“Who are ye, and what are you doing here?” cried Clement the Clerk to the Wallachs, who hitherto had not taken the slightest notice of him.
“We are they of Marisel who have burned Marcze Záre,” answered the peasants unanimously, with the grave faces of men who had just done something uncommonly wise.
“Well, be quick about it, and then come back to the village, for I am here by command of the Prince, my master, to put the usual questions to you.”
“And I,” put in Zülfikar, “am here by command of the mighty Ali Pasha of Grosswardein to levy a new tax.”
The Wallachs watched the Patrol-officer till he was quite out of sight without uttering a word; but they shook their fists after him and exclaimed—“May Marcze Záre take him!”
Then, with the bagpiper in front, they formed into a long procession and marched, loudly singing, down towards the distant village.
It was a long, straggling, Wallachian hamlet at which the patrollers now arrived—one house exactly like another; low clay huts with lofty roofs and projecting eaves, surrounded by quick-set hedges, the doors so low that one had to stoop in order to enter. Every house consisted of a single room, in which the whole family, parents and children, goats and poultry, lived together. At the entrance of the village stood a gigantic triumphal arch made of marble blocks; over the principal portal was the torso of a Minerva; on the façade were battle-pieces in high relief, and beneath them this Latin inscription in large Roman letters—“This town has been built by the unconquerable Trajan as a memorial of his triumph!” And behind the arch a heap of wretched clay huts!
On the capitol of a fallen Corinthian column, in front of the village dead-house, sits the prefika, the oldest old woman in the place, lamenting with meretricious tears over the dead young maiden who lies within. On the side of a grass-grown hill close at hand one sees a round stone building, raised once upon a time, no doubt, in memory of some Roman hero; but the Wallachian population has turned it into a church, covered it with a pointed roof, and daubed the interior with hideous paintings.
The Patrol-officer called the people together into the church, which was the only public building in the place. The crowd stood around him, the old men leaning on their crutches. The bloodred rays of sunset pierced through the round windowpanes, giving a peculiar appearance to the interior of the venerable edifice, whose walls were daubed all over with figures of grotesque saints, whom the monstrous fancy of the rustic artist had provided with scarlet mantles and spurred jackboots. Amongst so many pictures of the marvellous, that well-known allegory which represents Death as a skeleton, dragging off with him a king, a beggar, and a priest, was not lacking, and scattered among the icons were a few bandy-legged fiends derisively stretching out their tongues at poor damned sinners whom they clutched tightly by the hair.
Behind the iconastasis the priest and the Patrol-officer took their stand, surrounded by gilded icons and consecrated candles. When Clement had read his credentials to the people, he called to the village elder, a tall man with large projecting teeth, to come in front of the altar-rail, and addressed the following questions to him—
“Are there amongst you any sorcerers and magicians who can summon the devil to their aid?”
The crowd received this question with an awful whisper, and after a long pause the magistrate replied—
“There was one last year, your worship, a godless villain with blotches on his neck and body, which were patches stitched on to him by the devil, for even when we singed them with red-hot irons he did not feel it. We sent him to the Sanhedrim at Fehervár, where, failing to stand the water test, he was burnt alive.”
“Are there among you any hags or vampires which injure other people’s children, make knots in men’s bowels, ride through the air, colour milk red, hatch serpents’ eggs, or seek for grasses which can make them invisible, and open barred and bolted doors?”
This question called forth a hundred different answers. Everyone tried to communicate his own personal experiences to the interrogator; the younger women in particular pressed upon the Patrol-officer with furious importunity.
“One at a time, please,” cried Clement, with great dignity. “Let the magistrate say what he knows.”
“Yes, there used to be an old witch here, worshipful sir,” said the village elder obsequiously. “We called her Dainitsa.33 She had long molested mankind, for her eyes were red. She could, when she chose, bring down such storms upon the village that the wind would take off the roofs of the houses. Once she brought a hailstorm upon us, and God’s thunderbolt smote the village in three places. Thereupon the women here grew furious, seized her, and threw her into the pond. But even there the witch railed upon them and said—‘Take heed! You will live to beg of me the water which you now give me to drink!’ Then the women fished up her dead body from the bottom of the pond, thrust a dart through her heart, buried her in the valley, and rolled a large stone over her grave. But the very next year the witch’s curse came upon us. Throughout the summer not a drop of rain fell in our district. Everything was withered up, and our cattle carried off by the murrain. Dainitsa had drunk up
