The Tomöscher Pass--Projected railway from Kronstadt to
Bucharest--Visit to the cavalry barracks at Rosenau--Terzburg
Pass--Dr Daubeny on the extinct volcanoes of Hungary--Professor
Judd on mineral deposits.
Kronstadt is a capital place as headquarters for any one who desires to
explore the neighbouring country. One of my first expeditions was to
Sinia, a small bath-place in the Tomöscher Pass, just over the
borders--in fact in Roumania. Here Prince Charles has a charming
château, and there are besides several ambitious Swiss cottages
belonging to the wealthy grandees of Roumania. My object was not so much
to see the little place, as it was to explore this pass of the
Carpathians, now so familiar to newspaper correspondents and others
since the Russo-Turkish war began.
As I mentioned before, a railway is projected from Kronstadt through
this pass, which will meet the Lemberg and Bucharest line at Ployesti,
that station being less than two hours from the Roumanian capital. Up to
the present hour not a sod of this railway has been turned; but
curiously enough, with only two or three exceptions, all the "war maps"
have made the capital mistake of marking it down as a _completed_ line.
In the autumn of 1875, when I was there, the levels had been taken and
the course marked down; if it is ever really carried out, it will be one
of the most beautiful railway drives in Europe. It is a most important
link in the railway system of Eastern Europe. The Danube route is
frequently, indeed periodically, closed by the winter's ice, and
sometimes by the drought of summer, in which case the traveller who
wants to get to Roumania must take the train from Buda-Pest to
Kronstadt, and thence by road through the Tomöscher Pass to Ployesti.
There is a diligence service twice daily, occupying fourteen hours or
thereabouts, dependent, of course, on the state of the roads, which can
be very bad--inconceivably bad. For the sake of the excursion I took a
place in the _postwagen_ one day as far as Sinia, where there is a
modern hotel and very tolerable quarters. The scenery of the pass is
very romantic. In places the road winds round the face of the precipice,
and far below is a deep sunless glen, through which the mountain torrent
rushes noisily over its rocky bed; at other times you skirt the stream
with its green margin of meadow--a pastoral oasis amidst the wild
grandeur of bare limestone peaks and snowy summits. The autumnal
colouring on the hanging woods of oak and beech was something more
brilliant than I ever remember to have seen; the effect of being oneself
in shadow and seeing the glory of the sunlight on the foliage of the
other side of the defile, was most striking. Above this ruby mountain
rose other heights with a girdle of dark fir, and higher still were
visible yet loftier peaks, clothed in the dazzling whiteness of
fresh-fallen snow. In the Southern Carpathians there is no region of
perpetual snow, but the higher summits are generally snow-clad late in
the spring and very early in the autumn. I was told there is good
bear-hunting in this district.
While at Kronstadt I made the acquaintance of some Austrian officers
quartered in the neighbourhood. They kindly invited me to the cavalry
barracks at Rosenau, and accordingly I went over for a few days. The
barracks were built by the people of the village, or rather small town,
of Rosenau; for they were obliged by law to quarter the military, and to
avoid the inconvenience of having soldiers billeted upon them they
constructed a suitable building. The cavalry horses were nearly all in a
bad plight when I was there, for they had an epidemic of influenza
amongst them; but we found a couple of nags to scramble about with, and
made some pleasant excursions. One of our rides was to a place called
"The Desolate Path," a singularly wild bit of scenery, and curiously in
contrast to the rich fertility of Rosenau and its immediate
neighbourhood. This pretty little market town lies at the foot of a
hill, which is crowned with a romantic ruin, one of the seven burgher
fortresses built by the Saxon immigrants. There is a remarkably pretty
walk from the village to the "Odenweg," a romantic ravine, with
beautiful hanging woods and castellated rocks disposed about in every
sort of fantastic form. It reminded me somewhat of some parts of the
Odenwald near Heidelberg. Very likely the wild and mysterious character
of the spot led the German settlers to associate with it the name of
Oden.
We also rode over the Terzburg Pass. The picturesque castle which gives
its name to this pass is situated on an isolated rock, admirably
calculated for defence in the old days. It belonged once upon a time to
the Teutonic Knights, who held it on condition of defending the
frontier; but they became so intolerable to the burghers of Kronstadt,
that these informed their sovereign that they preferred being their own
defenders, and thus the castle and nine villages were given over to the
town. The Germans who had left their own Rhine country for the sake of
getting away from the robber knights were not anxious for that special
mediæval institution to accompany them in their flitting, we may be
sure. The democratic character of the laws and customs of the Germans of
Transylvania is a very curious and interesting study; in not a few
instances these people have anticipated by some centuries the liberal
ideas of Western Europe in our own day.
After returning from the visit to my military friends at Rosenau, I was
told I must not omit to make some excursions to the celebrated mineral
watering-places of Transylvania. The chief baths in this locality are
Elopatak and Tusnad. The first named is four hours' drive from
Kronstadt. The waters contain a great deal of protoxide of iron,
stronger even than those of Schwalbach, which they resemble. Tusnad, I
was told, is pleasantly situated on the river Aluta, an excellent stream
for fishing. The post goes daily in eight hours from Kronstadt. The
season is very short, being over in August. Tusnad is said to contain
one hundred springs of different kinds of water. I am not a
water-totaller, so I did not taste all of them when I visited the place
later on; but undoubtedly alum, iodine, and iron do severally impregnate
the various springs.
