A visit to Tulum

“He thought too much fuss was made over all this ancient masonry. . . . It was all a great bore to him, the Maya business, except for the tourist aspect. It gave people the wrong idea about Mexico. Blinking lizards on broken walls.”

— from Gringos, by Charles Portis

Last week, as part of a family trip to Mexico, I got the chance to visit my first Mayan city—the Yucatec town of Tulum. Having never been to this part of the world and having only studied it cursorily, I looked forward to an opportunity to learn a little more directly, on the ground. It was a great experience.

Tulum stands on rocky cliffs overlooking the sea on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, about a third of the way between Cancun to the north and Belize to the south. The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, which stretches from north of Cancun to Honduras, lies just offshore. A natural gap in the reef created by the undersea outlet of a freshwater underground river that flows into the ocean below the city played an important role in the siting of the city sometime around 800 years ago. Possibly more.

In the broader context of Mayan history, Tulum is a late post-classical city. The classical era—the one most people imagine, however vaguely, when they hear the word Maya—lasted about seven centuries, from c. AD 250-950. The post-classical period saw the diminution in size, population, influence, and order of the great classical city-states. Some were abandoned outright. Tulum was founded and flourished.

The playa at Tulum, now closed to the public as its shelter and ready supply of sargassum (the reddish brown seaweed visible along the shoreline) make it an excellent nesting site for sea turtles

Tulum is unusual in two respects. First, it sits on the coast, as a port. Though historians and archaeologists are discovering or recovering more and more about travel, communication, and trade throughout the Maya world, port cities are uncommon. That gap in the reef is the key. By aligning the city with the gap, Tulum allowed for the easy entry and exit of the large canoes used for trade up and down the Yucatán coast. A sheltered beach below a notch in the cliffs provided a natural dockyard. Further, the central political and religious complex of the city and its most important monumental building, the Castillo, were oriented to the gap in the reef. Not coincidentally, this the same direction in which the sun rises.

Second, Tulum is small. The city’s walls, greatly diminished but still impressive, enclose and protect a space 400 meters wide and 200 deep. Our guide, Pedro, estimated a population of 2,000, predominantly the city elite and traders, who lived in luxurious stone houses within the city walls. A larger population of farmers and slaves lived outside, growing the food.

So Tulum is no Chichén Itzá, perhaps the most famous late classical city, or the much earlier Tikal, but it has a unique history and its ruins are still impressive. Several houses, including two called the “palace” and “great palace” by archaeologists, have been excavated and partially reconstructed, but the centerpieces are the walls and the temple complex. Two smaller temples, the Temple of the Wind God and the Descending God Temple, sit atop the cliffs bracketing Tulum’s sheltered beach. The latter, presumably dedicated to a solar deity, has doorways aligning with the sunrise on the summer and winter equinoxes. On those days, dawn light shines straight through and clear across the city, striking a large stone in the outer walls.

Temple of the Descending God, visible upside down above the opening at the top of the stairs

But dominating the city is the Castillo, so named later, after the city’s abandonment, but in fact a combination temple and lighthouse. Canoes seeking to pass through the reef could aim for the Castillo. According to Pedro, fires were kept burning to help navigators aiming for the port.

The “great palace” in the foreground and the Castillo beyond

It also provided a stage for human sacrifice. Pedro proved refreshingly straightforward about this, indulging neither romantic notions that the victims offered were idealistic volunteers (something I’ve heard, absurdly, about the occasional victims of Viking human sacrifice, but never about the Maya) nor trying to diminish or explain away the practice. These were human sacrifices. Those offered were other Maya, captured in the ongoing internecine warfare characteristic of the ununified, warlike Maya world, and the offerings were meant to ensure good harvests, success in war, prosperity and stability for the city and all of its inhabitants.

That fact gives this sunny spot by the ocean, cooled by continuous breezes rushing in over the reef, an ominous aspect not unlike the Colosseum or some other ancient site of bloodshed. The intimacy, the smallness of the setting only strengthens this impression. Gladiator notwithstanding, it’s hard to visit the Colosseum and imagine it full of people celebrating bloodsport. At Tulum, it is easy to fill the avenues and plazas with people and visualize them staring up at the priests and doomed offerings. It’s easy because on the morning we visited, Tulum was full of people, and it is hard not to look up at the temple. Reverence comes naturally in a place like this.

