Читать книгу The Danube from the Black Forest to the Black Sea - Francis Davis Millet - Страница 5

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HE final preparations for our cruise occupied more time than we anticipated, and it was quite eight o’clock before the canoes touched water at the foot of the slippery stone steps. A large proportion of the inhabitants of Donaueschingen gathered on the bridge and near the landing to see us off, and a dozen eager volunteers helped us carry our boats and launch them into the yellow stream. A few minutes sufficed to stow the traps, for we had sent the sails and tents and various other articles by rail to Ulm, thinking they would be more trouble than use on the upper part of the river, with its succession of dams and weirs. Then, amid the “Hochs!” and “Glückliche Reises!” of the multitude, we scrambled in, each in turn, and pushed off. We firmly believe that no one in the great crowd of spectators detected that two of us were handling a double-bladed paddle for the first time—not even the two ladies from Massachusetts whom we met at the inn, for their hearty interest in our trip, and their enthusiastic admiration for the canoes, doubtless blinded them to the observance of our awkwardness. The swelling, curling stream bore us merrily out of sight of the town, and only an occasional paddle stroke was necessary to keep the bow in the right direction. Boys and girls ran along the shady path trying to keep pace with us, and we saw on the highway a carriage with our lady friends, who loyally kept sight of us for several miles. A very short time sufficed to familiarize us with the management of the canoes, so we could thoroughly enjoy the beauty of the landscape and indulge in the unalloyed feeling of satisfaction at our successful start, and we swept on through the great alternating patches of sunlight and shadow, under trailing boughs of large trees and past beds of tall rushes. In a few moments the Brege came in with a volume of water about equal to the Brigach, and then the real Danube rushed on, already quite majestic in aspect, through fields kaleidoscopic with myriads of flowers, reflecting in its pools the clear blue of the sky with brilliant summer clouds, adding new charms to the landscape at every turn. A number of swans from the park at Donaueschingen swam just ahead of us nearly to the first village, Pforen, with its dominating church edifice and huge wooden bridge. When they reached this self-imposed limit of their excursion they rose into the air with great flutterings and splashings, wheeled around and passed us so near at hand that we could feel the air from their great wings, then sailed away in graceful flight to their home in the secluded islands of the park. Large white wing-feathers danced along down stream; and when, many weeks afterwards, we dismantled our canoes on the shores of the Black Sea, we found one of these carefully stowed away in an angle of the underpart of the deck, and, with mock ceremony of a message from the Swan of the Source to the Sturgeon of the Sea, threw it to the strong north wind.

The meadows were full of haymakers—men, women, and children—laughing and chattering and bidding us “Grüss Gott!” as we passed. The odors of the fresh hay and the perfumes of the flowers were almost intoxicating in their strength. Nature on every side of us had that peculiar freshness and depth of color which comes with the first clear weather at the end of a long-continued rain, and the

THE START—DONAUESCHINGEN

landscape, seen from the level of the water, had the increased beauty of line and composition which so often comes from this point of view in the perspective. In less than an hour we reached our first weir near the little village of Neidingen, but the banks were easily accessible owing to the height of the stream, and in five minutes we had dragged the canoes across a grassy point and had launched them again. From the accounts we had read of these obstructions to navigation of the upper river, we anticipated much greater difficulties than we encountered at any of the one-and-twenty weirs and dams we navigated between Donaueschingen and Ulm, although the first one of all was by far the easiest to pass, and should not be mentioned as a fair sample. The weirs are far more numerous than the dams; indeed, there are but two or three of the latter. These, of course, must be carried over because of the sheer descent of the construction, whereas the weirs usually consist of a long slope of masonry over which the canoes can be shot without difficulty at the end of a long painter.

The delight of our first luncheon in the open air will never lose its freshness in the memory of either of us three. After a struggle with a weir at Geisingen, we landed in a pleasant meadow just below the village among waist-high ranks of wonderfully brilliant flowers, and lay for an hour basking in the balmy, perfume-laden, sunny air. At our feet the Danube, not the “beautiful blue” of song, but a vigorous, rushing stream, danced and sparkled in the sunlight. Before us were heavily-wooded hills with cool and tempting shadows, behind us the cluster of half-timbered houses and dignified church-tower of the village, and everywhere around the glories of a perfect June day. A few children, attracted by the sight of the canoes, interrupted our siesta; but when the school-bell sounded they all scampered away, and their prompt obedience to the call of authority made our independence seem all the more real and desirable. Then and there at our first landing-place we formed ourselves into a Society for the Preservation of the Banks of the Danube, appointed a president, secretary, and treasurer, and a board of management, and unanimously adopted one regulation, which was to the effect that we should not disfigure in any way the spots we might occupy as camps, but that all rubbish and unsightly debrís should be carefully hidden or thrown into the stream. To the honor of the S. P. B. D. let it be chronicled here that the regulation was strictly observed to the very end of the cruise.

