Читать книгу The Danube from the Black Forest to the Black Sea онлайн

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About eighteen miles below Tuttlingen, in the midst of the castle-crowned hills, we passed the monastery of Beuron, covering with its extensive buildings a great flat point in the river, under sheer towering limestone cliffs, surmounted by a grim black cross several hundred feet above the chapel spire.

Wildenstein

The monastery is imposing in extent but not in style, and the railway bridge close by does not add to the charm of the landscape. The rapid current hurried us on, not against our will, and we only paused to watch the monks haymaking in the meadows, wearing a dress which looked like a compromise between the costumes of a washerwoman and a Cape Cod fisherman. They must have suffered in the hot sun, with their gowns of heavy woollen stuff, but they suffered in silence, and did not deign to answer our greetings or even to turn their eyes upon us.

We practically finished the day’s cruise at the little village of Gutenstein, where we dined in the simple country gasthaus for a ridiculously trifling sum, and listened to the droning gossip of a lounging locksmith, who was minding his little child while the mother was at work in the hayfields. With the exception of this descendant of the Jan Steen type and the landlord and his wife, we saw only small children and decrepit old people. The rest were all at work haymaking, and we left before the population returned to the village. We selected our camp-ground—with an eye to beauty of situation as well as comfort—on a high point in a perfect paradise of wild-flowers. From Alfred Parsons’s note-book for the first two days of the cruise I take the following extract, which will give an idea of the wealth of the flora of this district: