The Danube (43 page)

‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. … They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my Holy Mountain.’ In the catalogue of the concert, there is a quote from Psalm 31. ‘To the chief Musician, a Psalm of David. In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust … for thou art my rock and my fortress.’

After the concert I eat wild garlic soup – bear onion, they call it in German and Hungarian – softened with sour cream, in the Salthaus restaurant off the Minorite Square. Through a low window off the cobbled street I glimpse broad-shouldered lads in white aprons in the warm orange light, rolling up their sleeves to start work on the next day's loaves. I sleep in my room under the cragged lip of King Richard's castle at Dürnstein. In the early morning I climb the steep path up to the fortress. Two men are already at work, rebuilding a stone terrace to prevent the erosion of the precious soil down the steep hillside. One wears a sweatshirt with a picture of an eagle. The very first apricot blossom is out in the orchards below me as I climb. This is the Wachau region of Austria, which owes its name to the guards who watched for invasion, but its fame and glory to the deep orange of its apricots. It is too early for the new crop, but last year's fruit is proudly displayed in every shop and stall along the little cobbled street in Dürnstein. Orange – the colour the bourgeoisie allegedly fear most. And here I am in middle-class Austria, where apricots paint the valleys with their fantastic hues.

Richard the Lionheart was imprisoned in the castle of Dürnstein for four months in the winter of 1192 by Duke Leopold V of Bavaria, with whom he had set out on the Third Crusade. Despite his capture of Acre and other coastal cities, Richard failed to take Jerusalem, the main prize of the crusade. The Muslim leader Saladin magnanimously allowed unarmed Christian soldiers into Jerusalem to pray before they left, but the proud Richard did not join them. Like Vienna for Suleiman, Jerusalem proved one stop too far for the English king. He set out back from the Holy Land in August 1192 towards England, impatient to be home, but was caught by Leopold, who demanded a hefty ransom.
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The tiled roofs of the village below look orange in the morning light, like the dark, burnished orange of apricots that have been cooked long and have begun to pick up the colour of the heavy iron pot in which the jam is made. The hills of the Wachau rise
out of the Danube, their villages still drowsy in the mist. The tower of the monastery church is painted white and blue, with a clock face with Latin numerals and four angels looking out for the welfare of passing sailors. The top is crowded with little baroque cherubs carrying spears, bows and arrows. The gold cross has a cockerel on the top like a weather vane. The path winds upwards to the ruined castle, on its pinnacle of rock, and there are humorous descriptions, in English, of the main characters in the story of the Lionheart. There's even a poem, allegedly written by the king himself:

His rival, Leopold, is assigned this text:

The story of how Richard was tracked down by his concerned people is also told. The bard Blondel roamed the Danube, singing Richard's favourite ballad. When he reached Dürnstein, and began the verse ‘No nymph my heart can wound, when her favour she shares, and bestows her smile on all …’ he heard Richard's voice continue, from his dungeon, ‘Hate I would prefer to bear, than with others love to share.’
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The fortress was only conquered once in its long history, by the Swedes towards the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1645. That war left the Danube valley and Bohemia at the mercy of famine and disease. Just as Habsburg–Ottoman rivalry turned Hungary into first a battleground, then a waste ground, this series of disputes between the houses of Bourbon and Habsburg devastated central Europe. The castle at Dürnstein was never rebuilt, though it was briefly reinforced in the 1660s as a forward chink in what remained of the chain of defences of Christian Europe, in case the Ottomans managed to capture Vienna.

From the top of the citadel, I watch climbers with ropes, scaling a cliff. The castle is 324 metres above sea level. Have I travelled two thousand
kilometres, and climbed so little? A Dutch barge passes ponderously below, the
Johanna-M
, registered in Werkendam, with three cars on the stern. Then a cruise ship, the
Viking Legend
, its decks bare, the passengers just visible through the windows below.