PFOREN

Below Neidingen and past Geisingen, Immendingen, and Möhringen the river winds through broad, fertile meadows, and in summer it is a panorama of wild-flowers. In the quiet pools of the stream we startled many water-fowl, and once caught sight of a deer feeding near the water. Numerous huts along the bank showed us that this was a favorite shooting-ground in the season, and there were many indications that the game is carefully preserved. The whole of that perfect first day was one uninterrupted succession of surprises and delights, both in landscape and architecture. The frequent villages were all of them interesting and picturesque both in construction and in situation, and as the houses lost their alpine character and became more solid and settled in type, they formed fascinating groups, and made a charming feature of every view.

In the late afternoon we floated out of the sweet air of the meadows into a stratum of effluvia from the tanneries of Tuttlingen, and but for the fact that the town claims as its hero Max Schneckenburger, the author of the words of “Die Wacht am Rhein” who was educated here in his youth, and for the more cogent reason of hunger, we probably should have paddled past the town without pausing longer than to admire some of its architectural features. Tuttlingen is not all tanneries, although, as we approached, we thought it must be, by the smell. It is a goodly-sized place, with the usual castle, an unusual church, and red-tiled houses, many of them elaborately half-timbered. Opposite the town, which straggles along the right bank of the stream, a great open meadow is in process of reclamation from the floods, and is being converted into a park or public pleasureground. In this flat expanse of rough ground stands a great square mass of masonry, which will sometime or other support the statue of Schneckenburger, for the Tuttlingers are actively engaged in gathering subscriptions for this monument.

Schneckenburger can scarcely be called a poet, for these verses are probably the only ones of any account he ever wrote—at least, no others have been preserved—and they came from his pen at the age of twenty-one. Nine years later, in 1849, he died, having become established as a small merchant, after several years’ experience as a commercial traveller. From the accounts given of him by his widow, the distinctive feature of his character was patriotic fervor, which found its earliest expression in his choice of a motto, “Deutsch,” in his school-boy days, and later in the sentiments of “Die Wacht am Rhein.” The ever-active discussion in our camp, whether the extraordinary popularity of the patriotic song is due to the verses or to the music, is hereby passed on for final settlement to the readers of this narrative. We never could agree about it.

Hut for duck shooting

Neidingen.

As it was already late when we reached Tuttlingen, we proposed to hurry our dinner so as to have plenty of daylight to shoot the great weir which filled the air with its roaring. But the deliberate ways of German landlords are not easily changed, and we only succeeded in getting off in the late twilight. With some misgivings we paddled out into mid-stream, towards the sound of the falling water, between the two great bridges. The fame of our expedition

MAX SCHNECKENBURGER, AUTHOR OF “DIE WACHT AM RHEIN”

[From an old portrait]

had spread far and wide, and it was the hour of leisure, so the Tuttlingers had assembled by thousands along the banks and on the bridges to see the mad strangers come to grief in the cataract on the great weir. The sight of the black masses of people stimulated us almost to rashness, and, without mutual consultation, we steered straight for some snags which had caught on the angle of the weir, and jumping out into the knee-deep water, each of us shot his canoe over at the end of the painter fastened to the stern and, holding the line, scrambled down the incline where the water was shallowest, jumped into his canoe and swept away under the second bridge. All this was done in very little longer time than it takes to tell about it. When the three canoes appeared almost simultaneously in the smooth water below the second bridge, shouts of “Hip! Hip!” and “Glückliche Reise!” echoed from the hill-sides to the towers of Honberg Castle. We replied in chorus “Schneckenburger soll hoch leben!” and dramatically disappeared in the gathering darkness. A half-dozen youths, ambitious to discover where and how we were going to pass the night, followed us along the bank, and we were loath to make our first camp until we had gotten rid of them. We accordingly paddled on and on, scarcely able to see the banks, and at last found an apparently secluded spot and landed. We hauled up the canoes into the dew-drenched meadow, made our simple preparations for the night, and lay down in the snug, warm cockpits. The first night in camp is never a very restful one, and the unaccustomed and somewhat cramped berth with all sorts of sharp projecting corners and the hardest of floors, did not assist our slumbers. Nor did the visit of a bevy of peasant girls who had ventured out from a neighboring farm-house, which we had not noticed in the darkness, help us to lose consciousness as they stood for a long time in the moonlight chattering in soft voices and repeating the story of our exploit at the great weir, which had evidently been related to them by the youths whom we had successfully dodged when we landed. The heavy dew obliged us to cover up our berths in some way, and we tried the rubber blanket as the proper article for such a purpose. This was far too hot. Then we tried the deck hatches, which shut down so closely that they left no room for us to turn over and, besides, were as hot as the rubber blanket. So we passed the night between fitful naps and impatient struggles with temporary roofs. The sun had not begun to dissipate the river fog before we had taken our plunge and were ready for breakfast. By general understanding, the experienced cruiser, or Admiral of the fleet, was expected to do the cooking, and he had made elaborate preparations for this duty. The other two hungry members of the expedition watched the operation of preparing this first breakfast with eager interest, listening meanwhile to the words of wisdom which came from the chef as he sat in his canoe wedged into the narrow cockpit by all the paraphernalia of his temporary trade.

