Chapter VI

Nieder-Walsee--Castles of Clam and Kreuzen--Ardagger--Grein--The Strudel and the Wirbel--Mistakes of various Authors concerning them--St. Nikola--Sarblingstein--Freystein--Hirschau--The Isper--Bösenbeug--Story of Bishop Bruno and the Lady Richlita--Ips--Gottsdorf.

After washing the walls of Ens, the river from which it takes its name hurries through several channels, into the Danube. In the time of Charlemagne it divided Bavaria from the lands of the Avars or Huns of Pannonia.

--“Ad fluvium venit Anasum
Qui medius Bajvarios sejunxit et Hunnos.”

Saxo Poeta. T. II. p. 155.

From the point of its confluence with the Danube, the latter is again studded with islands, sandbanks and sunken rocks as far as Nieder-Walsee; and the history of the small market towns and villages upon its flat banks, is as uninteresting as their appearance. On the left, below the village of Nieder-Sebing, the little river Aust, formerly the boundary between the Slavi and the Bohemians, flows round an island, formed in its mouth, into the Danube; and on the right, above the rippling Erla-bach, stands Erla-Kloster, a convent founded by Otto of Machland in the tenth century, and suppressed by the Emperor Joseph II. Our old steersman had been for some time complaining of illness, and now lay groaning upon some straw, having given up the paddle, by which the boat was steered, to the care of a lad who had joined us at Linz in the place of his son, an exchange which we had protested against at the time, as it was arranged at Ratisbon, that the same people should row us the whole way to Vienna, and the father and son were evidently the only persons who knew anything about the navigation of the river. The old man growing apparently worse every moment, we looked rather anxiously about for a place where we could land, and obtain some assistance, but none presented itself before our arrival, in sight of Nieder-Walsee; and therefore, although a mere group of huts, above which arose the old wall and curious tower of the Schloss, promised little in the way of accommodation, we determined to land there, and see what could be done to set our poor pilot on his legs again. Nieder-Walsee stands perched upon a rocky point of land, on the right bank of the Danube, and behind it the mountains again rear their forest-clothed heads. Upon the summit of one of the nearest stands Strengberg, a post station, through which the high road runs to Vienna, and from whence we enjoyed a splendid view of the Danube on our return by land to Linz. The castle of Nieder-Walsee was built by the same Eberhard, who erected Ober-Walsee on the Klausberg near Aschach, and stands on the site of the old castle of Sumerau, After the death of Reinprecht von Walsee in 1483, the castle was bought and sold, pledged and redeemed, by various families, till, in the Seven Years’ war, it became the property of the famous Field-marshal Daun, from one of whose descendants it was bought in 1810, by Count Wimpfer. A strong current runs round the point, and few boats, except those belonging to the inhabitants, approach the shore at this place, as there is considerable difficulty in getting back into the main stream, out of which one is aground every two minutes upon the gravelly shoals that rise in all directions in this part of the Danube, and can only be avoided by keeping in the middle of what the boatmen call the _Graben_ (the trench or channel) of the river. Not aware, however, of this circumstance, and anxious to alleviate the sufferings of the old steersman, we directed his locum tenens to run into the shore, a business that was speedily effected, for we had no sooner come within the influence of the current, than round went the head of the boat, and in a few seconds we were brushing the bushes that hung over the steep bank, and hurried along it far beyond the proper landing-place. Two unfortunate discoveries were made together. The offer of a dram to the steersman cleared up the mystery of his malady. He had had a few too many already, and had laid down in the boat for the most excellent of all reasons, his inability to stand; our second discovery was equally annoying. We had got out of the stream, and the only person who was capable of getting us cleverly back into it was hors de combat. The rest of the crew knew as little about the matter as ourselves. As soon as we had escaped one current we found ourselves in the power of another, and with such force was the heavy, flat-bottomed punt we were in driven upon the shoals, that, with all the strength we could muster amongst us, we were sometimes ten minutes or a quarter of an hour before we could get her afloat again; and when we had at last effected it, round she spun, and there was her stern as fast as a church within a dozen yards of the spot where her head had been similarly situated two minutes before. At least an hour and a half was lost in this amusing exercise, during which we had the gratification of seeing the regular packet-boat that we had gotten the start of at Aschach, pass us far to the left, and, steering clear of all obstacles, vanish into the valley which opened between the wooded mountains in the distance. At last, when our strength, our patience, and the reproaches we poured rather unceremoniously on our drunken steersman were just exhausted, and we had begun to calculate upon the probability of passing the afternoon and evening at least upon the shoals, we found ourselves by accident, but to our unspeakable satisfaction, once more impelled forwards by a gentle and properly behaved current, which promised, in the course of time, to lead us into the stream we had in evil hour deserted.

