Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (Journey Across Europe Book 2)

Continuing the epic foot journey across Europe begun in A Time of Gifts , Patrick Leigh Fermor writes about walking from Hungary to the Balkans. The journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on in 1933—to cross Europe on foot with an emergency allowance of one pound a day—proved so rich in experiences that when much later he sat down to describe them, they overflowed into more than one volume. Undertaken as the storms of war gathered, and providing a background for the events that were beginning to unfold in Central Europe, Leigh Fermor’s still-unfinished account of his journey has established itself as a modern classic. Between the Woods and the Water , the second volume of a projected three, has garnered as many prizes as its celebrated predecessor, A Time of Gifts . The opening of the book finds Leigh Fermor crossing the Danube—at the very moment where his first volume left off. A detour to the luminous splendors of Prague is followed by a trip downriver to Budapest, passage on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain, and a crossing of the Romanian border into Transylvania. Remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges that are the haunt of bears, wolves, eagles, gypsies, and a variety of sects are all savored in the approach to the Iron Gates, the division between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans, where, for now, the story ends. Continuing the journey on foot across Europe begun in A Time of Gifts Between the Woods and the Water begins where its predecessor, A Time of Gifts , leaves off--in 1934, with the nineteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor standing on a bridge crossing the Danube between Hungary and Slovakia. A trip downriver to Budapest follows, along with passage on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain, and a crossing of the Romanian border into Transylvania. Remote castles, villages, monasteries, and mountains that are the haunts of bears, wolves, eagles, gypsies, and sundry religious sects are all savored in the approach to the Iron Gates, on the border of Yugoslavia and Romania. This ruggedly beautiful and historic stretch of the Danube has since been lost beneath the waters of an immense hydroelectric power plant--as indeed so much of the old Europe that Leigh Fermor's pages so vividly evoke was soon to be destroyed in World War II. Patrick Leigh Fermor...