* * * * *

Well, the next morning we crossed by the ruins of old Greek Phanar
across the triple Stamboul-wall, which still showed its deep-ivied
portal, and made our way, not without climbing, along the Golden Horn to
the foot of the Old Seraglio, where I soon found signs of the railway.
And that minute commenced our journey across Turkey, Bulgaria, Servia,
Bosnia, Croatia, to Trieste, occupying no day or two as in old times,
but four months, a long-drawn nightmare, though a nightmare of rich
happiness, if one may say so, leaving on the memory a vague vast
impression of monstrous ravines, ever-succeeding profundities, heights
and greatnesses, jungles strange as some moon-struck poet's fantasy,
everlasting glooms, and a sound of mighty unseen rivers, cataracts, and
slow cumbered rills whose bulrushes never see the sun, with largesse
everywhere, secrecies, profusions, the unimaginable, the unspeakable, a
savagery most lush and fierce and gaudy, and vales of Arcadie, and
remote mountain-peaks, and tarns shy as old-buried treasure, and
glaciers, and we two human folk pretty small and drowned and lost in
all that amplitude, yet moving always through it.

We followed the lines that first day till we came to a steam train, and
I found the engine fairly good, and everything necessary to move it at
my hand: but the metals in such a condition of twisted, broken, vaulted,
and buried confusion, due to the earthquake, that, having run some
hundreds of yards to examine them, I saw that nothing could be done in
that way. At first this threw me into a condition like despair, for what
we were to do I did not know: but after persevering on foot for four
days along the deep-rusted track, which is of that large-gauge type
peculiar to Eastern Europe, I began to see that there were considerable
sound stretches, and took heart.