On the left bank of the Danube below Nieder-Walsee, stand the village of Saxen, and the Castles of Clam and Kreuzen. Saxen is mentioned as early as 823, in which year Louis the Debonair gave to Reginhard, Bishop of Passau, two churches at “Saxina in terra Hunnorum.” The towers of Clam rise above a forest of pines a little behind Saxen. It was anciently the seat of the Lords of Machland. The brother of Otto of Machland, who founded the kloster of Baumgartenberg, was the first of the family who signed himself “Chlamme,” A.D. 1156. On the extinction of the family of Machland, this Burg came to the Preuschenks, and in 1487, the troops of Matthias Corvinus besieged and took it. The family of Perger bought it in 1524, enlarged it in 1636, and took the title of Barons and afterwards of Counts of Clamm. The great white castle of Kreuzen, far away upon the summit of a hill to the north-west, also belonged to the Lords of Machland, and in the twelfth century was called Croucen and Chrutzen. In 1334, it came to the celebrated Volkerstorfs, The Counts of Meggar bought it in 1523, and when the Turks were devastating Upper Austria in 1526, its walls were filled with fugitives of all ranks and ages. In 1701, it was bought by a Count Cavariani, who sold it again almost immediately to the Count of Salburg. The market-town of Ardagger, upon the right bank, was given by Charlemagne to the bishopric of Passau. The Emperor Conrad III., when setting out on his unfortunate crusade, landed here on the 29th of May, 1147, to make the necessary preparation for passing with his fleet the then much-dreaded Strudel and Wirbel. Seventy thousand knights, completely armed, an equal number of foot-soldiers, a troop of females “in the armour and attitude of men,” the chief of whom, from her gilt spurs and buskins, obtained the epithet of “The golden-footed dame[56]”, passed down the Danube under the banners of Conrad. Two years afterwards, a few boats, principally filled with priests who had followed the army, returned to these shores; all that treachery, battle, and disease had left of the mighty host that had so lately marched in full confidence to the conquest of Asia!

A sudden bend of the river near this spot, brought us again amongst the mountains, and in a moment we seemed shut out from the world by the craggy barriers that rose on each side of us,--the counterparts of those I have attempted to describe in the wild gorge of the Schlägen. After passing a few lonely huts, perched here and there amongst the masses of rock and forest, the chateau and town of Grein started at once into view, on turning a sharp and craggy point, cradled amongst the precipices which, opening behind the town, form a vista, terminated by the castle of Kreuzen on its distant hill. Grein is one of the poorest and smallest towns in Upper Austria, and the chateau is a large, gloomy building, originally built by Heinrich von Chreine, in the twelfth century. Frederick the Handsome, Duke of Austria, pledged Grein for five hundred and sixty-two silver pfennige, to Albert von Volkerstorf, May 14th, 1308. The valiant Bernhard von Scherffenberg beat the Bohemians here twice, during the fifteenth century; at the close of which it was bought of the Emperor Maximilian by one of the family of Prueschenk. Heinrich von Prueschenk rebuilt the chateau, and from this circumstance it received the name of Heinrichsburg.

