BUDAPEST WHEN A mid-morning sunbeam prized one eyelid open a few days later, I couldn’t think where I was. An aroma of coffee and croissants was afloat under a vaulted ceiling; furniture gleamed with beeswax and elbow-grease; books ascended in hundreds, and across the arms of a chair embroidered with a blue rampant lion with a forked tail and a scarlet tongue, a dinner jacket was untidily thrown. An evening tie hung from the looking glass, pumps lay in different corners, the crumpled torso of a stiff shirt (still worn with a black tie in those days) gesticulated desperately across the carpet and borrowed links glittered in the cuffs. The sight of all this alien plumage, so unlike the travel-stained heap that normally met my waking eyes, was a sequence of conundrums. Then, suddenly, illumination came. I was in Budapest. * * * Little remains of the journey from Szentendre: a confused impression of cobbled approaches, the beginnings of tramlines, some steep streets and airy views of the Danube and its bridges and the search for the hill of Buda.
What do You think about Between The Woods And The Water?