Opposite Dürnstein, Josef Fischer works among his fish tanks. A large, jovial fellow, his main work was in his vineyard, until he began fish farming as a hobby. Now his son has taken over the wine-making, to allow him to concentrate on salmon. The
Huchen
(Danube salmon) is the most prized fish of all on the Danube upstream of Vienna, and one of the rarest. Josef has at least ten thousand in his garden. His is the most successful breeding project for the salmon in Austria, and I've arrived on the day of the annual fertilisation of the eggs. First he drains the pond where the largest female fish, nearly two metres long, is swimming slowly, as if in anticipation. Then he catches her in a big sheet and carries her gently in his arms over to a green tub. There, a chemical has been mixed into the water to make her drowsy. Then he carefully runs his hands along the whole length of her body, to squeeze out the eggs he knows are there. But the preparation period was too short. This year he missed out several important steps as an experiment. The experiment fails. No eggs. Josef takes it in his large stride. ‘I have enough, more than enough salmon here,’ he says, carrying the salmon back to the pond, which is slowly refilling with water.

The fish are divided by age – the youngest a year old, then three years, then five. There are small windows on the tanks, and you can watch the fish swimming past, like visitors to the opera. Ten years have passed since he last ate one, Josef confesses. He can't bring himself to eat them any more; he loves his fish so much. Each year he puts several hundred, sometimes several thousand, back into the Danube. As he works we sip first his white wines, then his rosé. If Leopold the Virtuous had treated Richard the Lionheart like this, he might never even have wanted to return to beery, blustery Albion.

Hermann Miedler is a fisherman on the left bank of the Danube. You can't miss his house – he's built a red model lighthouse in his garden – ‘so I can find it when I come home late!’ he jokes. And he jokes a lot. The lighthouse is surrounded by large, polished rocks he has dragged from the Danube – ‘my wife complains that there are so many stones here, there's
no room left for flowers … I've been living by the Danube for fifty-seven years, and fishing for all but the first seven. As children we were always down by the water. In those days you could say to your parents, “I'm just going down to catch a fish”, and you did. You can't say that any more – though I'm a better angler than I was then, and have better equipment. It has become a real achievement to catch a single fish in this great river.’ He welcomes the work of ecologists and local councils in the Wachau to restore the lost meanders of the river. One project has been completed at Rossatz, close to Josef Fischer's salmon breeding garden. A new one is underway at Grimsing, just upriver.

Hannes Seehofer walks me over a rocky path, past bulldozers digging out, rather than filling in, an oxbow. It's a deconstruction, rather than a construction site. As at Orth, before Vienna, a tough deal has been struck with local landowners to allow the Danube a little more elbow room, to benefit fish and wildlife. The Count of Schönbühel, who lives in a castle opposite and owns the land, insisted that if his island was to be allowed to flood, he wanted a bridge at least, to be able to reach it at lower water. Half the project is already completed, and the Danube flows through a meander to which it was denied access for a hundred years. Nearly forty fish species were noted in the water here within six weeks of the reopening – including carp and
Nase,
two fish on which the salmon feed. Danube salmon enter the river from the tributaries, but a much longer migration route upriver would need to be restored for them to become a sustainable population in the river again.
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Work is now almost complete on another meander, just upriver from the first. ‘When they built the big hydroelectric dam upriver at Melk, the river fell two metres, so it could no longer enter the meander. The willows suffered, and other trees, hardwoods took their place – beech and ash.’

We stop to examine a black poplar – not quite as big as the one I visited with Georg Frank in Orth, but just as tall and craggy. There are just forty or fifty left in the whole Wachau. Biologists have discovered a rare red beetle living in this tree – long thought to be extinct in this part of Austria. Out in mid-stream, between the island and the Schönbühel castle, two rocks protrude from the water, known affectionately by locals as the cow and her calf. These are the bane of many ships’ captains lives – especially those travelling upstream.