The traveller now approaches the most extraordinary scene on the long Danube, from its source in the Black Forest, to its mouth in the Black Sea. As soon as a bend of the river has shut out the view of Grein and its chateau, a mass of rock and castle, scarcely distinguishable from each other, appears to rise in the middle of the stream before you. The flood roars and rushes round each side of it; and ere you can perceive which way the boat will take, it dashes down a slight fall to the left, struggles awhile with the waves, and then sweeps round between two crags, on which are the fragments of old square towers, with crucifixes planted before them. It has scarcely righted itself from this first shock, when it is borne rapidly forward towards an immense block of stone, on which stands a third tower, till now hidden by the others, and having at its foot a dangerous eddy. The boat flashes like lightning through the tossing waves, within a few feet of the vortex, and comes immediately into still water, leaving the passenger who beholds this scene for the first time, mute with wonder and admiration. These are the Scylla and Charybdis of the Danube, the celebrated Strudel and Wirbel. The passage is made in little more than the time it takes to read the above brief description, and I could scarcely scratch down the outlines of these curious crags and ruins, before I was whirled to some distance beyond them. I must beg my reader, however, to return with me, and repass them more leisurely, than the impatient stream would permit us. The Danube, checked in its northern course at Grein, and driven unwillingly towards the east, vents its fury against the opposing crags on the left bank, and having broken down part of the barrier, rides over the ruins in triumph, forming what is called, by the boatmen, the Grein-Schwall. After this ebullition of anger, the stream appears to sink into sullen indifference, and slowly and silently pursues its way through a gloomy gorge of precipices, that rise higher and higher on each side of it, till it arrives within a few yards of the Wörthinsel, an island, about four hundred fathoms long, and two hundred broad, surrounded by sand-banks on all sides except the north, where a perpendicular crag starts up, bearing on its crest the ruins of the Wöther-Schloss, or Castle of Werfenstein[57]. From this island to the rocky shores of the Danube, which here open and form a kind of circle around it, run several chains of crags beneath the water; some indeed peering above it, over and through which the stream rushes right and left, with considerable violence and uproar. The right arm is called the Hössgang, and is only passable when the water is very high, by the smallest and lightest craft. The main body hurries round the northern or left side of the island, and boiling over the first chain of rocks, falls through three separate channels, a depth of three feet in a distance of four hundred and eighty. This fall is called the Strudel; but the boatmen have a name for each channel, and call that one in particular the Strudel which is nearest to the north shore of the island: the centre channel is called the Wildriss; and the third, nearest the main bank, the Waldwasser[58]. The three principal crags which, standing in the entrance of these three channels, form part of the bank or bar, over which the water falls into them, have also their particular names; that in the entrance to the Strudel is called the Bomben-Gehäkel, or Buma-G’hachelt; the next, the Wildriss-Gehäkel, and the third, the Wald-Gehäkel,--the term Gehäkel or G’hachelt distinguishing the crags, the points of which generally appear above the surface, from those which lie beneath it, and which are called Kogeln or Kugeln. There are nearly a dozen of these Kogeln in the passage of the Strudel, the principal of which are named the Marchkugel, the Wolfskugel, and the Maisenkugel; and one, from its particular formation, the Dreyspitze. These lie in various directions, in the entrance and middle of the channels. At the outlet of the Wildriss there is a reef of rock called the Ross, the principal crag in which is named the Rosskopf; another reef, called the Felsengelander, lies at the end of the Waldwasser, beside which are two rocks called the Keller and the Hute. Some of these, at low water, are not more than two feet beneath the surface, and impassable, of course, by a boat of any size or burden.

It may easily be supposed that a stream like the Danube does not flow very quietly over so rugged a bed, and though considerable masses of rock have been blown up, and the channels otherwise much widened and deepened within the last fifty years, there are still obstacles enough to fret and agitate the river to a degree which gives at least an appearance of danger to the passage, if even there be not a little in reality. At the end of the fall, or Strudel, on the left, and of the Hössgang on the right, the rocky shores again approach each other, and the river, uniting its currents, sweeps rapidly round to the north beneath a jutting crag, upon which stands the ruins of the castle of Struden, and washes the walls of the little town of the same name. The castle belonged anciently to the lords of Machland, and after them to the Archdukes of Austria. In 1413, the Archdukes Leopold and Ernest gave the “Feste haus ze Struden” to one Hans Greisenecker, who already possessed the Castle of Werfenstein, for “a consideration;” and in 1493, the brothers Heinrich and Sigmund Prueschenk bought both castles from the House of Austria, to which they had reverted.

About a thousand yards below Struden, but near the right bank of the river, rises the large block of stone called the Hausstein, upon which are the ruins of the tower of the same name; round the southern side of this block struggles a small arm of the Danube, called the Lueg, and navigable like the Hössgang, when the water is very high, by small boats only. On the northern side is the celebrated whirlpool (Der Wirbel), formed most probably by the violence with which the two currents of the Danube are hurled against each other on leaving the Wörthinsel, and again checked and divided by the Hausstein. This whirlpool measures sometimes nearly fifty feet in diameter; but when we passed it, it did not, I should think, exceed fifteen. In the centre the water forms a perfect funnel, and a large branch of fir was whirling round and round in it, as if some invisible hand were stirring the natural cauldron, and making it “boil and bubble.” All sorts of extravagant stories have of course been circulated respecting this dreaded vortex, which is gravely affirmed by some of the old writers to have no bottom. Munster, in his Kosmographie, printed at Basle in 1567, says, “They have often sounded in this place, but the abyss is so deep that they can touch no ground. It is bottomless. What falls therein, remains under and never comes up again.”--b. III. sam. 965. This writer also confounds the Strudel with the Wirbel.[59]

