We set out around dawn in the wagon of a young farmer here, who seems to be a prosperous fellow and is the son of one of the old-timers at the tavern. He had apparently received orders from his sire to take us, and didn’t much like the appointment. When we first mounted the wagon, in the earliest light of the town square, he pointed up to the mountains a few times, shaking his head and saying, “Poenari? Poenari?” Finally, he seemed to resign himself to the task and gave rein to his horses, two big brown machines pulled from the fields for the day.
The man himself was a formidable-looking character, tall and hugely broad-shouldered under his blouse and wool vest, and with his hat on he towered a good two heads above us. This made his timidity about the excursion a little comic for me, although I certainly shouldn’t laugh about the fears of these peasants after what I saw in Istanbul (which, as I said before, I shall tell you in person). Georgescu tried to engage him during our drive into the deep forest, but the poor man sat holding his reins in silent despair (I thought), like a prisoner being led away to the block. Now and then his hand crept inside his shirt as if he wore some kind of protective amulet there-I guessed this from the leather thong around his neck and had to resist the temptation to request a look at it. I felt pity for the man and what we were putting him through, against all the proscriptions of his culture, and resolved to give him a little extra remuneration at the end of the trip.
We intended to stay the night, to give ourselves ample time to examine everything and to try to talk with any peasants we might encounter who live close to the site, and to this end the man’s father had provided us with rugs and blankets, and his mother had given us a store of bread, cheese, and apples tied up in a bundle in the back of the wagon. As we entered the forest, I felt a distinctly unscholarly thrill. I remembered Bram Stoker’s hero setting off into the Transylvanian forests-a fictional version of them, in any case-by stagecoach, and almost wished we’d departed at evening, so that I too might have glimpses of mysterious fires in the woods, and hear wolves howling. It was a shame, I thought, that Georgescu had never read the book, and I resolved to try to send him a copy from England, if I ever got back to such a humdrum place. Then I remembered my encounter in Istanbul and it sobered me.
We rode slowly through the forest, because the road was rutted and pocked with holes and because it began almost at once to climb uphill. These forests are very deep, dim inside even at hottest noon, with the eerie coolness of a church interior. Riding through them, one is utterly surrounded by trees and by a fluttering hush; nothing is visible from the wagon track for miles at a stretch, apart from the endless tree trunks and underbrush, a dense mix of spruce and varied hardwoods. The height of many of the trees is tremendous and their crowns block the sky. It is like riding among the pillars of a vast cathedral, but a dark one, a haunted cathedral where one expects glimpses of the Black Madonna or martyred saints in every niche. I noted at least a dozen tree species, among them soaring chestnuts and a type of oak I’d never seen before.
At one point where the ground levelled out, we rode into a nave of silvery trunks, a beech grove of the sort one still stumbles on-but rarely-in the most wooded of English manor grounds. You’ve seen them, no doubt. This one could have been a marriage hall for Robin Hood himself, with huge elephantine trunks supporting a roof of millions of tiny green leaves, and last year’s foliage lying in a fawn-colored carpet under our wheels. Our driver did not seem to register any of this beauty-perhaps when you live your entire life among such scenes, they do not register asbeautybut as the world itself-and sat hunched over in the same disapproving silence. Georgescu was busy with some notes from his work at Snagov, so I had no one with whom to share a word of the loveliness all around us.
After we’d driven nearly half the day, we came out into an open field, green and golden under the sun. We had risen quite high, I saw, from the village, and could look out over a dense vista of trees, sloping so steeply downwards from the edge of the field that to step off towards them would be to fall sharply. From there the forest plunged into a gorge and I saw the River Arges for the first time, a vein of silver below. On its opposite bank rose enormous forested slopes, which looked unscalable. It was a region for eagles, not people, and I thought with awe of the many skirmishes fought here between Ottomans and Christians. That any empire, however daring, would try to penetrate this landscape seemed to me the height of folly. I understood more fully why Vlad Dracula had chosen this region for his stronghold; it hardly needed a fortress to make it less pregnable.
Our guide jumped down and unpacked our midday meal, and we ate it on the grass under scattered oaks and alders. Then he stretched out under a tree and put his hat over his face, and Georgescu stretched out under another, as if this were a matter of course, and they slept for an hour while I rambled about the meadow. It was wonderfully quiet apart from the moan of the wind in those boundless forests. The sky rose bright blue above everything. Walking to the other side of the field, I could see a similar clearing rather far below, presided over by a shepherd in white garments and a broad brownish hat. His flock-sheep, apparently-drifted around him like clouds, and I reflected that he could have been standing there in just that way, leaning on his staff, since the days of Trajan. I felt a great peace come over me. The macabre nature of our errand faded from my mind, and I thought I could have stayed up there in that fragrant meadow for an aeon or two, like the shepherd.
In the afternoon our way led up on steeper and steeper roads, and finally into a village that Georgescu said was the nearest to the fortress; here we sat a while at the local tavern with glasses of that very fortifying brandy, which they callpalinca.Our driver made it clear that he intended to stay with the horses while we went on foot to the fortress; under no circumstances would he climb up there, much less spend the night with us in the ruins. When we pressed him, he growled,“Pentru nimica în lime,”and put his hand on the leather thong around his neck. Georgescu told me this meant “Absolutely not.” So obstinate was the man about all this that finally Georgescu chuckled and said the walk was a reasonable one and the last part had to be done on foot anyway. I wondered a little at Georgescu’s wanting to sleep out in the open, instead of returning to the village, and to be honest I didn’t quite relish the idea of an overnight there myself, although I didn’t say so.
Eventually we left the fellow to his brandy and the horses to their water and went on our way with the bundles of food and blankets on our backs. As we were walking along the main street, I remembered again the story of the boyars of Târgoviste, limping upwards towards the original ruined fortress, and then I thought of what I had seen-or believed I had seen-in Istanbul, and I felt again a pang of uneasiness.
The track soon narrowed to a small wagon road, and after this to a footpath through the forest, which sloped upwards before us. Only the last stretch gave us a steep climb, and this we negotiated with ease. Suddenly, we were on a windy ridge, a stony spine that broke out of the forest. At the very top of this spine, on a vertebra higher than all the rest, clung two ruined towers and a litter of walls, all that remained of Castle Dracula. The view was breathtaking, with the River Arges barely twinkling in the gorge below and villages scattered here and there at a stone’s drop along it. Far to the south, I saw low hills that Georgescu said were the plains of Wallachia, and to the north towering mountains, some capped with snow. We had made our way to the perch of an eagle.