Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

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.

Georgescu led the climb over tumbled rocks and we stood at last in the midst of the ruin. The fortress had been a small one, I saw at once, and had long since been abandoned to the elements; wildflowers of every description, lichens, moss, fungus, and stunted, windblown trees had made their ancient home in it. The two towers that still stood were bony silhouettes against the sky. Georgescu explained that it originally had five towers, from which Dracula’s minions could watch for Turkish incursions. The courtyard in which we stood had once had a deep well, for sieges, and also-according to legend-a secret passageway that led to a cave far below on the Arges. Through this Dracula had escaped the Turks in 1462 after using the fortress intermittently for about five years. Apparently he had never returned to it. Georgescu believed he had identified the castle chapel at one end of the courtyard, where we peered into a crumbling vault. Birds flew in and out of the tower walls, snakes and small animals rustled out of sight ahead of us, and I had the sense that nature would soon take the rest of this citadel for her own.

By the time our archaeological lesson was over, the sun hung just above the western hills and the shadows of rock, tree, and tower had lengthened around us. “We could walk back to the last village,” Georgescu said thoughtfully. “But then we’ll have to hike back up if we want to look around again in the morning. I’d still rather camp here, wouldn’t you?”

By then I felt that I had much rather not, but Georgescu looked so matter-of-fact, so scientific, beaming up at me with his sketchbook in hand, that I didn’t want to say so. He set about gathering dead wood from the area, and I helped him, and soon we had a fire crackling away on the stones of the ancient courtyard, carefully scraped clean of moss for the purpose. Georgescu seemed to enjoy the fire immensely, whistling over it, adjusting loose sticks, and setting up a primitive rig for the cook pot he produced from his rucksack. Soon he was making stew and cutting bread, smiling at the flames, and I remembered that he was, after all, as much Gypsy as Scottish.

The sun set before our supper was quite ready, and when it dropped behind the mountains, the ruins were plunged into darkness, towers stark against a perfect twilight. Something-owls? bats?-fluttered in and out of the empty window sockets, from which arrows had flown towards the Turkish troops so long ago. I got my rug and pulled it as close to the fire as I safely could. Georgescu was dishing up a miraculously good meal, and as we ate it he talked again about the history of the place. “One of the saddest tales about Dracula legend comes from this place. You have heard about Dracula’s first wife?”