The river, which is such an asset to the city in its milder moods, shows sometimes another side. The ice, which accumulates in the winter, is often the cause of much damage, for when it breaks up it comes down in huge blocks, which grind and crash against the piers of the bridges and do an infinity of mischief. Not less terrible are the floods, which in the past have caused inundations, the most fearful of which spelt ruin to the city of Pest. In March of 1838 the river, which was frozen solid to three feet in thickness, began to groan and crack and heave, so that a dyke was thrown up to guard against it. Count Stephen Széchenyi, who was alive at that time, built a barge or sort of little ark, for which he suffered much ridicule. However, during the thirteenth day every citizen was at work strengthening and piling up the dyke, until, at eight in the evening, the river broke forth and, carrying masses of ice on its surface, beat down the dyke and overwhelmed the crowd. The crashing of the ice, the screams of the women and children, the rush of the waters, made up an appalling orchestra, more especially as the whole scene was plunged in darkness. It was a time of horror as awful as the judgment day to those concerned in it! The whole of the next day the river continued to rise, carrying away on its broad flood hundreds of drowned human beings. Those who survived had fled to the highest ground, and as the water reached the foundations of the streets and sapped them, they saw whole rows of buildings totter and reel and fall. The heavy barges and other things carried along by the water dashed into the streets and smashed up what remained standing. There was nothing to eat and many of the miserable wretches were thinly clad and in extreme cold; the fifteenth day was the worst of all, for many died of hunger and exposure, and corpses lay about on what remained of the land as well as floating on the water. The city had literally crumbled to pieces! Those who were in Buda were better off, for they had the hills to climb up, and the flood did not reach them to the same extent; but to convey help across that raging torrent was not a task to be lightly attempted. Count Széchenyi was among the foremost to help others with his ark, and another hero was Baron Nicholas Wesselenyi, who performed prodigies of valour. Those who visit Pest must go to see the bas-relief on the wall of the Franciscan Church commemorating this disastrous epoch. The city rose again on the ruins of its former self, and to-day numbers four or five times as large as it was then. [Illustration: COTTAGES IN THE ALFÖLD] CHAPTER X THE DANUBE BELOW BUDAPEST