Between The Woods And The Water

Proper travel writing, perhaps slightly marred by all his aristocratic hob-nobbing. A wonderful sense of place and time.

Perhaps I had made too long a halt on the bridge.

But this was not to be compared with the sky behind. The flatness of the Alföld leaves a stage for cloud-events at sunset that are dangerous to describe: levitated armies in deadlock and riderless squadrons descending in slow motion to smouldering and sulphurous lagoons where barbicans gradually collapse and fleets of burning triremes turn dark before sinking. These are black vesper’s pageants … the least said the better.

‘Let us assume’ turns in a few pages into ‘We may assume’, which, in a few more, is ‘As we have shown’; and, after a few more pages yet, the shy initial hypothesis has hardened into a brazen established landmark, all the time with not an atom of new evidence being adduced. Advantageous points are coaxed into opulent bloom, awkward ones discreetly pruned into non-being.

Nearly all of them had been dragged into the conflict in the teeth of their true feelings and disaster overtook them all.