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apprentice. Emblematic of a secret sweeps’ guild which stretched all over Europe, it ensured a welcome from his colleagues everywhere; his circular brushes and his slotted bamboo staves were strapped to the bottom of his rucksack, just in case. While he explained that he was heading south to Innsbruck and the Brenner and then down intoItaly, he unfolded his map on the table and his finger traced Bolzano, Trento, the Adige, Lake Garda, Verona, Mantua, Modena, Bologna and the Apennine passes leading to Florence; and as he uttered the glorious names, he waved his hand in the air as though Italy lay all about us. “Kommst du nicht mit?”
    Why not? It was tempting, and he was an amusing chap. Then I thought of the registered envelope I hoped was waiting in Munich and of all the mysteries of Eastern Europe that I would miss. “Schade!” he said: what a shame. Warmed by another schnapps or two, we helped each other on with our burdens and he set off for the Tyrol and Rome and the land where the lemon-trees bloomed ( Dahin! ) and waved his top-hat as he grew fainter through the snowfall. We both shouted godspeed against the noise of the wind and wondering whether I had done the right thing I plodded on, eyelashes clogged with flakes, towards Bavaria and Constantinople.
    * * *
    The house in the Uri utca was full of helpful books. Above all, there were the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Meyers Konversationslexikon , both of them firm standbys throughout the journey, and I found a wide window-seat to pile them on. There was a book on learning Hungarian and I made a fumbling assault on it, though my vocabulary never got beyond a hundred words or so, most of them nouns.
    Coming from a great distance and wholly unrelated to the Teutonic, Latin and Slav languages that fence it in, Hungarian has remained miraculously intact. Everything about the language is different, not only the words themselves, but the way they are formed, the syntax and grammar and above all the cast of mind that brought them into being. I knew that Magyar belonged to the Ugro-Finnic group, part of the great Ural-Altaic family, “Just,” one of my new friends told me, “as English belongs to the Indo-European.” He followed this up by saying that the language closest to Hungarian was Finnish.

    â€œHow close?”
    â€œOh, very!”
    â€œWhat, like Italian and Spanish?”
    â€œWell no, not quite as close as that...”
    â€œHow close then?”
    Finally, after a thoughtful pause, he said, “About like English and Persian.”
    But it seems that one can get one step nearer with the languages of the Ostiaks and the Voguls. Reckoned only in thousands, these small groups of kindly skin-clad folk dwell in the fens and the tundras between the Upper Urals and the Ob river in Western Siberia. They inhabit half-underground huts and birch-bark shelters and, up to their waists in snow, hunt the woods for bears, which, simultaneously gods and quarry, they also worship; and when the ice melts, they fish and set traps and graze their reindeer across the moss, at pains to segregate them from the enormous neighbouring herds of their distant cousins, the Samoyeds. It was no help, at first, to learn that Magyar, whose resonance is fast, incisive and distinct, is an agglutinative language—the word merely conjures up the sound of mumbling through a mouth full of toffee. It means that the words are never inflected as they are in Europe, and that changes of sense are conveyed by a concatenation of syllables stuck on behind the first; all the vowel sounds imitate their leader, and the invariable ictus on the leading syllable sets up a kind of dactylic or anapaestic canter which, to a new ear, gives Magyar a wild and most unfamiliar ring. So, when at the dance I was listening to the vernacular sentences of my monocled and stork-loving Esztergom friend while he poured whisky out of a cut-glass decanter, and then to his