Father Kircher vows there is a hole underneath the Wirbel, which sucks in the waters of the Danube, and a subterranean channel connected with it, by which the said water is conveyed into Hungary, where it rises again, and forms the Plattensee or Lake of Balaton! Others claim the same origin for the Lake of Neusiedle[60], and to clinch the fable, which is still reverently believed by the Hungarians, assert, that a travelling cooper, who lost some of his tools in the Wirbel, absolutely found them again floating on the surface of the Neusiedler-see.

Happelius, as in support of this hypothesis, says, “it is well known that the Danube loses a considerable quantity of its waters in the Wirbel, so that its flood is of much less consequence from that spot down to Vienna,” a falsehood which a glance at the river is capable at once of refuting.

There can be no doubt that, in earlier ages, there must have been considerable danger in passing these falls and eddies; and even now, when the water is low, an inexperienced or careless steersman might easily get the bottom of his boat knocked out in the Strudel, or its side staved in by the crags of the Hausstein, under either of which circumstances the passengers would stand a very fair chance of being drowned. I cannot help thinking our own rather a narrow escape, for my readers will recollect that, on leaving Nieder-Walsee, our worthy pilot was lying dead drunk in the stern of the boat. To our utter astonishment, however, upon approaching the Grein-Schwall, he managed to get upon his legs, and, as if sobered for the moment by a sudden sense of his own situation, snatched the rudder from the boy (who in a few minutes would certainly have had us upon the rocks), steered us manfully and cleverly through the Strudel and Wirbel, and then flung himself down again on his straw as drunk and insensible as before. Had we been aware of the vicinity of these places, we should certainly have taken a pilot on board at Ardagger, but we had no idea we were so near them, and the poor fellows who rowed us were altogether ignorant of the river, and merely working their way to Vienna. The passage was, however, made before we had time to think of our danger, almost indeed before we knew where we were; and absorbed in contemplation of the romantic beauty of the scene, nothing short of absolute foundering could, I believe, have distracted our attention from it. Riesbeck, after a brief description of this spot, says, “a great variety of circumstances concur to excite an idea of danger in both these parts of the Danube. Low mechanics are fond of speaking of them, and magnifying the danger, that they may increase their own importance in having gone through it. Others, more simple, who come to the place with strong conceits of what they are to meet with there, are so struck with the wildness of the prospect, and the roaring of the water, that they begin to quake and tremble before they have seen any thing. But the masters of the vessels are those who most effectually keep up the imposition. They make the passage a pretence for raising the price of the freight, and when you are past them the steersman goes round with his hat in his hand to collect money from the passengers as a reward for having conducted them safely through such perilous spots. When our master (who yet very well knew how much it was for his interest to keep up the credit of his monsters) saw how little attention I paid to them, he assured me in confidence that _during the twenty years he had sailed the Danube, he had not heard of a single accident_.” This account was written in 1780, and yet only three years before, (on the 31st of October 1777,) two vessels struck, one on the Wolfs-Kugel, and the other on the Maisenkugel, and went to pieces. In 1749, a Schiffmeister of Passau, named Freidenberger, perished with his daughter in the whirlpool, and another Schiffmeister, Martin Beyerl, of Vienna, was drowned in it, at the commencement of the century.

The danger has certainly, however, been much diminished by the exertions of the Austrian government, which, besides having considerably widened and deepened the channels of the Strudel and Hössgang, by blowing up the rocks and removing the sand, has instituted sundry prudent regulations respecting the navigation of this part of the Danube. All boats ascending the river when the water is only of a certain height, are obliged to stop at the little town of Struden till information is sent to Grein and the Saurüssel, at both which places a flag is immediately hoisted to give notice to any vessels descending the stream, that one is coming up through the Strudel, and so prevent the collision that would be likely to take place should they attempt to pass it in contrary directions at the same time, the descending vessel being compelled, under a heavy penalty, to lay to, above the rock called the Rabenstein, till the other has passed. Also when the water is of a sufficient height to enable the ascending boats to pass through the southern channels of the Lueg and the Hössgang, the horses keep the towing-path on the right bank from Ips to Wiessen, a small place facing Grein. But when the water is low, the horses are ferried three times across the river in the short distance of 1200 yards; first below the Wirbel, from the right bank over to the left; then from the town of Struden to the Wörthinsel; and lastly, from the western end of that island over the Hössgang, back again to the right bank, under the Rabenstein.