The Castillo looms above the central plaza, the palace in the foreground, and dominates even the Temple of the Descending God at left

This in no way diminishes Tulum. It’s just a fact of the place, and Pedro treated it as such, explaining things gently but firmly. This is history—accept and understand it. I appreciated that approach.

The face of a god on the facade of the great palace, with yellow, red, and black paint still decorating the eye and nose

The human sacrifice and the dedication to astronomy that I’ve already mentioned are perhaps the two most famous aspects of Maya culture, but do not come close to expressing all of it. In addition to telling us about trade, the observation of the stars and the careful orientation and construction of Tulum’s monumental buildings, Pedro described the art and decoration of the city. Rather than bare stone, Tulum in its heyday was brightly painted with a variety of colors derived from natural pigments. The dominant color scheme was a bright turquoise, though reds, blacks, yellows, and other colors were used for murals or to accent sculpture.

On “the great palace,” in addition to the faces of gods sculpted in larger-than-life size into the masonry at the four corners of the building and reliefs of other gods—including the Descending God and a squatting goddess of birth and fertility—ritual scenes were painted inside. The paintings were still visible through the columns supporting the upper level. The faces of the gods still bore traces of yellow and red paint, and red handprints—artists’ signatures? marks of prayer? pure decoration?—showed plainly all over the building.

Tulum, as Pedro explained, was seen and described but never conquered by the Spaniards. It was abandoned in the 1540s. The pressures of war, overpopulation, and crop failure led the people of Tulum to pull up stakes and leave. And where did they go? Yet another unexplained aspect of the mysterious Maya?

That reputation, after all, has drawn people to ruins like Tulum from all over the world for the better part of a century. Charles Portis’s final novel Gringos, which I reread during the trip, is in no small part about the cranks and oddballs who all wind up in the Yucatán hoping to get something out of the Maya. The allure of the mysterious and the uncanny. But here Pedro was excellent as well. The city was abandoned, yes, later to be claimed by the jungle and rediscovered by European travelers exploring rumors of lost cities, but the people did not disappear. More than twenty Mayan languages are still spoken in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.

There was much more I could describe and much more detailed information imparted by Pedro and the bilingual signage around the city, but I want to encourage y’all to visit for yourselves if you can. I came away with a strong impression of the strength and vibrancy, the ingenuity and ceremony, the good and the bad of a civilization even in its period of decline and of Tulum’s unique place in the broader Maya world. And visiting in person—seeing the centuries-old handprints on the great palace, staring up at the site of a long ago bloodstained altar, feeling the relief from the tropical heat borne from the sea by the wind—gave me a flesh-and-blood appreciation for the history I’ve previously only read about.

If you’re going to visit Tulum, let me corroborate a few things that a travel agent will probably tell you:

• Dress comfortably and coolly, even if you’re visiting in the late winter, like we did.

• Wear a broad-brimmed hat, and make sure it fits well. The closer you get to the cliffs the more likely it will be blown off.

• Bring bottled water, and plenty of it.

• Bring sunglasses and sunscreen.

• Bring bug spray. We came well-equipped in this regard but had no trouble with insects whatsoever. But it can’t hurt to be prepared.

And a final, personal and historical bit of advice: behave yourself. Much of the ruins of Tulum are roped off and closed to the public—with armed federales at the entrance and local police hanging around, watching—because of vandalism. Per Mark Twain, “There have always been ruins, no doubt; and there have always been pensive people to sigh over them, and asses to scratch upon them their names and the important date of their visit.” Always have been, perhaps, but it doesn’t have to be you.

My wife and I have been back in the States for a week and have enjoyed going over our experiences on the trip, especially our visit to Tulum. I hope this rare travelogue will entice y’all to visit, too. In the meantime, I’ll conclude with a gallery of a few other photos from our visit.

The National Medal of Honor Heritage Center

Last week was my spring break, and my wife and I took the kids to Chattanooga for a long weekend. We had two sites we wanted to make sure to visit: Chickamauga battlefield, about which more later, and the Tennessee Aquarium. We also obeyed the classic command to see Rock City and, as an extra treat, visited Chattanooga’s National Medal of Honor Heritage Center.

The museum

The Charles H Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, named for a Chattanooga native who is currently the only living Medal of Honor recipient from the ETO during World War II, is a stellar little museum. We visited on a whim following our morning at the Tennessee Aquarium; the Heritage Center is located right next door on the same plaza.

