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On dismounting, the Director, a thin elderly man, with a modest and pleasing manner, told me in German that he was a native of the Austrian side of the Save, and had been attached to the quarantine at Semlin; that he had joined the quarantine service, with the permission of his government, and after having directed various other establishments, was now occupied in organizing this new point.
Here we appear to be driving up the avenues of an English park; yonder, where the mountain sinks sheer into the river, the road must find its way along an open gallery, with a roof weighing millions of tons, projecting from the mountain above. After sunset we arrived at Dreucova, and next morning went on board the steamer, which conveyed me up the Danube to Semlin.
This, at any rate, was certain: German or American or hyphenate, Henry Semlin, manufacturer and spy, had voyaged from America to England not for the purposes of trade but to get hold of that mutilated document now reposing in my pocket.
So Lord Adalbert Beaumanoir was watched from Passau to Maria Theresiopel, and telegrams flew over the face of the land, and Alec's British ally was hauled from the train at Semlin soon after dawn Friday.
One thing was certain: the waiter had let the question of Semlin's papers stand over until the morning, as he had done in my case, for Semlin still had his passport in his possession. After all, if Semlin was unknown at the hotel, the waiter had only seen him for the same brief moment as he had seen me. Thus I reasoned and argued with myself, but in the meantime I acted.
The engineer did not get his tribute and we did not get our train at Vincovce, where we spent twenty hot, hungry and extremely disagreeable hours before the arrival of a local train bound for Semlin, across the Danube from Belgrade.
The lower town of Semlin is, from the exhalations on the banks of the river, frightfully insalubrious, but the cemetery enjoys a high and airy situation. The people in the town die off with great rapidity; but, to compensate for this, the dead are said to be in a highly satisfactory state of preservation.
What puzzled me was why an American manufacturer, seemingly of some substance and decently dressed, should go to a German hotel on the recommendation of a German, from his name, and the style of his visiting card, a man of good family. Semlin might, of course, have been, like myself, a traveller benighted in Rotterdam, owing his recommendation to the hotel to a German acquaintance in the city.
At Semlin I still was encompassed by the scenes and the sounds of familiar life; the din of a busy world still vexed and cheered me; the unveiled faces of women still shone in the light of day. Yet, whenever I chose to look southward, I saw the Ottoman’s fortress—austere, and darkly impending high over the vale of the Danube—historic Belgrade.
In two days we must have two hundred thousand men on our frontiers. We must draw a gigantic cordon from the Dniester to the Adriatic. The main body, however, must go forward to Semlin and Futak. We two follow the main army, and day after to-morrow we must set out, and no," said the emperor, interrupting himself, while all the light died out from his countenance.
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