A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Author:Patrick Leigh Fermor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, Travel, Essays & Travelogues, General, Literary, Personal Memoirs, Western, Biography & Autobiography, Special Interest
ISBN: 9781590175170
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Published: 1977-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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

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