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When the Magyars overran Pannonia in the tenth century, under the headship of the great Arpad, they appear to have found the Szeklers already in possession of part of the vast Carpathian horseshoe that part known to us as the Transylvanian frontier of Moldavia. They claim to have come hither as early as the fourth century.
I had before this seen the caverns of the peak of Derbyshire, where, lying down flat in a boat, we proceeded along a subterranean river, under an arch two feet high. I had visited the beautiful grotto of Treshemienshiz, in the Carpathian mountains, the caverns of the Hartz, and those of Franconia, which are vast cemeteries,* containing bones of tigers, hyenas, and bears, as large as our horses.
In this way too, before a war, Diedrich is heard preparing for battle at one o'clock in the morning on the mountain of Ax. Once in seven years Earl Gerald rides round the Curragh of Kildare; and every seventh year the host at Ochsenfeld in Upper Alsace may be seen by night exercising on their horses. On certain days the Carpathian robber issues from his cavern in the Czornahora.
Petersburg circles; and one solitary caftan-Jew, with ear-locks and skull-cap, wafting into the nineteenth century the cabalistic mysticism of the Carpathian Messiah. Who speaks of the Jewish type? One can only say negatively that these faces are not Christian. Is it the stamp of a longer, more complex heredity? Is it the brand of suffering?
The waters of the mighty river are contracted within a narrow gorge, which in fact cleaves asunder the Carpathian range for a space of more than fifty miles. The limestone rock forms a precipitous wall on either side, rising in some places to an altitude of more than two thousand feet sheer from the water's edge.
A brief description of the battle ground will enable the reader to follow more easily the course of the struggle. Imagine that length of the Carpathian chain which forms the boundary between Galicia and Hungary as a huge, elongated arch of, roughly, 300 miles. In parts the range is 100 miles in width, and from under 2,000 to 8,000 feet high.
This time they threatened it first from the north of the Vistula, and on 9 November their cavalry, pursuing the Germans, was at Miechow, only twenty miles from Cracow. Moving more slowly through Galicia while Brussilov occupied the Carpathian passes, Dmitrieff pushed his cavalry into Wielitza south-east of the city on 6 December, and on the 8th he fought a successful action in its outskirts.
Beginning in the West with the country of the Sigambri on the Rhine, and from that of the Cherusci and Angrivarii near the Weser and the Hartz, this division comprehended, besides those tribes, the Chatti, the Langobardi, the Hermunduri, the Marcomanni and Quadi, the Lugii, and beyond the Vistula the Bastarnae, in the neighborhood of the Carpathian hills.
They had conquered many lands from the heathenish Slavs and Lithuanians who were living in the plain between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains, and the Franks administered those outlying districts just as the United States used to administer her territories before they achieved the dignity of statehood.
In the district of Cracow, especially towards the Carpathian Mountains, great fires are kindled by the peasants in the fields or on the heights at nightfall on Midsummer Eve, which among them goes by the name of Kupalo's Night. The fire must be kindled by the friction of two sticks.
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