Adrift in Pacific and Other Great Adventures – 17 Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). Jules Verne
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fed then under the care of the said Frik—immanior ipse. Stretched on a hillock carpeted with grass, he slept with one eye open, his big pipe in his mouth; and now and then he gave a shrill whistle to his dogs when some sheep strayed away from the pasturage, or else he gave a more powerful blast which awoke the multiple echoes of the mountain.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon. The sun was sinking towards the horizon. A few summits whose bases were bathed in floating mist were standing out clear in the east. Towards the south-west two breaks in the chain allowed a slanting column of rays to enter the ring like a luminous jet passing through a half open door.
This orographic system belongs to the wildest part of Transylvania, known as the county of Klausenburg, or Kolosvar.
A curious fragment of the Austrian Empire is this Transylvania, “Erdely,” in Magyar, which means the country of forests. It is bounded by Hungary on the north, Wallachia on the south, Moldavia on the west. Extending over sixty thousand square kilometres, about six millions of hectares, nearly the ninth of France, it is a kind of Switzerland, but half as large again, and no more populous. With its table-lands under cultivation, its luxuriant pasturages, its capriciously carved valleys, its frowning summits, Transylvania, streaked by the plutonic ramifications of the Carpathians, is furrowed by numerous watercourses flowing to swell the Theiss and the superb Danube, the Iron Gates of which, a few miles to he south, close the defile of the Balkan chain on the frontier of Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.
Such is this ancient country of Dacia, conquered by Trajan in the first century of the Christian Era. The independence it enjoyed under Jean Zapoly and his successors up to 1699, ended with Leopold the First, who annexed it to Austria. But such was its political constitution that it remained the common abode of the races which elbow each other but never mingle—Wallachians, or Roumans, Hungarians, Tsiganes, Szeklers of Moldavian origin, and also Saxons, whom time and circumstances will end by Magyarizing to the advantage of Transylvanian unity.
To which of these types did the shepherd Frik belong?
Was he a degenerate descendant of the ancient Dacians? He would not have found it easy to say so, to judge by his tumbled hair, his begrimed face, his bristly beard, his thick eyebrows, like two red-haired brushes, his bluish eyes, bluish or greenish, the humid corners of which were marked with the wrinkles of old age. He must have been sixty-five—you would never have guessed him less. But he was big, hardy, upright under his yellowish cloak, which was not as shaggy as his chest; and a painter would not have lost the chance of sketching him, when he was wearing his grass hat, a true wisp of straw, and resting on his crook as motionless as a rock.
Just as the rays penetrated through the break in the west, Frik turned over. His half-closed hand he made into a telescope, as he had already made it into a speaking-trumpet, to make his voice heard at a distance, and he looked through it attentively.
In the clear of the horizon, a good mile away, lay a group of buildings, with their outlines much softened by the distance. This old castle occupied on an isolated shoulder of the Vulkan range the upper part of a table-land called the Orgall Plateau. In the bright light the castle stood out with the clearness displayed in stereoscopic views. But, nevertheless, the shepherd’s eye must have been endowed with great power of vision to be able to make out any detail in that distant mass.
Suddenly he exclaimed, as he shook his head,—
“Old castle! Old castle! You may well stand firm on your foundation. Three years more and you will have ceased to exist, for your beech-tree has only three branches left.”
This beech-tree, planted at the extremity of one of the bastions of the enclosure, stood out black against the sky, and would have been almost invisible at that distance to any one else than Frik. The explanation of the shepherd’s words, which were caused by a legend relative to the castle, we will give in due time.
“Yes,” he repeated, “three branches. There were four yesterday, but the fourth has fallen during the night. I can only count three at the fork. No more than three, old castle—no more than three!”
If we attack a shepherd on his ideal side, the imagination readily takes him for a dreamy, contemplative being: he converses with the planets, he confers with the stars, he reads in the skies. In reality he is generally a stupid, ignorant brute. But public credulity easily credits him with supernatural gifts: he practises sorcery; according to his humour he can call up good fortune or bad, and scatter it among man and beast—or, what comes to the same thing, he sells sympathetic powder, and you can buy from him philtres and formulas. Can he not make the furrows barren by throwing into them enchanted stones? Can he not make sheep sterile by merely casting on them the evil eye? These superstitions are of all times and all countries. Even in the most civilized lands, one will never meet a shepherd without giving him some friendly word, some significant greeting, saluting him by the name of “pastor” to which he clings. A touch of the hat affords an escape from malign influences, and on the roads of Transylvania it is no more omitted than elsewhere.
Frik, then, was regarded as a sorcerer, a caller-up of apparitions. According to him the vampires and stryges obeyed him; if you were to believe him, these were to be met with at the setting of the moon, as on dark nights in other countries you see the great bissext astride on the arms of the mill talking with the wolves or dreaming in the starlight.
Frik profited by all this. He sold charms and counter charms. But, be it noted, he was as credulous as his believers; and if he did not believe in his own witchcraft, he believed in the legends of his country.
There is nothing surprising therefore in his prophecy regarding the approaching disappearance of the old castle, now that the beech was reduced to three branches, or in his at once setting out to bear the news to Werst.
After mustering his flock by bellowing loudly through a long trumpet of white wood, he took the road to the village. His dogs followed him, hurrying on the sheep as they did so—two mongrel demi-griffins, snarling and ferocious, who seemed fitter to eat the sheep than to guard them. He had a hundred rams and ewes, a dozen yearlings, the rest three and four years old.
The flock belonged to the judge of Werst, the biro Koltz, who paid the commune a large sum for pasturage, and who thought a good deal of his shepherd Frik, knowing him to be a skilful shearer and well acquainted with the treatment of such maladies as thrush, giddiness, fluke, rot, foot rot, and other cattle ailments.
The flock moved in a compact mass, the bell-wether at the head, making the bell heard above the bleating.
As he left the pasture Frik took a wide footpath bordered by spacious fields, in which waved magnificent ears of corn, very long in the straw and high on the stalk; and several plantations, of koukouroutz, which is the maize of the country. The road led to the edge of a forest of firs and spruces, fresh and gloomy beneath their branches. Lower down the Syl flowed along its luminous course, filtering through the pebbles in its bed, and bearing the logs of wood from the sawmills upstream.
Dogs and sheep stopped on the right bank of the river and began to drink greedily, pushing the reeds aside to do so.
Werst was not more than three gunshots away, beyond a thick plantation of willows formed of well-grown trees, and not of stunted pollards which only grow bushy for a few feet above their roots. These willows stretched a way up to Vulkan Hill, of which the village of the same name occupied a projection on the southern slope of the Plesa range.
The fields were now deserted. It is only at nightfall that the labourers return home, and Frik as he went along had no traditional “good night” to exchange. When his flock had satisfied their thirst, he was about to enter the fold of the valley when a man appeared at the bend of the Syl, some fifty yards down stream.
“Hallo, friend!” said he to the shepherd.
He was one of those pedlars who travel from market to market in the district. They are to be met with in the towns and all the villages. In making themselves understood they have no difficulty, for they speak all languages. Was this one an Italian,