"Bram Stoker - Dracula" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stoker Bram)

All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was
full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns
or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals;
sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide
stony margin on each side of them to be subject ot great floods.
It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside
edge of a river clear.

At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds,
and in all sorts of attire. Some of them were just like the peasants
at home or those I saw coming through France and Germany,
with short jackets, and round hats, and home-made trousers;
but others were very picturesque.

The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they
were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves
of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of
strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet,
but of course there were petticoats under them.

The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more
barbarian than the rest, with their big cow-boy hats, great baggy
dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy
leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails.
They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them,
and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches.
They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing.
On the stage they would be set down at once as some old
Oriental band of brigands. They are, however, I am told,
very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion.

It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz,
which is a very interesting old place. Being practically on
the frontier--for the Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovina--
it has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows marks
of it. Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place,
which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions.
At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent
a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties
of war proper being assisted by famine and disease.

Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found,
to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted
to see all I could of the ways of the country.

I was evidently expected, for when I got near the door I faced
a cheery-looking elderly woman in the usual peasant dress--
white undergarment with a long double apron, front, and back,
of coloured stuff fitting almost too tight for modesty.