As soon as you have passed the Wirbel, a boat puts off from the little town of St. Nikola on the left bank, and paddling alongside, a man holds out a box with the figure of the saint in it for the “voluntary contributions” of the passengers, who are expected to drop a few kreutzers in acknowledgment of the protection that has been so kindly afforded them by his saintship. On board the regular passage-boat, money is also collected by the steersman as Riesbeck describes, and another ceremony likewise takes place, something similar to that customary on board a ship when passing the line. The steersman goes round with the wooden scoop or shovel, with which they wet the ropes that bind the paddles to their uprights, filled with water; and those who have never before passed through the Strudel and the Wirbel must either pay or be well soused with the element, the perils of which they have just escaped.

In 1144, Beatrix of Klamm founded an hospital at St. Nikola for travellers on the Danube, which she so richly endowed, that Albert of Austria, two hundred years later, found it only necessary to provide for the spiritual welfare of its visitants, and therefore established a daily mass with the money collected on the river from Ardagger to Ips, in the manner above mentioned.

There were formerly two other towers or fortresses in the neighbourhood; the ruins of one still exist on the northern bank of the river, nearly facing the Wirbel, on the rock called the Langen-Stein. The other was, as early as the twelfth century, spoken of as “the ruined castle of the noble Lady Helchin,” and not a fragment of it is now remaining. An old story, which I shall shortly have occasion to transcribe, speaks of the tower called “Der Teufelsthurm,” (the Devil’s Tower) but whether either of the four still standing have a claim to that respectable appellation or no, is a question at present undecided. It is accorded by some writers to the Castle of Werfenstein.

The gorge through which the river now flows calmly and silently as it had never been ruffled, is of the same description as that from Hayenbach to Neuhaus, but the mountains that line its shores are still higher, and often

“Their lofty crests are capped with snow,
While blossoms deck the vale below.”

So deep is the water, and so steady the stream, that boats of any burden may drift down it in the darkest night with perfect safety. We now floated past the old round tower of Sarblingstein, standing on a pedestal of granite, above a little group of houses, beside which the rivulet of Sarbling brawls through a woody ravine over the rocky bank into the Danube. The tower is all that remains of a fortress built by the Monks of Waldhausen in 1538, with the permission of the Emperor Ferdinand, upon the express condition that it should be considered an asylum for the inhabitants of the neighbourhood in case of invasion or civil war. Hirschau, close under Sarblingstein, is the last hamlet in Upper Austria, or Austria on the Ens. Opposite it on the right bank are the scarcely visible remains of the castle of Hirschau, and further east, upon the mountain top, lie the extensive ruins of Freystein, formerly one of the largest and strongest castles in Austria. At the close of the fourteenth century, it belonged to the famous Reinprecht von Walsee, and after him to the families of Preuschenk and Zinzendorf. The Prince of Starrhemberg also once possessed it. Near this spot two valleys open to the south-west, and from thence the granite is brought with which the streets of Vienna are paved. The labourers employed to blast the rocks and work the quarries live close by in the little village of Dörfel; beside which the rivulet Isper, the Hyspere of the middle ages, rippling through a narrow valley, forms the line of boundary northward between Upper and Lower Austria.

