Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates-Fast Shipping

Description

Continuing the epic foot journey across Europebegun in A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor writes about walking from Hungary to the Balkans.

Thejourney that Patrick Leigh Fermor setout on in 1933—to cross Europeon foot with an emergency allowance of one pounda day—proved so richin experiences that when much later he sat down to describethem, theyoverflowed into more than one volume. Undertaken as the storms of wargathered, and providing a background for the events that were beginningto unfoldin Central Europe, Leigh Fermor’s still-unfinished account ofhis journey hasestablished 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 celebratedpredecessor, A Time of Gifts.

The opening of the book finds LeighFermor crossing theDanube—at the very moment where his first volume left off.A detour tothe luminous splendors of Prague is followed by a trip downriver toBudapest,passage on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain, and acrossing of the Romanianborder into Transylvania. Remote castles,mountain villages, monasteries and toweringranges that are the hauntof bears, wolves, eagles, gypsies, and a variety of sectsare allsavored in the approach to the Iron Gates, the division between theCarpathianmountains and the Balkans, where, for now, the story ends.