our - own language!
Yours with devotion,
Rossi
My dear friend, We have been, to my solemn awe, up to Vlad's fortress and back. I know now why I wanted to see it; it made real for me, a little, in life the frightening figure I seek in his death - or will soon be seeking, somehow, somewhere, if my maps are of any help. I shall try to describe our excursion for you, as I wish you to be able to imagine the scene and as I want a record of it myself. 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