The sun went down and the mountains seemed to sink with it, or melt into the mists that crept around them. The valley of the Danube widened,--a large building rose on the left bank, upon the end of a rocky promontory, throwing a deeper gloom over the darkening waters, its lofty tower piercing through the low vapours and soaring into the clear, star-spangled sky above them--it was Schloss Bösenbeug, the summer residence of the Emperor, and one of the oldest buildings in Lower Austria, though the alterations made during the last century by its then possessors, the Herren von Hoyos, have taken much from the antique appearance of its exterior[61]. Nearly facing it on the right bank stood the small chateau of Donaudorf, and beyond these two buildings, the river opened to the right and left, in the same manner that it did below Neuhaus. A multitude of lights glimmering amidst a black mass of houses and huts, and reflected in long trembling lines upon the water, pointed out to us the town of Ips, similarly situated to that of Aschach. The Castle of Bosenbeug or Persenbeug belonged in the ninth century to that Count Engelschalk who carried off the daughter of Arnulph the Bastard, and afterwards lost his eyes and his estates by the sentence of the Diet at Ratisbon, as has been already described in the notice of Ebelsberg near Linz: Nearly all the confiscated property of Engelschalk was given by Arnulph to the monks of Kremsmünster; but, curiously enough, this Castle of Bösenbeug, by a train of circumstances, eluded for a long time the clutches of “holy mother Church,” who laboured indefatigably, “by hook or by _crook_,” to get it into her possession. How it escaped her grasp in the ninth century is not clear, but it certainly did do so, and became the property of the valiant Bavarian Sieghart von Sempt, to whom probably it was given as a stronghold, that would enable him better to defend the duchy against the inroads of the Hungarians. Sieghart fell gloriously in the execution of his trust, A.D. 907, in the terrible battle fought between Theben and Haimburg. To work of course went the monks, and at length so wrought upon the mind of one of his weak descendants, Albert III.; that he bequeathed to them at his death “the strong castle of Bösenbeug,” in despite of the entreaties of his wife Richlinde, or Richlita, who strove to preserve it to the next male heir, her nephew Welf von Altorf. The breath was scarcely out of the body of Albert, when a desperate struggle ensued between his widow and the monks of Ebersberg. The lady had taken up her residence in the castle, which she claimed as part of her jointure, with reversion to her nephew Welf, and refused to acknowledge the title of the church, which she contended had been fraudulently acquired. In the midst of this dispute, a circumstance took place which shall be related as nearly as possible in the words of the old chronicler Aventine. “The Emperor” (Henry III. surnamed the Black) “departed from Regensburg and came by water to Passau: there he tarried during the Passion week; and till the holy feast of the Ascension. The next day after which he again took water; and journeyed into Lower Bavaria, as Austria was then called. There is a town in Austria by name Grein; near this town is a perilous place in the Danube, called the Strudel by Stockerau[62]. There doth one hear the water rushing far and wide, so falls it over the rocks with a great foam, which is very dangerous to pass through, and brings the vessel into a whirlpool, rolling round about. The Emperor Henry went down through the Strudel; in another vessel was Bruno, bishop of Wurtzburg, the Emperor’s kinsman; and as the bishop also was passing through the Strudel, there sat upon a rock that projected out of the water, a man blacker than a Moor, of a horrible aspect, terrible to all who beheld it, who cried out and said to bishop Bruno, ‘Hear! hear! bishop! I am thine evil spirit! thou art mine own, go where thou wilt, thou shalt be mine, yet now I will do nought to thee, but soon shalt thou see me again[63].’ All who heard this were terrified. The bishop crossed and blessed himself, said a few prayers, and the spirit vanished. This rock is shewn to this day; upon it is built a small tower all of stone, without any wood: it has no roof, and is called the Devil’s Tower. Not far from thence, some two miles journey, the Emperor and his people landed, purposing to pass the night in a town called Pösenbeiss, belonging to the Lady Richlita, widow of the Count Adalbero von Ebersberg. She received the Emperor joyfully; invited him to a banquet, and prayed him, besides, that he would bestow the town of Pösenbeiss and other surrounding places (that her husband had possessed and governed) on her brother’s son, Welforic III. The Emperor entered the banquet-room, and standing near Bishop Bruno, Count Aleman von Ebersberg and the Lady Richlita, gave the countess his right hand and granted her prayer. At that moment the floor of the apartment fell in, and the Emperor fell through into the bathing-chamber below it, without sustaining any injury, as did also Count Aleman, and the Lady Richlita, but the bishop fell on the edge of the bathing-tub, broke his ribs, and died a few days afterwards.” Other writers say, that the Count and the Lady Richlita both died from the hurts they received; but be that as it may, the right heir was, according to the Emperor’s promise, established at Bösenbeug, A.D. 1045, in spite of the intrigues and plots of the monks, whose agents had frightened and killed the poor bishop, he having, as it appears, spoken a good word for the lady, who is supposed also to have fallen a victim to the same scandalous trick, copied most likely from a similar tragical farce played off by the celebrated St. Dunstan, about seventy years before, in England. Some time afterwards the monks renewed their claim in applications to the Markgraves Albert I. and Leopold III., but without success, the latter, in 1096, giving the castle to his youngest daughter, Richardis. Thus foiled, they went on a new tack, and managed to persuade the husband of this Princess, Count Stephaning, to join the first crusade, in the hope that he would never return, and that Bösenbeug would at length become their property. Half of the charitable wish was granted.

