Flying Visits by Clive James

Author:Clive James [James, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509832385
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Postcard from Salzburg

AT THE Heathrow Terminal 2 check-in counter I was behind a 6 foot 6 inch male Ethiopian lacrosse goalie who had turned up three days early for a flight to Stockholm. It gradually became apparent that either he lacked the concept conveyed by the English word ‘early’ or else he thought that the girl behind the counter was threatening him with circumcision. An Australian on the way to Salzburg, I shared his unease.

Salzburg is in a part of Austria which could not be more mountainous without hitting the aeroplane. There are Alps everywhere. Dropping from the sky by courtesy of an Austrian Airlines Boeing 727, I surveyed a landscape straight out of The Sound of Music, that epic musical in which Julie Andrews and a small choir of yodelling siblings sing madrigals at the Gestapo, thereby rendering them helpless. Much of the film was in fact shot in this very area. Many a time in the next few days I was to see lush green slopes set at the precise angle for Julie Andrews to sprint up them and achieve lift-off.

The Salzkammergut winds through this precipitous area like a hidden valley, or rather a network of hidden valleys. The road from the airport tunnels through solid rock. Salzkammergut means salt chamber possession, an indication of what the valley’s chief export used to be in ancient times. The glaciers carved steep walls. When they melted they left a string of lakes and fast-flowing rivers which cut the salt chamber still deeper. The strange wealth that made meat last longer was easy to get at. On the other hand the valley itself was not.

Under the old Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire that came later and the Austro-Hungarian Empire that came later still, the salt chamber always seemed to be by-passed by the hungry armies. Even the Thirty Years War hardly touched it. True, 20,000 Protestants were slung out after the mandatory tortures, but no armies came in. Napoleon went around instead of through. Hitler was born just over the hill, near Linz. Berchtesgaden, although high up, is so close by that Julie Andrews could reach it on foot in a matter of minutes. Yet Hitler’s chief creation, the Second World War, left the district almost unharmed.

Salzburg’s river is called the Salzach and still flows so fast over its rocky bed that it looks like a crowd of whirlpools running downstairs in a panic. Defined by the walls of the gorge and some eminently fortifiable outcrops, only one good place offered itself in which to build a town, and there they built Salzburg. It didn’t, of course, happen all at once. For a long while after the Romans went away hardly anything happened at all. Then, during the long haul of the Middle Ages, the outcrops were found to be ideal places to build a fortress, a monastery and a convent. Snug in their separate walled residences, monks and nuns ignored the world and each other. Below the outcrops, churches and ancillary buildings accumulated on the flat stone shelves of the riverbanks.

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