After paying a modest entrance fee the tour begins upstairs with an interactive media room. Computers set into tables allow visitors to search a database of Medal of Honor recipients, and digital banners on the walls display continuously changing photos of recipients both well known and obscure. My favorite feature of this room was a wall-sized touchscreen display featuring a 3D globe dotted with the locations of Medal of Honor actions, each of which you could tap on to bring up a box with a photo of the recipient, the date of the incident, and the citation. The clusters of dots, especially around the battlefields of all theatres of the Civil War and in western Europe in both World Wars, as well as scattered across the Pacific and other often surprising out-of-the-way places, gives you a graphic sense of where the United States’ wars have been fought, as well as the scale of the fighting.

From the interactive room you enter a theatre for a short film about the Medal and its history. From here, you continue through the best part of the museum, a carefully designed series of exhibits walking you through American wars since the Civil War. Each exhibit has a life-size diorama of two or three Medal of Honor recipients from the conflict. These are exceptionally well done, with great attention to detail. Others are featured in large-scale photographs or well-designed displays with uniforms, artifacts—the museum preserves over 6,000 items related to the Medal of Honor—and some element of the environment in which those profiled earned the medal: the cliffs at Hacksaw Ridge, a sandbagged hootch for three Vietnam recipients, a dusty road for one who fought in Iraq. A few have video reenactments that play in screens set into the walls, and at several points a multimedia station features interviews with living Medal of Honor recipients.

Among those profiled are Dr Mary Walker, the only female Medal of Honor recipient; Civil War officers James Andrews (of the Great Locomotive Chase) and Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas); Buffalo soldier George Jordan; World War I soldiers Charles Whittlesey, Joseph Adkison, and Alvin York; conscientious objector turned medic Desmond Doss; Marine officer Alexander Bonnyman; and Kyle Carpenter. There are a great many others as well.

While I didn’t have the luxury of stopping to read every sign or piece of information—touring with a six- and a four-year old keeps you moving—the displays offered lots of opportunities to tell stories and talk to the kids about what they were seeing. It’s hard to know what sticks, but they came away seeming to appreciate more what being brave and sacrificing for others means.

This was especially true of the Vietnam display. While many of those profiled in the dioramas lived to fight again or to tell their stories to future generations, the men whose stories were selected to represent Vietnam—Marine Rodney Davis and Navy corpsman David Ray—were killed in action, both by taking the blast of enemy grenades in order to save others. A recurrent theme of the museum, a quotation displayed in several places, is John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” The museum shows vividly what this means on the battlefield.

Other notes

The museum has a good gift shop with well-selected items that are relevant to the museum’s topic and don’t reduce its theme to kitsch (something you can’t always count on with museum gift shops). There’s an especially good selection of books; I picked up Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary, which I’ve been looking forward to reading since it was reissued for the centennial of his actions in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.

The staff and volunteers were friendly, helpful, and very accommodating to a dad touring with two children six and under. I especially appreciated their work; they represented the museum and its mission well.

In conclusion

The Medal of Honor Heritage Center offers an excellent introduction to US military history and the virtues the medal represents: patriotism, citizenship, courage, integrity, sacrifice, and commitment. While informative and moving for adults, it’s also a good place for kids to visit—the dioramas are helpful visuals, and the stories, while presented soberly and realistically, are not prohibitively graphic. I highly recommend visiting if you’re ever in the Chattanooga area.

A visit to Antietam

Bloody Lane, Antietam National Battlefield Park

Friday I got to visit Antietam National Battlefield Park for the first time. Despite my interests, studies, and profession, this is only the fourth Civil War battlefield I've been able to visit, after Gettysburg (twice), Kennesaw Mountain, and Griswoldville. (I could count Atlanta, but that battlefield is buried beneath Jimmy Carter Boulevard now.) 

The Battle of Sharpsburg, a.k.a. Antietam, occurred September 17, 1862 in the fields surrounding Sharpsburg, Maryland. Major General George McClellan, the Union commander of the Army of the Potomac, having accidentally acquired a copy of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's marching orders for his invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania, moved to confront Lee while his army was divided. Lee drew his army up around the town of Sharpsburg, where a few bends of the Potomac River created a defensible position. McClellan attacked, and his troops kept up pressure on Lee all day, but the battle proved indecisive. McClellan refrained from attacking the next day and Lee was able to escape across the river into Virginia. 

