Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.” But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation.

The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed-through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire up the Rhine, and down to the Danube.Īt once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.“Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time.

A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written.Īt the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey-to walk to Constantinople.

A time of gifts