and there is a well within the walls. In the center the great stone church could serve as a barracks, council chamber, and sanctuary, all in one.

North from Toarcla forests commence again, and in the narrowing valley one finds the pine-shaded dilapidation of the bathing establishment at Tusnad, once well known in the region for its curative waters. We passed the night at another small mountain resort called Toplita, charming, though deserted.

THE TRANSYLVANIAN LANGUAGE SITUATION IS COMPLEX

As we started out the next morning for the town of Bistrita we had our first lesson in the complexity of the language situation in Transylvania.* We encountered a woodsman on the road and, as we were speaking German, asked the way to Sächsisch-Regen, the first stop en route. Meeting with no response, we transferred the interrogation to the chauffeur, who inquired in Rumanian, but used the same form for the name of the town. The woodsman replied that he did not know the route.

A few miles farther on we repeated our inquiries at a small farmhouse by the roadside, but were unable to obtain any information, as Hungarian was the sole language of the inhabitants. Passing through a small village, we finally obtained the information desired from the Saxon postmaster.

Our difficulties were caused by the fact that we should have altered the name in its Rumanian, Hungarian, and German forms in accordance with the speech of the persons addressed, as each nationality clings to its own version of place names (see text, page 319).

After passing through Reghinul Sasesc, the goal of our inquiries, a small Saxon town without unusual feature, we arrived toward nightfall at Bistrita, about 200 miles from Brasov and situated in the midst of a mountain-girdled plain, the northernmost Saxon outpost. It clusters about an ancient Protestant church, not too happily restored in the sixteenth century.

* See, also, "The Battle-line of Languages in Western Europe," in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for February, 1923.

This was the first stop of the caravans coming over the Buzeu Pass, and the church contains a collection of rugs similar, but inferior, to that at Brasov. The ruins of the ancient castle of Hunyadi Janos crown the hill which commands the roadway to the pass, about three and a half miles from the town.

CLUJ IS THE SHRINE OF TRANSYLVANIAN MAGYARIS M

Through beautiful mountain scenery the route continues via Dej 50 miles, to Cluj, center of Transylvania historic culture and the stronghold of Magyar sentiment. Here, before the World War, the Transylvanian aristocracy maintained palaces and held a sort of reunion in the autumn and spring between the isolation. of their remote castles and the metropolitan atmosphere of Budapest.

Here, too, the best youth of the region attended the university, which maintained a high reputation in the Dual Monarchy and which is now rated second in Rumania as to faculty and perhaps first in library and equipment.

Although Cluj is the shrine of Magyarism in Transylvania, its native hero, Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary from 1458 to 1490, is, nevertheless, claimed, and with reason, by the Rumanians as one of themselves. He has long been celebrated in their history under the name of Matieu Corvin.

To his Wallachian connection through his grandfather Vogh, who owned a small holding called Hunyad and who married a Hungarian, this son of Hunyadi Janos owes the fact that his equestrian figure, with the hawklike face glowering in pseudo-classic garb from an imposing pedestal in front of the Cathedral of St. Michael, is the sole relic in Transylvania of the centuries of Hungarian dominion.

RUMANIAN RULERS CROWNED IN ALBA IULIA'S CITADEL

En route south from Cluj to the fourth of the seven towns, Sebesul Sasesc, we passed through its more important neighbor, Alba Iulia (Gyula Fehervar, Karlsburg), whose imposing citadel I first visited in October, 1922, to attend the coronation of the King and Queen of Rumania.

The Romanesque Cathedral of St. Michael, where Hunyadi Janos is buried, crowns the fortress hill, approached across three moats through three heavily carved archways. The ancient church is now flanked by a beautiful but incongruous coronation church in the Rumanian style (see page 325). It was built especially for the celebration of the union of Transylvania with Rumania, on the site where Michael the Brave was crowned as ruler over a united Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia.

The memory of the three queens of that colorful pageant, like "Boris Godonov" done seriously, will always remain with me.

There is little to cause one to linger at Sebesul Sasesc, except, perhaps, to taste

the excellent wine from near-by hills and to view the church, a heavy and not too successful mixture of Gothic and Romanesque. There are few traces of the ancient fortifications and the town is like a village asleep in a fairy tale, its 8,000 inhabitants seemingly invisible as one passes through at the noon hour.

TRANSYLVANIA'S OLDEST SETTLEMENT

HAS GERMANIC FLAVOR

Thence to Sibiu is a run of about 40 miles, through a fertile and thickly settled plain, where the fields show heavy crops of wheat and maize. Sibiu is perhaps the oldest settlement in Transylvania, being identified with Cibinium, a Roman town established in the time of Trajan, when Transylvania was considered a kind.

of El Dorado, from which came much of the gold used in Rome.

Many of the veins worked at that time still produce gold, and more than $14.000,000 worth was mined in Transylvania in 1921, including the pale gold from which was made the medieval crown for the coronation of the Queen.