Two things make Antietam significant: First, it is the bloodiest single day in American military history. 23,000 men were killed and wounded in just twelve hours of combat. Second, as Antietam was the closest thing to a victory the Union had achieved in the east up to that point, the battle offered President Lincoln, hitherto an advocate of a limited war to preserve the union, an opportunity to expand the war's scope and put extra economic pressure on the Confederacy by announcing the Emancipation Proclamation, which would theoretically liberate all slaves in areas still under Confederate control if the war were not ended by January 1, 1863. This was not actually a popular move, especially since further disaster awaited the Union armies later that year.

I arrived before the visitors' center opened and the first spot I walked to was the western end of Bloody Lane, where the 24th Georgia Volunteer Infantry deployed in support of Colquitt's Brigade during the battle. Among the privates of the 24th's Company E, "Rabun Gap Rifles," was Abraham Lafayette Keener, an ancestor on my maternal grandfather's mother's side. Abraham has a small role to play in my forthcoming novel Griswoldville.

I walked the length of Bloody Lane to the park observation tower. Bloody Lane was a deeply rutted road at the time of the battle--natural entrenchments for the defending Confederates under D.H. Hill. Despite repeated assaults by much larger Union forces, Hill's men held out for nearly four hours. During that time, over 5,000 men were killed and wounded along that stretch of road. The Confederate dead lay three deep in a few places.

After climbing the observation tower I walked to Dunker Church, scene of some early fighting and maneuvering during the morning of the battle, and watched the excellent half-hour film available at the park visitors' center. I am, to be frank, usually underwhelmed by the films at national parks, but this one was produced to a high standard and featured dramatic and moving reenactments of some of the major events of the battle. I bought a DVD copy for use in the classroom.

From there I drove to Burnside's Bridge to complete my visit. 

If you haven't visited Antietam, do so. It's an important site for Civil War history and the park is well-maintained and beautiful. Strikingly so. Walking around on a sunny, cloudless June morning, I found it hard to imagine all the death that occurred there. But it's important to try.

A gallery of the photos I took. I forgot my Nikon before I got on the road, but I hope my phone's camera suffices.

A Time of Gifts

Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of A Time of Gifts, in Greece just after World War II

I'm not sure where I first heard of Patrick Leigh Fermor's book A Time of Gifts, but I'm grateful that I did. The first passage I ever read of it was a lavish and beautifully written description of his visit to Munich's Hofbräuhaus in January 1934, less than a year after Hitler came to power in Germany. Fermor so immediately evoked the time and place and atmosphere—from the appearance of the obese, beer-swilling masses to the sheer noise of eating and singing—that I had to read the rest. I finally started it over the weekend.

A Time of Gifts relates Fermor's adventures, at the age of 18, through Europe. Expelled from school, restless at the thought of a career in the army, and bored with formal education, Fermor decided to hike his way across Europe, alone. He borrowed a few pounds from friends, kitted himself out in London, and took a steamer to the Hook of Holland, where he landed in December 1933. His goal: Constantinople, at the other end of the continent.

I'm about halfway through. Fermor has traveled up the Rhine, cut diagonally across southern Germany via the Neckar and over the Danube, and has just arrived in Salzburg. It's a pure delight.

Fermor based this book on his memories, notes, letters, and diaries of 1933-34 but wrote and published it in the 1970s, and he brings that longer perspective to bear on a number of occasions. (Examples below.) After his trip, he did serve in the British military, fighting in special operations on Crete and living in caves between guerrilla strikes. His most famous exploit was kidnapping a German general. He went on to a life of further adventure and worldwide travel, but the war looms largest over A Time of Gifts. Many of the places and people he meets along the Rhine, Neckar, and Danube in the early 1930s would be irreversibly changed—if not destroyed—within a decade. 

This hindsight lends A Time of Gifts a powerful sense of nostalgia and pathos. Fermor's youthful exuberance, naivete, and awkwardness are humorous and fun to read about, and his willingness to laugh at himself immediately wins one over. But over and over, turning his reminiscences bittersweet, are the offhand comments, asides, and footnotes about what survived the war and what didn't. Sic transit gloria mundi. 

Below I've copied a few of my favorite passages of A Time of Gifts so far. Please do check out the whole book. I've enjoyed it immensely so far.

