Algernon Blackwood

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube
enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters
spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country
becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low
willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy
blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be
seen in large straggling letters the word Sumpfe, meaning marshes.

In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown
islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes
bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the
sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never
attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain
humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems
that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so
continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire
plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and falling over
the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green swells
like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery white
as their underside turns to the sun.

Happy to slip beyond the control of the stern banks, the Danube here
wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting
the islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a
shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at
the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and
forming new islands innumerably which shift daily in size and shape and
possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their
very existence.

Properly speaking, this fascinating part of the river's life begins soon
after leaving Pressburg, and we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and
frying-pan on board, reached it on the crest of a rising flood about
mid-July. That very same morning, when the sky was reddening before
sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a
couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the
Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a
grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing
current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus
Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Thelsen on a spur of the
Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly from the left and the
frontier is crossed between Austria and Hungary.

Racing along at twelve kilometers an hour soon took us well into Hungary,
and the muddy waters—sure sign of flood—sent us aground on many a
shingle-bed, and twisted us like a cork in many a sudden belching whirlpool
before the towers of Pressburg (Hungarian, Poszony) showed against the sky;
and then the canoe, leaping like a spirited horse, flew at top speed under
the grey walls, negotiated safely the sunken chain of the Fliegende Brucke
ferry, turned the corner sharply to the left, and plunged on yellow foam
into the wilderness of islands, sandbanks, and swamp-land beyond—the land
of the willows.

The change came suddenly, as when a series of bioscope pictures snaps down
on the streets of a town and shifts without warning into the scenery of
lake and forest. We entered the land of desolation on wings, and in less
than half an hour there was neither boat nor fishing-hut nor red roof, nor
any single sign of human habitation and civilization within sight. The
sense of remoteness from the world of humankind, the utter isolation, the
fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly
laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly to one another
that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit
us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a
separate little kingdom of wonder and magic—a kingdom that was reserved
for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten
warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.

Though still early in the afternoon, the ceaseless buffetings of a most
tempestuous wind made us feel weary, and we at once began casting about for
a suitable camping-ground for the night. But the bewildering character of
the islands made landing difficult; the swirling flood carried us in shore
and then swept us out again; the willow branches tore our hands as we
seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many a yard of sandy bank into
the water before at length we shot with a great sideways blow from the wind
into a backwater and managed to beach the bows in a cloud of spray. Then we
lay panting and laughing after our exertions on the hot yellow sand,
sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a
cloudless blue sky above, and an immense army of dancing, shouting willow
bushes, closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their
thousand little hands as though to applaud the success of our efforts.

"What a river!" I said to my companion, thinking of all the way we had
traveled from the source in the Black Forest, and how he had often been
obliged to wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning of June.

"Won't stand much nonsense now, will it?" he said, pulling the canoe a
little farther into safety up the sand, and then composing himself for a
nap.

I lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of the elements—water,
wind, sand, and the great fire of the sun—thinking of the long journey
that lay behind us, and of the great stretch before us to the Black Sea,
and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming traveling
companion as my friend, the Swede.

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any
other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its
aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood
gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the
great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved,
unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown of some living
creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it
became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being,
through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its
mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly
and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a
Great Personage.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret
life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our tent,
uttering that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be caused by
the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its bed, so great is its hurrying
speed. We knew, too, the voice of its gurgling whirlpools, suddenly
bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its shallows
and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below all mere surface
sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the banks. How it
stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its face! And how its
laughter roared out when the wind blew up-stream and tried to stop its
growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and
foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that
self-conscious chatter when there were hills to look on; the affected
dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns, far too
important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when the sun
caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till the steam
rose.

It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world knew
it. There were places in the upper reaches among the Swabian forests, when
yet the first whispers of its destiny had not reached it, where it elected
to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear again on the other side
of the porous limestone hills and start a new river with another name;
leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had to climb out and
wade and push the canoe through miles of shallows.

And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth, was
to lie low, like Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent tributaries
came to join it from the Alps, and to refuse to acknowledge them when in,
but to run for miles side by side, the dividing line well marked, the very
levels different, the Danube utterly declining to recognize the newcomer.
Below Passau, however, it gave up this particular trick, for there the Inn
comes in with a thundering power impossible to ignore, and so pushes and
incommodes the parent river that there is hardly room for them in the long
twisting gorge that follows, and the Danube is shoved this way and that
against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself with great waves and much
dashing to and fro in order to get through in time. And during the fight
our canoe slipped down from its shoulder to its breast, and had the time of
its life among the struggling waves. But the Inn taught the old river a
lesson, and after Passau it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.

This was many days back, of course, and since then we had come to know
other aspects of the great creature, and across the Bavarian wheat plain of
Straubing she wandered so slowly under the blazing June sun that we could
well imagine only the surface inches were water, while below there moved,
concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of Undines, passing silently
and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely too, lest they be
discovered.

Much, too, we forgave her because of her friendliness to the birds and
animals that haunted the shores. Cormorants lined the banks in lonely
places in rows like short black palings; grey crows crowded the
shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of shallower water that
opened up between the islands, and hawks, swans, and marsh birds of all
sorts filled the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant cries. It
was impossible to feel annoyed with the river's vagaries after seeing a
deer leap with a splash into the water at sunrise and swim past the bows of
the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at us from the underbrush, or
looked straight into the brown eyes of a stag as we charged full tilt round
a corner and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too, everywhere
haunted the banks, tripping daintily among the driftwood and disappearing
so suddenly that it was impossible to see how they managed it.

But now, after leaving Pressburg, everything changed a little, and the
Danube became more serious. It ceased trifling. It was half-way to the
Black Sea, within seeming distance almost of other, stranger countries
where no tricks would be permitted or understood. It became suddenly
grown-up, and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke out into three
arms, for one thing, that only met again a hundred kilometers farther down,
and for a canoe there were no indications which one was intended to be
followed.

"If you take a side channel," said the Hungarian officer we met in the
Pressburg shop while buying provisions, "you may find yourselves, when the
flood subsides, forty miles from anywhere, high and dry, and you may easily
starve. There are no people, no farms, no fishermen. I warn you not to
continue. The river, too, is still rising, and this wind will increase."