and said “Panch!”—the word for five in both Hindi and Romany (
öt
, in Magyar), the wonder grew. I tried the only other words I could remember from
Lavengro
, pointing to my tongue and saying “Lav?”; but drew a blank;
tchib
was their word for it. I drew another blank with “penning dukkerin,” Borrow's—or rather Mr. Petulengro's—word for ‘fortune-telling.' But I had better luck with the word
petulengro
itself, at least with the first half. The whole word (‘horseshoe-master' in Borrow, i.e. blacksmith) caused no reaction, but when I cut it down to
petul
, and pointed to the anvil, a small
boy dashed into the dark and came back holding up a horseshoe in triumph.
[3]

As soon as they got the hang of it, each time I pointed at something with a questioning look, back came the Gypsy word. Most of them laughed but one or two looked worried, as though tribal secrets were being revealed. A finger pointing to Heaven, and “Isten?” (the Magyar word for God), at once evoked the cry of “Devel!,” which sounds odd at first; until one thinks of
Deva
in Hindi and its probable Sanskrit ancestor. An eager light had come into those swart faces. Lustrous hair, dark eyes, chestnut skin and, among the women, the sinuous walk and brittle flexibility of wrist and ankle—all these encouraged the notion that they could have changed hardly at all since they had left Baluchistan or Sinde or the banks of the Indus. I had recently read, or been told, two hostile legends connected with their skill as metal-workers: not only had they cast the Golden Calf for the Israelites, but a Gypsy smith is supposed to have forged the nails for the Crucifixion, in punishment for which a similar nail had been hammered into his behind by a turncoat demon.

* * *

Malek was grazing under the tree where I had left him, a dozen yards from the fire. The hobble seemed secure and comfortable and, with saddle and saddle-bag for pillow, I lay and smoked but couldn't sleep for a long time. When I did, the well-being generated by those hasty swallows of wine and the cheerful session by the fire had worn off. How could I have been so insane as to bring a borrowed horse into such a den of hazards? Later, between waking
and sleeping I had nightmare visions of the Gypsies making off with that beautiful Szapáry horse; then (as they were said to do) painting him a different colour before selling him to a cruel stranger; eating him outright, perhaps; or, even worse, getting him secretly turned into salami, the whispered fate of old donkeys, after the hasty despatch of both horse and rider. This last fate was the best solution: should the borrowed horse come to harm, better death than a lifetime of disgrace. When I woke from these dreadful fancies, the new moon had set; but there was Malek, lit by stars under the branches and he was still there when daybreak routed the phantoms of the night. The sun lifted itself out of the wilderness like a blood-red disc and the crowing of the Gypsies' cock ran from one invisible farmyard to another until the whole plain was stirring.

I had brought plenty of sugar-lumps and after gratefully giving Malek a couple I fed him some solider stuff and wandered off to see what was going on. A reversal of last night's shadows striped the plain; smoke was rising and fingers were already threading, plaiting and splicing among the heaped-up reeds. Apart from the dazzling frippery of the girls, I had been disappointed the night before by the tameness of this little company. Not a glimpse of a musical instrument, not a note or a twang; not even a dancing bear. But I was wrong. In the lee of a cart, a huge brown Carpathian beast, his cheek resting on folded paws, lay fast asleep; and even as I watched he began to stir. Sitting up, he yawned long and wide, rubbed his eyes, then dropped his paws in his lap and peered about with bleary goodwill, while his companion, blowing on embers, prepared breakfast for two. I rejoined Malek, and as we both munched, I noticed that our sheltering tree, tall as a medium-sized oak, belonged to a kind I had never seen. The bark was darker, oval leaves the colour of verdigris grew in symmetrical sprays and leathery pods dangled among them like dark runner-beans. It was a carob-tree. (Its blackish pods, with the faint, dull, haunting taste of fossil chocolate, are like teak to chew. A few years later I sometimes used to stem hunger with them on the southern rocks of
Crete, unconsciously imitating the Prodigal Son: they are the husks which he and the swine did eat, and they are still fed to pigs. ‘Locust-beans' is an alternative name and some rashly think it was these, with wild honey, that kept St. John the Baptist alive in the desert.)

I saddled Malek, and said goodbye. We headed east.

It was time, and perhaps it is again, to see where we were, and to glance at the past of this extraordinary region. Since the centuries of Rome's frontier along the Danube, the logical way from Buda—Strigonium—to the Levant lay due south along the river to its confluence with the Sava, where the huge and crucial fortress of Belgrade was later to spring up: then through the Balkan passes, across the future kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria to Adrianople and over Thrace to the Imperial City, or to the Hellespont, where Asia began. This was the overland link between the Kings of Hungary and the Byzantine Emperors; it was the path of Barbarossa and his crusaders on the journey which ended with the Emperor's death in the chill flow of the Calycadnus. But the last crusading army but one—the Hungarians of King Sigismund, with his French, German, Burgundian and Wallachian allies and even, some say, a thousand English—kept on recklessly downstream until Bajazet the Thunderbolt, striking at Nicopolis, utterly destroyed them. (More later of this.) A final Crusade in the next generation was smashed to bits on the Black Sea; then Constantinople itself was lost. The same route in reverse had carried the Turks by fatal stages into the heart of Europe. They had subjugated the Balkans in the late Middle Ages and by Tudor times they were advancing upstream. Suleiman the Magnificent defeated King Louis II,
[4]
then he captured and burnt Buda; but in 1529 he laid unsuccessful siege to Vienna, and when the second attempt on Vienna failed at the end of the next century, the Ottoman tide began to turn. Charles of Lorraine, and then Prince Eugene stemmed their advance and harried them downstream along the same watery
thoroughfare; and the Austrian army, awfully arrayed, boldly, by battery, besieged Belgrade. The
Stadt und Festung
fell and the time-honoured path became the itinerary for all Western travellers; in particular, for Ambassadors travelling to the Sublime Porte. Strings of carriages with outriders and escorts of musketeers, or ribboned houseboats with many oarsmen wended majestically downstream. (One must imagine Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu during a halt, half-furred and half-flimsy in Turkish dress, reading Pope's
Homer
under a poplar tree.)