Between the woods and the water - Patrick Leigh Fermor

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.