Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor

to re-pack my rucksack and when some sketches dropped out Mrs. Haviar gathered them up. They weren’t very good but she asked me to do a drawing of her daughter, Erszi, an amazing and pretty little girl of about ten. I had often done sketches in Germany and Austria as a kind of thank-offering to hosts—no one seemed to mind their inexpertness—so I jumped at the suggestion and Erszi ran off excitedly to tidy her hair. When she was still not back after ten minutes, they gave her a shout and she arrived looking extraordinary in a cloche hat of her mother’s, long ear-rings and a fox stole; she had covered her face with powder and had turned her lips into a sticky Cupid’s bow. Perching on a tuffet, she crooked a bangled wrist on her hip while her other hand flourished a twelve-inch cigarette-holder and tapped off the ash with vampish languor. It was convincing and rather eerie, an advanced case of lamb dressed up as mutton. “Isn’t she silly?” her mother said fondly. I’m not sure the sketch did her justice.
    Later, back in her ordinary clothes, she and her father and I set off for Malek’s quarters. I was armed with some valedictory lumps of sugar and steeled for an Arab’s farewell to his steed. We found Malek fooling about with some ponies at the far end of a paddock but when I called him he cantered over with a gratifying flutter of mane and tail and I patted the blaze on his brow and stroked his beautiful arched neck for the last time. I said goodbye and set off.My sitter, still elated by her recent avatar, kept waving and jumping up and down and shouting “Viszontlátásra!” until we were all out of earshot.
    * * *
    The Körös kept me company the whole day. The river was banked against flooding and all of it was wooded, so branches dappled the path and the river’s edge with shadows all the way. Thistledown fluff from the willow-herb span across the water and diving frogs marked almost every step. Reeds and tall clumps of bullrushes sheltered families of moorhens, and purple dragonflies hovered and settled among the yellow flags. When I sat down for a smoke, an abrupt movement gave away an otter; he looked about, then ran along the root of a willow and slipped in with a plop which stirred the backwater with spreading rings. There was plenty of food for him: fish gleamed in the clear water and, a little further upstream, two boys were busy with long reeds and cork floats. Their catch was strung through the gills inside a hollow tree and we had scarcely exchanged greetings when there was a silver flash and another was whisked leaping out of the current. When I said “Eljen!”—Bravo! I hoped—they offered to give it to me but I felt shy about turning up at my next halt like Tobias. Cattle gathered under the branches and waded knee-deep while flocks, filling every inch of shade in the fields, hid from the noonday as still as fossils.
    An abrupt swarm of Gypsies made me look among the tents and the carts in case they were my friends from north of Cegléd, but in vain. Men with bill-hooks carried long sheaves of reeds on their heads that bounced up and down as they walked. Women were thigh-deep in the water, washing and wringing out their rags and their tattered finery, and then festooning them over the undergrowth and branches, while troops of boys, like the ones on the Slovak shore at Easter, scoured the banks for the lairs of their just-edible quarry—voles, weasels, water-rats and so on. They left theserious work to their little sisters, who trotted tirelessly alongside their only prospect of the day, calling out “Bácsi! Bácsi!”—for the masculine prey of small Gypsies are all honorary uncles; and their shrill uncle-uncle cries continued for about a furlong. When the reproachful diminuendo had died away I was alone again with nothing but swallows curvetting through the shadows or the occasional blue-green flash of a