This is the narrowest stretch of the Danube in the Wachau. When the river is in full flood, in early summer, it can reach as deep as ten metres. In periods of drought it can be as low as one and a half – preventing all large shipping for several weeks. ‘Between the dams here, we have only thirty-five kilometres of running water,’ says Hannes. ‘The next power station is another twenty kilometres further on, but its storage lake stretches back at least twenty kilometres upstream. The fish need sheltered places, like the new meander we are making, in which to breed. One of the main problems for them in the main stream is the ships, especially the cruise liners, which are in more of a hurry. Their bow-wave washes away any eggs that the fish have managed to lay along the gravelly shores.’ Two ways exist to create new habitats for fish-spawning: opening meanders and putting down new gravel banks beyond the main shipping lane, to give the fish places to shelter behind. He points out piles of gravel, dredged from the shipping lane, then carefully put back into the river closer to the banks. These look like ungainly heaps, but the next high water will flatten them out. Their ecological value is enormous. Not only can fish spawn behind them but birds like the little tern like to lay their eggs in the gravel.

Melk Abbey stands powerfully orange and white above the confluence of the Melk river and the Danube, like an apricot ripple ice cream. The green dome and twin towers of the baroque church of St Peter rise out of the largest courtyard.

In the year 1012, Colomann, an Irish – by other accounts Scottish – pilgrim on his way to the Holy Land, was caught by local people who mistook him for a spy and, as the poor man could not explain himself in any language they could understand, hanged him on a barren elder tree. The body failed to decompose, to the wonder of his tormentors. A year and a half after his death, according to the account of Matthaeus Merian the Elder, one Rumaldos hacked a piece off the body to treat his sick son. When he did so, fresh blood flowed from the corpse, and the barren tree grew fresh leaves – final proof of a miracle. Even his son felt better. The body was taken down and given a decent burial in the church in nearby Stockerau, and when the following year the Danube burst its banks and flooded the whole countryside, the river steadfastly refused to pour into this particular church. Poor Colomann's mortal remains were finally
reinterred in St Peter's church at Melk when the Benedictines founded their monastery on a steep cliff top overlooking the confluence of the Melk and the Danube. The monastery also boasts a splinter of the cross on which Christ was crucified, and a lance which belonged to the martyr Mauritius. The wealth of the monastery is partly thanks to the Babenberg family which owned it for many centuries, and were one of the first ruling families of Austria, and partly to the frequent visits of members of the aristocracy, who never paid for their accommodation, but brought gifts instead.

Some of the nine hundred pupils who attend the school in the monastery cross the Danube each day by ferry. I walk through great hallways with baroque frescoes on the ceilings, where ladies have taken out the windows to clean them. In the famous monastery library there are books in fifteen languages, including a Navaho–English dictionary and two huge globes by the famous Venetian astrologer Vincenzo Coronelli: one of the earth and one of the heavens.
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Built in 1693, he used the forty-eight ‘constellations’ identified by Ptolemy, and supplemented them with knowledge brought back from the southern hemisphere by European seafarers. The ancient Greek version included the constellation Argo, named after Jason's ship. If the mythological story is true, the
Argo
must have sailed past this very spot, long before the monastery was built on the hill. The constellations are depicted concave rather than convex. I would dearly love to gently spin the globe, but have to content myself with the vision of Aquarius the water-carrier, lugging his giant frame and dressed in an animal skin, around the sky.

A more recent miracle runs parallel to the huge hydroelectric dam that blocks the Danube just upriver from the town. A fast flowing stream –
melk
actually means ‘slow-moving stream’ in Old Slavic – meanders through the woods on the left bank of the river, carefully dug to allow fish to migrate upstream. The meanders are there to slow the flow down and give the fish more chance to succeed. Regular monitoring proves that it is much used. The water level upstream of the dam is ten metres higher than downstream, so the design had to accommodate that difference. A similar stream is being built at the next dam at Ybbs, but construction has been slowed by the rocks on either side of the river. One day, if every Austrian dam has such a fish bypass, the salmon will be able to migrate long-distances up river again. Then Josef Fischer can cheerfully go back to his vines.