Below Mühlheim,

Kallenberg

“It’s no use to get out of your canoe to cook a meal,” he said, with a tone of authority that silenced our incipient suggestions as to a tidy spot on the flat surface of an adjacent rock. “It’s a thousand times simpler and easier to cook in your canoe, for your things are so handy. All you have to do is to sit just where you are and reach for whatever you want. Besides, you never lose anything, for nothing can get far out of sight in a canoe.”

All this time he was carefully arranging a towering, complex construction of tin and brass, with a large spirit-lamp beneath. It was a coffee-machine of his own invention, which, after having been charged with the various materials, was expected to make a most excellent brew at one operation. The water was to come to a boil at the same time with the milk, and then be forced in some mysterious way through the coffee, and come out café au lait of a quality not to be found this side Paris. Everything went on quite satisfactorily for a few minutes, and then the spectators saw a cloud of steam and a fountain of milk suddenly rise high into the air, and, simultaneously with the explosion, saw the cook leap from the canoe all ablaze and roll wildly in the long wet grass. The canoe was covered with flaming spirits, but the fire was extinguished with little difficulty. The milk was all lost, the coffee scattered into the remotest crevices of the cockpit, the eggs were broken, the bread soaked with a nauseous mixture, and breakfast was in a mess generally. Fortunately, the damage to the person of the cook was slight, but the laceration of his feelings was far more serious and lasting, and he gave up the position of cook of the expedition which he had talked about for six weeks and had filled for six minutes, and became second dish-washer and scullery-boy.

We were eager to be afloat once more, so we picked up a scratch breakfast and launched the canoes while the ring of the scythe was still in the air, and the busy spreaders had not yet begun their work.

Wernwag.

We shot three weirs in as many hours, and passed Neudingen, Mühlheim, and Friedingen before eleven o’clock. At the last-named village, a sweetly pastoral place among the hills, we encountered our first rapids, for the flood was so high that all the shallows in the river above had been quite covered, and we had seen white water at the weirs alone. The channel narrows at this point, the hills crowd close to the banks, and great gray crags rise from the dark foliage on the steep slopes. Ruins of castles crown almost every prominent summit, and the scenery grows wilder and more beautiful at every bend of the river. Kallenberg, Wildenstein, Wernwag, Falkenstein, and a half-score of other ruins, equally wonderful in situation, tempted us to sketch them, and we found the most delightful spots imaginable wherever we paused and exchanged the paddle for the pencil.

About eighteen miles below Tuttlingen, in the midst of the castle-crowned hills, we passed the monastery of Beuron, covering with its extensive buildings a great flat point in the river, under sheer towering limestone cliffs, surmounted by a grim black cross several hundred feet above the chapel spire.

Wildenstein

The monastery is imposing in extent but not in style, and the railway bridge close by does not add to the charm of the landscape. The rapid current hurried us on, not against our will, and we only paused to watch the monks haymaking in the meadows, wearing a dress which looked like a compromise between the costumes of a washerwoman and a Cape Cod fisherman. They must have suffered in the hot sun, with their gowns of heavy woollen stuff, but they suffered in silence, and did not deign to answer our greetings or even to turn their eyes upon us.

We practically finished the day’s cruise at the little village of Gutenstein, where we dined in the simple country gasthaus for a ridiculously trifling sum, and listened to the droning gossip of a lounging locksmith, who was minding his little child while the mother was at work in the hayfields. With the exception of this descendant of the Jan Steen type and the landlord and his wife, we saw only small children and decrepit old people. The rest were all at work haymaking, and we left before the population returned to the village. We selected our camp-ground—with an eye to beauty of situation as well as comfort—on a high point in a perfect paradise of wild-flowers. From Alfred Parsons’s note-book for the first two days of the cruise I take the following extract, which will give an idea of the wealth of the flora of this district:

THE MONKS OF BEURON

“From Donaueschingen downward the meadow flowers have a subalpine character—masses of ragged-robin and bladder-lychnis (the calyx of which is a delicate mauve), knotweed, various campanulas (one with bright mauve flowers in a very loose panicle), buttercups, purple sage, and grasses in flower. On the river banks for a long way down are masses of yellow iris, and occasionally sweet-calamus. In one meadow a purple variety of rocket; and generally the usual English meadow flowers. Lower down Campanula glomerata grows in fine purple masses with the sage; and in the rocky parts about Beuron were bright pinks, like the chedder-pink, Geranium sanguineum, and saxifrages. A bright blue veronica grows plentifully as you go down (Quære spicata?). Other plants on the rocks were a purple lactuca, dog-rose, systopteris, wall-rue, and Adiantum nigrum.”

As long as daylight lasted we botanized and sketched; and when twilight came on we watched the glowing hill-sides fade into a simple mass in silhouette against the starlit sky, and then slept like tired children.