It starts, however, exactly where A Time for Gifts left off - crossing the Danube into Hungary - and ends also on the Danube, but far far away at the famed Iron Gates. The great river bookends Fermor's travels in this volume, which mostly occur inland through Hungary and Romania and other countries that were created by the Treaty of Versailles and the aftermath of the First World War, denuded in the Second World War, then isolated and destroyed by the Cold War.
But for the most part, Fermor avoids looking back, and stays in the present of his memories. A central piece of this part of his trek is a throwback to a 19th c. way of life - travelling from one country house to another, visiting with counts and grafs and vons and zus who all have marvelously shabby but graceful country homes filled with artifacts and vast libraries and charming, cosmopolitain guests. His innate British upper crustiness - read, impeccable manners and good education - combined with his genuine curiosity and good humor help him to fit right into this golden world of summer picnics and exploring and shooting and and riding and dressing for dinner with the last Archduke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and cocktails on the terrace and bicycle polo. The owners of these idylls are all fascinating, well-educated, mostly polymaths who share Fermor's love of history and natural science and local tradition, and are perfectly willing to help him along his way, particularly if he stays for a few days. Fermor has great affection for the many characters he meets, and describes them with humor and sympathy.* I could quote endlessly from his adventures here, which truly embody summer of a kind that few experienced then, and none will now.
Maybe this passage will do to give you a sense of the delights that awaited a young Englishman making his way across Transylvania in 1934. He is near Arad, which had been Hungarian but became Romanian after WW1.
"During the hot midday hours, iced soda was splashed into the deep golden wine I keep mentioning. This has a barbarous sound, but it was delicious - Spritzer the called it in German, and, in Magyar, hoszu lepes, 'a long step,' one of the many terms for the degrees of dilution. Generically, all these wines were unmistakably from that particular region, yet each one seemed to change with the roof under which it was to be drunk. it was ready for drinking from the moment the vintage had settled from fermentation, and after years in cool cellars it was beyond praise. At dinner, decanter on decanter was emptied, undiluted now, by the light of candles in tall glass tulip-shaped shields. Jas liked sitting late after dinner when rash and varied talk ranged far into the small hours. When he lifted a forefinger, we would fall silent and listen to the nightingales for a minute. A restless geometry of fire-flies darted about under the spatulate volume of the chestnut trees, and getting up one nigh to go to bed, we found emerald-coloured tree-frogs smaller than threepenny-bits clinging to the leaves like miniature green castaways on rafts." (107)
But of course, you simply can't read Fermor's stories without the shadow of what is to come hanging overhead. Where are all those houses now? What happened to the people? Here's what Fermor says:
"Every part of Europe I had crossed so far was to be torn and shattered by the war; indeed except for the last stage before the Turkish frontier, all the countries traversed by this journey were fought over a few years later by two mercilessly destructive powers; and when war broke out, all these friends vanished into sudden darkness. Afterwards the uprooting and destruction were on so tremendous a scale that it was sometimes years after the end of it all that the cloud became less dense and I could pick up a clue here and there and piece together what had happened in the interim. Nearly all of them had been dragged into the conflict in the teeth of their true feelings and disaster overtook them all." (110)
It is not only war that destroys this way of life, but "progress." Fermor's final weeks of this passage are spent on the Danube, near the Iron Gates - an area that was completely flooded in 1970 by the construction of a great hydro-electric dam in the late 1960s. You can read about all of this on your own, thanks to the miracle of the internets. But here is an example of what was lost not to war but to improvement. Before the flood (I think that Fermor would like that biblical allusion, except he'd use antidiluvian or something far more polysyllabic) there was an island in the Danube, called Ada Kaleh that was still populated by descendants of the Turks who made it so far into what is now Central Europe. Fermor spends a night in this perfect place.
"Balconied houses gathered about the mosque and small workshops for Turkish Delight and cigarettes, and all round these crumbed the remains of a massive fortress. Vine-trellises or an occasional awning shaded the cobbled lanes. There were hollyhocks and climbing roses and carnations in whitewashed petrol tins, and the heads and shoulders of the wives who flickered about among them were hidden by a dark feredje - a veil pinned in a straight line above the brown and joining under the nose; and they wore tapering white trousers, an outfit which gave them the look of black-and-white ninepins. Children were identically-clad miniatures of the grown-ups and, except for their unveiled faces, the little girls might each have been the innermost of a set of Russian dolls. Tobacco leaves were hung to dry in the sun like strings of small kippers. Women carried bundles of sticks on their heads, scattered grain to poultry and returned from the shore with their sickles and armfuls of rushes. Lop-eared rabbits basked or hopped sluggishly about the little gardens and nibbled the leaves of ripening melons. Flotillas of ducks cruised among the nets and the canoes and multitudes of frogs had summoned all the storks from the roofs." (246)
It sounds lovely, but if you want the full picture, including the marvelous image of the men in the coffee house smoking hookahs and drinking coffee and raki, you'll just have to read it yourself.
*There are more personal connections this time. Fermor makes a great friend in Istvan, the scion of one house, and takes a lover, Angela, for a few brief but charmed weeks. And there's that romp in the hay after a naked swim, which is never detailed but sure sounds like a bit of whoopee. (137)
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