Patrick Leigh Fermor · 1986 · overland

The second volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor's walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, published fifty years after the journey. It picks up on the bridge at Esztergom where the first book ended, and carries him down to Budapest, across the Great Hungarian Plain on a borrowed horse, and through a Transylvania that the war would shortly erase.

1. 1
   Esztergom

   He crosses the Danube into Hungary by the Maria Valeria bridge, exactly where the first volume stopped - eighteen, on foot, with a pound a week and letters of introduction that keep opening doors.

2. 2
   Budapest

   Downriver to Budapest, where he falls in with young aristocrats and spends weeks in a city of coffee houses and late nights - the start of a pattern in which Europe's poorest traveller keeps being lodged in castles.

3. 3
   The Great Hungarian Plain

   Across the puszta on a borrowed horse, riding through a landscape of wells, herds and enormous distances - and sleeping in barns, gypsy camps and shepherds' huts between one country house and the next.

4. 4
   Transylvania

   Over the Romanian border into Transylvania, into libraries, water-meadows and mountain forests full of bears and wolves - and among Hungarian gentry whose world had perhaps ten years left and who did not know it.

5. 5
   The Iron Gates

   The volume ends at the Iron Gates, where the Danube forces through the gorge between the Carpathians and the Balkans - a stretch of river later drowned by a dam, so that what he describes no longer exists to be seen.