* * * * *

One fun thing, for me, is that I've been to a number of the places Fermor describes. Here he narrates his approach, moving upriver along the Rhine, to Cologne, the first sign of which, even today, from fifty miles off on the Autobahn, is the twin spires of the Kölner Dom:

After a first faraway glimpse, the two famous steeples grew taller and taller as the miles that separated us fell away. At last they commanded the cloudy plain as the spires of a cathedral should, vanishing when the outskirts of the city interposed themselves, and then, as I gazed at the crowding saints of the three Gothic doorways, sailing up into the evening again at close range. Beyond them indoors, although it was already too dark to see the colours of the glass, I knew I was inside the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. Except for the little constellation of tapers in the shadows of a side-chapel, everything was dim. Women knelt interspersed with nuns and the murmured second half of the Gegrüsset seist Du, Maria rose in answering chorus to the priest's initial solo; a discreet clatter of beads kept tally of the accumulating prayers. In churches with open spires like Cologne, one could understand how congregations thought their orisons had a better start than prayers under a dome where the syllables might flutter round for hours. With steeples they follow the uprush of lancets and make an immediate break for it.

Here Fermor, with wry wit, describes finding himself in church in Coblenz with a bunch of Nazis:

It was the shortest day of the year and signs of the seasons were becoming hourly more marked. Every other person in the streets was heading for home with a tall and newly felled fir-sapling across his shoulder, and it was under a mesh of Christmas decorations that I was sucked into the Liebfrauenkirche next day. The romanesque nave was packed and an anthem of great choral splendour rose from the gothic choir stalls, while the cauliflowering incense followed the plainsong across the slopes of the sunbeams. A Dominican in horn-rimmed spectacles delivered a vigorous sermon. A number of Brownshirts—I'd forgotten all about them for the moment—was scattered among the congregation, with eyes lowered and their caps in their hands. They looked rather odd. They should have been out in the forest, dancing round Odin and Thor, or Loki perhaps.

Fermor reaches another German town, one I know pretty well—Heidelberg—just before the new year. This is as perfect a description of the sensory joy of thawing out after a day in the snow as you can find:

This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day's doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, strangling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots.

Fermor is at Zum roten Ochsen, the Red Ox, a famous Heidelberg Inn that's still in operation. He stays for a few days at the behest of the generous owners, Herr and Frau Spengel, and tours the town, University, and Heidelberg Castle with their son, Fritz:

Frau Spengel insisted that it was absurd to set off on New Year's Day; so I spent another twenty-four hours wandering about the town and castle and reading and writing and talking with this kind and civilized family. (My sojourn at the Red Ox, afterwards, was one of several high points of recollection that failed to succumb to the obliterating moods of war. I often thought of it.)

And appended to this paragraph is this footnote:

After writing these words and wondering whether I had spelt the name Spengel right—also to discover what had happened to the family—on a sudden impulse I sent a letter to the Red Ox, addressed "to the proprietor." A very nice letter from Fritz's son—he was born in 1939—tells me that not only my host and hostess are dead, but that Fritz was killed in Norway (where the first battalion of my own regiment at the time was heavily engaged) and buried at Trondheim in 1940, six years after we met. The present Herr Spengel is the sixth generation of the same family to own and run this delightful inn.

I could post many, many more, but I'll conclude with the longish chunk from Munich that first brought my attention to Fermor and his work:

I had expected a different kind of town, more like Nuremberg, perhaps, or Rothenburg. The neo-classical architecture in this boreal and boisterous weather, the giant boulevards, the unleavened pomp—everything struck chill to the heart. The proportion of Storm Troopers and S.S. in the streets was unusually high and still mounting and the Nazi salute flickered about the pavement like a tic douloureux. Outside the Feldherrnhalle, with its memorial to the sixteen Nazis killed in a 1923 street fight nearby, two S.S. sentries with fixed bayonets and black helmets mounted guard like figures of cast-iron and the right arms of all passers-by shot up as though in reflex to an electric beam. It was perilous to withhold this homage. One heard tales of uninitiated strangers being physically set-upon by zealots. Then the thoroughfares began to shrink. I caught a glimpse down a lane of Gothic masonry and lancets and buttresses and further on copper domes hung in convolutions of baroque. A Virgin on a column presided over a slanting piazza, one side of which was formed by a tall, Victorian-Gothic building whose great arched undercroft led to a confusion of lesser streets. In the heart of them stood a massive building; my objective, the Hofbräuhaus. A heavy arched door was pouring a raucous and lurching party of Brownshirts onto the trampled snow.