But Sibiu's Roman ruins have been completely superseded by medieval walls, towers, and palaces. It is a town built on a gigantic plan, its wide spaces, towers, moats, squares, cathedrals, and palaces all being designed for nonexistent crowds. Its 30,000 inhabitants might easily be accommodated in a quarter of the space which the town occupies.

Sibiu seems to have been conceived as a setting for a Wagnerian opera, but neither the loudest tenor nor the most discordant cymbals could arouse the echoes.

SIBIU HAS MANY GUIDEBOOK SIGHTS

Sibiu remains to-day more Saxon than Saxony, and neither the Hungarian culture formerly imposed, nor the Rumanian now enjoined, seems to have any effect on its Germanic flavor.

Of sights, in the guidebook sense, it has its full share. The cathedral, with its monumental effigies of the long-dead burghers, looking in their sculptured ruffs well-nigh as lively as their descendants in the streets, is well worth a visit.

An excellent collection of early Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Brunkenthal Museum, formerly the palace of the governor of Transylvania, contains splendid specimens of those schools, including Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, Brueghel, Jordaens, and Frans Hals the Younger.

North from Sibiu we drove toward Medias, the sixth of the seven towns. En route we stopped at an orchard farmhouse for a glass of milk. The old wife refused payment for her rural hospitality, and, on being pressed to accept something, said that she would deem it a favor if we would drive her daughter and granddaughter back to town.

We gladly acquiesced and a shy young woman with an infant in her arms seated herself beside the chauffeur. She adjusted her sailor hat atop the kerchief binding her flaxen hair, clutched the baby tightly with one hand and the side of the

town.

The old city contains little of note save a fortified church and an ancient gateway, formerly part of the fortifications. But we were chiefly interested in our passengers. The rush of wind had deranged the mother's kerchief and strands of hair protruded, to her great confusion.

As we drew up before her dwelling, a one-story structure with a long-shuttered façade toward the street, two of the neighbors peered from their windows, and our guest hastened her thanks for the first automobile ride of her life, in order to escape the prying eyes of the neighborhood gossips.

SIGHISOARA LEAST TOUCHED BY
MODERNITY

We approached the last in the circle of the seven castle towns, Sighisoara, toward sunset. Its walled citadel and battlements and its turreted clock tower were outlined

It is a small city which overflowed some 200 years ago from the narrow confines of the inclosed citadel that still houses in its inaccessible mansions a goodly number of the 11,000 inhabitants who must make all their journeys on foot, as no vehicles can reach the summit.

The fifteenth-century castle church crowning the hill was built for strength rather than for beauty, but has attained a rugged charm, with its thick walls and slitlike Gothic windows.

Sighisoara is 65 miles from Brasov, the starting point of our journey, and is perhaps the least touched by modernity of these seven cities which have played so large a part in the history of Transylvania. For this reason we determined to conclude our tour of the province in this city, which united the charms of all the others.

AN'S conquest over Nature was

M

never more forcefully asserted than when members of the Alexander Hamilton Rice Scientific Expedition_recently flew to the headwaters of the Parima River, in northwestern Brazil. The upper Amazon Basin is one of the last of the world's blind spots to succumb to the persevering curiosity of the explorer. For many years attempts had been made in vain to penetrate the dense jungles which cover it, and to navigate the seething rapids that block its rivers, but the undertaking has now been proved entirely feasible from the air.

Where the untrodden jungle presented a matted and almost impenetrable wall to men on foot, it surrendered its secrets readily to men in the sky. The hostile Indians who had hindered previous expeditions could not obstruct a plane flying 3,000 feet above them, and no ground scout, however skillful, could match an aviator in ferreting out the easiest trails to be followed and forewarning of obstacles to be met and overcome. Our hydroplane served as the eyes of the expedition.

Our party assembled in Manáos, Brazil, on July 6, 1924, and consisted of Dr. Rice, director; Dr. Koch-Grünberg, ethnologist; Dr. George Shattuck, physician; Weld Arnold, cartographer; Charles C. Bull, assistant; John C. Couzens, engineer; Walter Hinton, airplane pilot; John E. Wilshusen, airplane mechanic; John W. Swanson and Thomas S. MacCaleb, radio-telegraphists; Hermann Dengler, draftsman; Silvino Santos, film operator; Ramundo Camara, assistant; and myself, as observer and aerial photographer. With the Indian porters and paddlers, our party numbered more than 100.

The variety of professions represented on its staff suggests the variety of the objectives of the expedition. Dr. Rice set the following program:

To survey and map the Rio Branco and its western affluent, the Rio Uraricoera, following the latter to its source in the Serra Parima, and to ascertain whether any passage existed between the headwaters of this river and those of the Orinoco, thus tying this survey to the one carried out on the leader's 1919-20 expedition.