• Nonfiction

• Type: Travelogue

A Time of Gifts is a 1977 travelogue by author Patrick Leigh Fermor. - AsNotedIn

Haste and the weather cut short our farewells and our embraces and I sped down the gangway clutching my rucksack and my stick while the others dashed back to the steps - four sodden trouser-legs and two high heels skipping across the puddles - and up them to the waiting taxi; and half a minute later there they were, high over head on the balustrade of the bridge, craning and waving from the cast-iron quatrefoils.

Places

• Augsburg, DE, Bavaria
• Austria,
• Bavaria, Germany
• Bratislava, Bratislavsky Kraj
• Central Transdanubia, Hungary Maria Valeria Bridge spans the River Danube between Esztergom, Hungary, and Sturovo, Slovakia.
• Danube River, Increasing height laid bare new reaches of the river like an ever-lengthening chain of lakes, and for those rare stretches where the valley ran east and west, the sunrise and the sunset lay reflected and still and an illusion lifted each lake a step...
• Hofbrauhaus, Munich I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips. It was heavier than a brace of iron dumb-bells, but the blond beer inside was cool and marvelous, a brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth.
• Laurenskerk Rotterdam, Rotterdam I hadn't gone far before the door of the Groote Kirk - the cathedral attached to the enormous belfry - beckoned me inside.
• Melk Abbey, Melk A brilliant array of skills, which touches everything from the pillars of the colonnade to the twirl of a latch, links the most brittle and transient-seeming details to the most magnificent and enduring spoils of the forests and quarries.
• Nitriansky Kraj, Slovakia But, by the end of the service a compelling aura of extinction, emptiness and shrouded symbols pervaded the building. It spread through the village and over the surrounding fields. I could feel it even after Kobolkut had fallen below the horizon.
• North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany Beer, caraway seed, beeswax, coffee, pine-logs and melting snow combined with the smoke of thick, short cigars in a benign aroma across which every so often the ghost of sauerkraut would float. - PLF in Goch
• Prague Castle, Prague, CZ But in King Vladislav's vast Hall of Homage the ribs of the vaulting had further to travel, higher to soar. Springing close from the floor from reversed and bisected cones, they sailed aloft curving and spreading across the wide arch of the ceiling....
• Prague, CZ, Czechia
• Slovakia,
• South Holland, It was still a couple of hours till dawn when we dropped anchor in the Hook of Holland.
• St Katharine's and Wapping, Meanwhile St Catherine's Wharf was sliding offstage and upstream, then Execution Dock and Wapping Old Stairs and the Prospect Of Whitby ...
• Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg
• The Valley of the Rhine, Apart from that glimpse of tramlines and slush, the mists of the Nibelungenlied might have risen from the Rhine bed and enveloped the town, and not only Mainz, the same vapours of oblivion have coiled upstream, enveloping Oppenheim, Worms and Mannheim....
• Tower Bridge, London, London half a minute later there they were, high over head on the balustrade of the bridge, craning and waving from the cast-iron quatrefoils.
• Vienna, AT, Austria