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Updated: June 9, 2025
We had started from Buda-Pest on Monday morning at seven o'clock, and arrived at Basiash at nine the following morning. We were fortunate in not having been detained anywhere by shallow water, so often the cause of delay by this route.
But dancing was not the only diversion. The winter I was at Buda-Pest a long spell of enduring frost gave us some capital skating. The fashionable society meet for this amusement in the park, where there is a piece of ornamental water about five acres in extent. Here the Skating Club have established themselves, having erected a handsome pavilion at the side of the lake to serve as a clubhouse.
The boats and barges in the winter harbour of the Austrian capital had been dragged from their anchorage, covering the river with the débris of wreckage; in short, widespread mischief was reported generally from the Upper Danube. There was a prevalent idea that Buda-Pest had been saved by the flood breaking bounds at Vienna, but events proved that our troubles were yet to come.
And when this train went out, in it, among piles of luggage belonging to other travelers, to Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pest, Salzburg, was August, still undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole in the winter under the grass. Those words, "fragile and valuable," had made the men lift Hirschvogel gently and with care.
It seems that at Eresi, a few miles below Buda-Pest, where the water is shallow, the ice had formed into a compact mass for the space of six miles, and at this point the down-drifting ice-blocks got regularly stacked, rising higher and higher, till the whole vast volume of water was bayed back upon the twin cities of Buda and Pest, the latter place being specially endangered by its site on the edge of the great plain.
It is only within the last two or three years that they have taken to publish the comparative returns of the capital cities of Europe, and now it appears that Buda-Pest is in the unenviable position of having on an average the highest death-rate of any European town!
The great hospitality of my new friends would have rendered a winter in that delightful country most agreeable, but the holiday part of my tour was over, and circumstances led me to pass some months in the capital. I got back just in time for All-Souls' Day. The Fête des Morts is observed with great ceremony throughout Hungary, especially at Buda-Pest.
Though Buda-Pest had escaped the worst of the threatened calamity, the state of the low-lying suburbs of the town on both sides of the river was very serious, and, as it turned out, weeks elapsed before the waters entirely subsided.
I am very sorry that Countess A has attempted to introduce this fashion from Pest." Buda-Pest, though the capital, is not the place to find the best Hungarian society. Many of the old families prefer Pressburg; and Klausenburg is to Transylvania what Edinburgh was to Scotland, socially speaking, before the days of railroads.
It was a smart saying, but it was not a thing accomplished when the Prince wrote his Travels, nor is it now; for though the "Danube Steam Navigation Company" have been running their boats for nearly half a century, they are in difficulties, "chiefly," says Mr Révy, "from the neglect of all river improvements between Vienna and Buda-Pest, and between Basiash and Turn-Severin."
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