A little west of Poprád, in Northern Hungary, on the railroad between
Sillein and Kassa, is the village of Liptós Szt Miklós, to which place
I journeyed on the 12th of June, 1896. The conductor was the only man
on the train or at any of the stations who would admit that there was a
glacière at Déményfálva, and that it was feasible to get into it: every
one else professed entire ignorance on the subject. It is perhaps,
worth noting at this time that it is always difficult to get any
information about glacières; in fact, the advice about cooking a hare
might well be applied to glacière hunting: first catch your glacière.
The scenery between Sillein and Miklós was picturesque. The hills were
covered with forest. In one place, the railroad ran through a beautiful
mountain gorge alongside a river, where a number of rafts were floating
down. There were also some primitive ferries, where a rope was
stretched across the river, and the force of the current carried the
ferryboat across, once it was started. Many peasants were at work in
the fields; often in squads. White, blue, brown, and a dash of red were
the predominating colors in their dress. The men wore white trousers,
made of a kind of blanket stuff, and a leather, heelless moccasin of
nearly natural shape. Almost all the women had bare feet; those of
the older ones were generally shaped according to Nature's own form,
while those of the younger ones were generally distorted from wearing
fashionable shoes. We went past several villages of huts with thatched
roofs, something like the Russian villages one sees beyond Moscow, only
less primitive.
The inn at Miklós was poor, and as at Dóbsina, the pigs lived in the
yard and occasionally came for an interview under the covered doorway.
Inquiries elicited the information that Déményfálva could be reached
by carriage, so I engaged one at the livery stable. The owner told me
that about twenty years before, he leased the glacière and carried on a
regular business in supplying Buda-Pest with ice. He had thirty lamps
put in to give light to the workmen, who brought up the ice in baskets
on their backs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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