“Audiit, et voti Phœbus succedere partem
Mente dedit: partem volucris dispersit in auras.”

The bones of the poor crusader whitened the deserts of Syria, but his castle reverted to the Markgraves of Austria. Ottocar, king of Bohemia, gave it in 1271 to the patriarch of Aquileia; but in the reign of the Emperor Albert I. we find it again in the possession of the house of Austria. The Emperor Frederick IV. took possession of it as guardian of Ladislaus, but he was ejected by force of arms in 1457, and the castle given back to Ladislaus. Rudolph II. pledged and afterwards sold it, with Rohreck, Weinberg, and the whole Isperthal, to the Barons of Hoyos, from which family it was repurchased by the present emperor in 1801. The tilt-yard is still in good preservation, and the gardens are beautiful. His Majesty is very partial to the spot, and makes frequent excursions by land as far as the Strudel and Wirbel, from whence he returns in the boat of a schiffmeister at Bösenbeug of the name of Feldmüller, whom he patronizes highly, and who is considered the richest man of his calling in Lower Austria. He builds yearly about twenty of the boats called kellheimers, and employs one hundred horses and three hundred men. Most of the inhabitants of the little markt of Bösenbeug have, as may be supposed, considerably benefited from its becoming an Imperial residence.

The town of Ips or Yps, as it is indifferently spelt, on the opposite bank, is supposed by some old geographers to be the Usbium of Ptolemy, by others the Pons Isidis. It is seated at the confluence of a river of the same name with the Danube; and, in the time of Charlemagne, appears under the name of Ibesse and Isebruch, as the property of the Counts of Sempt and Ebersberg. In 1275, Ips threw open its gates to Rudolph of Hapsburg; and, in 1741, the Bavarian and French armies here formed a junction: its name has, however, become familiar to foreign lands, not from the deeds of arms done in its neighbourhood, but from its having shared with Passau the trade in the crucibles made at Hafner-zell; and which, as I have before mentioned, are distinguished throughout the world by the names of the places where they are sold, instead of that of the spot where they are fabricated. Immediately below Ips, the river forms a reach, which, from the difficulty of its navigation, obtained the appellation that has eventually attached itself to the point of land at which it commences,--Die Böse-Beug, literally, “the bad corner.” Before we turned this corner, however, night had sunk down upon land and flood, and our crew began to be clamorous for rest and refreshment. Our drunken beast of a steersman, whom we had now begun cordially to detest, insisted upon proceeding as far as Marbach; and accordingly the men, who knew nothing of the river, pulled away again for a quarter of an hour rather sulkily; when, having lost sight of the lights of Ips, and seeing none appear in the distance, they again expressed symptoms of impatience, and upon receiving from a passing boat the information that Marbach was yet “eine starke stunde” (a long hour) distant, they became outrageous, and vowed they would run the boat ashore, at the first village they could discover. Neither my companion nor myself much objected to their determination, as there was every probability, from their utter ignorance of the river, the inability of the steersman to direct them, and the heavy fog that was fast rising, that in the course of a few minutes we should go bump ashore somewhere, whether we would or no; and therefore a hovel, where bed and supper might be procured, was certainly preferable to a sandbank without either. Two or three tapers glimmering above the fog through something like windows, attracting our notice on the left, the men pulled towards it, and our boat soon grated on the sand, under what first appeared a lofty wall, but which turned out, on examination, a steep bank, upon the ridge of which stood half a dozen poor cottages. Up we clambered on all fours, dragging our cloaks and portmanteaus with us; and a man making his appearance with a lantern, we followed him into an old crazy-looking hovel, which, by the outward and visible sign of a dead bush dangling over its door, too plainly indicated the miserable state of its inward and spiritual grace, though dignified by the title of a gasthaus[64]. Several sufficiently ill-looking fellows in jackets of undressed black sheep-skin, caps of the same material, and high boots, each with a formidable clasp-knife, worn as an English carpenter wears his rule; two brawny, bare-armed, masculine wenches in similar jackets, with dark handkerchiefs bound round their brows in the Austrian fashion; and an old hag, whose habits and person were equally indescribable, formed the rather startling group to which our guide introduced us. Our application for beds appeared to astonish them. They had no such thing; there was plenty of straw. They had no coffee, no butter;--the poor fellows who had rowed us sat down on a bench, and began to gnaw some dry bread, the only refreshment the _hotel_ seemed capable of furnishing. On a sudden it occurred to us that a basin of boiled milk might be procurable, and sure enough half a gallon, at least, of delicious milk was in ten minutes smoking in two glorious wooden bowls, upon the long oaken table before us. Our host now entered with one or two helpers laden with straw, which they spread all over the floor, and our crew, having finished their crusts, stretched themselves out in a row, their knapsacks under their heads, and soon commenced a nasal symphony, more powerful than harmonious. The company and the family having one by one withdrawn, with the exception of the old beldame, who waited to take away the solitary candle, we betook ourselves also to our portion of the straw, and never in my life did I enjoy a sweeter, sounder sleep than that which bound up my senses in the humble gasthaus of Gottsdorf till six o’clock the next morning.