I remembered reading long ago Dr Daubeny's work on "Volcanoes," in which
he says that Hungary is one of the most remarkable countries in Europe
for the scale on which volcanic operation has taken place. There are, it
is stated, seven well-marked mountain groups of volcanic rocks, and two
of these are in Transylvania. The most interesting in many respects is
the chain of hills separating Szeklerland from Transylvania Proper. It
is within this district that most of the mineral springs are found.
These volcanic rocks are of undoubted Tertiary origin, say the
geologists. The whole range is for the most part composed of various
kinds of trachytic conglomerate. "From the midst of these vast tufaceous
deposits, the tops of the hills, composed of trachyte, a rock which
forms all the loftiest eminences, here and there emerge.... The trachyte
is ordinarily reddish, greyish, or blackish; it mostly contains mica. In
the southern parts, as near Csik Szereda, the trachyte encloses large
masses, sometimes forming even small hillocks, of that variety of which
millstones are made, having quartz crystals disseminated through it, and
in general indurated by silicious matter in so fine a state of division
that the parts are nearly invisible. The latter substance seems to be
the result of a kind of sublimation which took place at the moment of
the formation of the trachyte.... Distinct craters are only seen at the
southern extremity of the chain. One of the finest observed by Dr Boné
was to the south of Tusnad. It was of great size and well characterised,
surrounded by pretty steep and lofty hills composed of trachyte. The
bottom of the hollow was full of water. The ground near has a very
strong sulphureous odour. A mile to the SSE. direction from this point
there are on the tableland two large and distinct _maars_ like those of
the Eifel--that is to say, old craters, which have been lakes, and are
now covered with a thick coat of marsh plants. The cattle dare not graze
upon them for fear of sinking in. Some miles farther in the same
direction is the well-known hill of Budoshegy (or hill of bad smell), a
trachytic mountain, near the summit of which is a distinct rent,
exhaling very hot sulphureous vapours.... The craters here described
have thrown out a vast quantity of pumice, which now forms a deposit of
greater or less thickness along the Aluta and the Marosch from Tusnad to
Toplitza. Impressions of plants and some silicious wood are likewise to
be found in it."[18]
Since Dr Daubeny's time there have been many observers over the same
ground, the most distinguished being the Hungarian geologist Szabó,
professor at the University of Buda-Pest. A countryman of our own has
also taken up the subject of the ancient volcanoes of Hungary, and has
recently published a paper on the subject. Professor Judd has confined
his remarks principally to the Schemnitz district in the north of
Hungary. But the following passage refers to the general character of
the formation. Professor Judd says:[19] "The most interesting fact with
regard to the constitution of these Hungarian lavas, which in the
central parts of their masses are often found to assume a very coarsely
crystalline and almost granitic character, while their outer portions
present a strikingly scoriaceous or slaggy appearance, remains to be
noticed. It is, that though the predominant felspar in them is always of
the basic type, yet they not unfrequently contain _free quartz_,
sometimes in very large proportion. This free quartz is in some cases
found to constitute large irregular crystalline grains in the mass, just
like those of the ordinary orthoclase quartz-trachytes; but at other
times its presence can only be detected by the microscope in thin
sections. These quartziferous andesites were by Stache, who first
clearly pointed out their true character, styled 'Dacites,' from the
circumstance of their prevalence in Transylvania (the ancient Dacia)."
In concluding this highly instructive and interesting memoir of the
volcanic rocks of Hungary, Professor Judd says: "The mineral veins of
Hungary and Transylvania, with their rich deposits of gold and silver,
cannot be of older date than the Miocene, while some of them are
certainly more recent than the Pliocene. Hence these deposits of ore
must all have been formed at a later period than the clays and sands on
which London stands; while in some cases they appear to be of even
younger date than the gravelly beds of our crags!"
For any one who desires to geologise in Hungary and Transylvania there
is abundant assistance to be obtained in the maps which have been issued
by the Imperial Geological Institute of Vienna, under the successive
direction of Haidinger and Von Hauer. "These are geologically-coloured
copies of the whole of the 165 sheets of the military map of the empire;
and these have been accompanied by most valuable memoirs on the
different districts, published in the well-known 'Jahrbuch' of the
Institute. Franz von Hauer has further completed a reduction of these
large-scale maps to a general map consisting of twelve sheets, with a
memoir descriptive of each, and has finally in his most valuable and
useful work, 'Die Geologie und ihre Anwendung auf die Kenntniss der
Bodenbeschaffenheit der Osterrungar. Monarchie,' which is accompanied by
a single-sheet map of the whole country, summarised in a most able
manner the entire mass of information hitherto obtained concerning the
geology of the empire."
I have given this passage from Mr Judd's paper because there exists a
good deal of misapprehension amongst English travellers as to what has
really been done with regard to the geological survey of Austro-Hungary.
[Footnote 18: A Description of Active and Extinct Volcanoes, by C.
Daubeny, p. 133. 1848.]
[Footnote 19: 'On the Ancient Volcano of the District of Schemnitz,
Hungary,' Quarterly Journal, Geo. Soc., August 1876.]