I was back in beer-territory. Halfway up the vaulted stairs a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastika'd arm, was unloosing, in a staunchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours. Love's labour lost. Each new storey radiated great halls given over to ingestion. In one chamber a table of S.A. men were grinding out Lore, Lore, Lore, scanning the slow beat with the butts of their mugs, then running the syllables in double time, like the carriages of an express: "UND—KOMMT—DER—FRÜHLingindastal! GRÜSS—MIR—DIE—LORenocheinmal". But it was certain civilian figures seated at meat that drew the glance and held it.

One must travel east for a hundred and eighty miles from the Upper Rhine and seventy north from the Alpine watershed to form an idea of the transformation that beer, in collusion with almost non-stop eating—meals within meals dovetailing so closely during the hours of waking that there is hardly an interprandial moment—can wreak on the human frame. Intestine strife and the truceless clash of intake and digestion wrecks many German tempers, twists brows into scowls and breaks out in harsh words and deeds.

The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a yard. They branched at the loins into thighs as thick as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its three deceptive smiles. Every bristle had been cropped and shaven from their knobbly scalps. Except when five o'clock veiled them with shadow, surfaces as polished as ostriches' eggs reflected the lamplight. The frizzy hair of their wives was wrenched up from scarlet necks and pinned under slides and then hatted with green Bavarian trilbys and round one pair of elephantine shoulders a little fox stole was clasped. The youngest of this group, resembling a matinee idol under some cruel spell, was the bulkiest. Under tumbling blond curls his china blue eyes protruded from cheeks that might have been blown up with a bicycle pump, and cherry lips laid bare the sort of teeth that make children squeal. There was nothing bleary or stunned about their eyes. The setting may have reduced their size, but it keyed their glances to a sharper focus. Hands like bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami, frankfurter, krenwurst and blutwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on check and brow. They might have been competing with stop watches, and their voices, only partly gagged by the cheekfuls of good things they were grinding down, grew louder while their unmodulated laughter jarred the air in frequent claps. Pumpernickel and aniseed rolls and bretzels bridged all the slack moments but supplies  always  came through before a true lull threatened. Huge oval dishes, laden with Schweinebraten, potatoes, Sauerkraut, red cabbage and dumplings were laid in front of each diner. They were followed by colossal joints of meat—unclassifiable helpings which, when they were picked clean, shone on the scoured chargers like calves' pelvises or the bones of elephants. Waitresses with the build of weight-lifters and all-in wrestlers whirled this provender along and features dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre's banquet. But all too soon the table was an empty bone-yard once more, sound faltered, a look of bereavement clouded those small eyes and there was a brief hint of sorrow in the air. But succour was always at hand; beldames barged to the rescue at full gallop with new clutches of mugs and fresh plate-loads of consumer goods; and the damp Laestrygonian brows unpuckered again in a happy renewal of clamour and intake.

I strayed by mistake into a room full of S.S. officers, Gruppen- and Sturmbannführers, black from their lightning-flash-collars to the forest of tall boots underneath the table. The window embrasure was piled high with their skull-and-crossbones caps. I still hadn't found the part of this Bastille I was seeking, but at last a noise like the rush of a river guided me downstairs again to my journey's end.

The vaults of the great chamber faded into infinity through blue strata of smoke. Hobnails grated, mugs clashed and the combined smell of beer and bodies and old clothes and farmyards sprang at the newcomer. I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips. It was heavier than a brace of iron dumb-bells, but the blond beer inside was cool and marvellous, a brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth. This was the fuel that had turned the berserk feeders upstairs into Zeppelins and floated them so far from heart's desire. The gunmetal-coloured cylinders were stamped with a blue HB conjoined under the Bavarian crown, like the foundry-mark on cannon. The tables, in my mind's eye, were becoming batteries where each gunner served a silent and recoil-less piece of ordnance which, trained on himself, pounded away in steady siege. Mass-gunfire! Here and there on the tables, with their heads in puddles of beer, isolated bombardiers had been mown down in their emplacements. The vaults reverberated with the thunder of a creeping barrage. There must have been over a thousand pieces engaged!—Big Berthas, Krupp's pale brood, battery on battery crashing at random or in salvoes as hands adjusted the elevation and traverse and then tightened on the stone trigger-guard. Supported by comrades, the walking wounded reeled through the battle smoke and a fresh gunner leaped into each place as it fell empty.

Hugely enjoyable book. Pick it up if you're at all interested in travel, Europe, or just a good memoir.