FOOTNOTES (CHAPTER VI.)

[56] Gibbon.--William of Tyre and Matthew Paris reckon seventy thousand loricati in each of the armies led by Conrad and the French king, Louis VII. The light-armed troops, the peasant infantry, the women and children, and the priests and monks, swelled this swarm to an inconceivable extent. “It is affirmed by the Greeks and Latins, that in the passage of a strait or river, the Byzantine agents, after a tale of nine hundred thousand, desisted from the endless and formidable computation.”--_Decline and Fall_, vol. xl. p. 107.

[57] This little square tower, which is generally called, from its situation, the Wörther-Schloss, is described in several topographical works indifferently under the name of the Castle of Werfenstein, and the Castle of Struden. But it being clearly apparent from various ancient documents that the Castles of Werfenstein and Struden were two distinct buildings, Herr Schultes has, I think, with good reason, designated this the ruin of Werfenstein, and that which overhangs the little markt of Struden, on the left bank of the river, the Castle of Struden.

[58] The Waldwasser and the Wildriss, like the Hössgang, are never passable but when the water is very high, and then only by the lightest and smallest craft. The Strudel, though most studded with rocks, is the best, and consequently the general passage for all boats and rafts, either ascending or descending, and has therefore given its name to the whole fall.

[59] A singular ignorance of the true situation of these famous places is displayed by most of the German writers. Berckenmayer, in his Curiösen Antiquarius, carries the Wirbel below the town of Krems, and he is followed in his error by Strahlenberg, in his Beschreibung des Russichen Reiches, and Hübner, in his Vollständigen Geographie, who speak of the Wirbel as a _waterfall_ near Krems. From Hübner this mistake has been copied into several geographical works, and amongst others into the old Zeitung’s Lexicon; and many of the modern German, and even some English travellers speak of the Strudel and Wirbel as one and the same thing, a confusion which nothing but utter carelessness could have created; the first being distinctly a fall, and the second an eddy, each remarkable in itself, and at some little distance from the other.

[60] “Inter alios (vortices) famosus ille est, qui aspicitur sub Lincio. Creditur vulgo origo esse lacus Neusidel in Hungaria Cis-Rahabanti. Aspicitur etiam alter sed hoc minor, prope pagum Almas infra Commaronium, qui perhibetur esse origo lacus Balaton.”--Marsigli Danubiani illustr. See also Herbinius de Cataract. Fluv., and Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus.

[61] Vide Frontispiece. The view was taken from a hill on the right bank of the river, on our return by land from Vienna.

[62] Here is another error respecting the Strudel. Stockerau is nearly two days journey from it, in the neighbourhood of Vienna.

[63]
“_Brutus._ Speak to me what thou art?
Ghost. _Thy evil spirit, Brutus._
_Brutus._ Why com’st thou?
Ghost. _To tell thee thou shalt see me at Philippi._
_Brutus._ _Well, Then I shall see thee again?_
Ghost. _Ay, at Philippi!_”

Julius Cæsar, Act iv. Scene 3.

[64] A _gast-haus_ is an hotel; a _wirths-haus_, a tavern, or ale-house.