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18-05-2009 - Contrary to our expectations

Contrary to our expectations, the wind did not go down with the sun. It
seemed to increase with the darkness, howling overhead and shaking the
willows round us like straws. Curious sounds accompanied it sometimes,
like the explosion of heavy guns, and it fell upon the water and the
island in great flat blows of immense power. It made me think of the
sounds a planet must make, could we only hear it, driving along through
space.

But the sky kept wholly clear of clouds, and soon after supper the full
moon rose up in the east and covered the river and the plain of shouting
willows with a light like the day.

We lay on the sandy patch beside the fire, smoking, listening to the
noises of the night round us, and talking happily of the journey we had
already made, and of our plans ahead. The map lay spread in the door of
the tent, but the high wind made it hard to study, and presently we
lowered the curtain and extinguished the lantern. The firelight was
enough to smoke and see each other's faces by, and the sparks flew about
overhead like fireworks. A few yards beyond, the river gurgled and
hissed, and from time to time a heavy splash announced the falling away
of further portions of the bank.

Our talk, I noticed, had to do with the far-away scenes and incidents of
our first camps in the Black Forest, or of other subjects altogether
remote from the present setting, for neither of us spoke of the actual
moment more than was necessary--almost as though we had agreed tacitly
to avoid discussion of the camp and its incidents. Neither the otter nor
the boatman, for instance, received the honor of a single mention,
though ordinarily these would have furnished discussion for the greater
part of the evening. They were, of course, distinct events in such a
place.

The scarcity of wood made it a business to keep the fire going, for the
wind, that drove the smoke in our faces wherever we sat, helped at the
same time to make a forced draught. We took it in turn to make foraging
expeditions into the darkness, and the quantity the Swede brought back
always made me feel that he took an absurdly long time finding it; for
the fact was I did not care much about being left alone, and yet it
always seemed to be my turn to grub about among the bushes or scramble
along the slippery banks in the moonlight. The long day's battle with
wind and water--such wind and such water!--had tired us both, and an
early bed was the obvious program. Yet neither of us made the move for
the tent. We lay there, tending the fire, talking in desultory fashion,
peering about us into the dense willow bushes, and listening to the
thunder of wind and river. The loneliness of the place had entered our
very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after a bit the sound of our
voices became a trifle unreal and forced; whispering would have been the
fitting mode of communication, I felt, and the human voice, always
rather absurd amid the roar of the elements, now carried with it
something almost illegitimate. It was like talking out loud in church,
or in some place where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite _safe_, to
be overheard.

Gepost door: ftyijhbsa op 18-05-2009 om 19:09

18-05-2009 - Though still early

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 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 we 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 growth
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 upstream 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 new-comer. 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; gray 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 halfway to the
Black Sea, within scenting 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.

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