The soil at Posharevatz is remarkably rich, the greasy humus being from fifteen to twenty-five feet thick, and consequently able to nourish the noblest forest trees.  In the Banat, which is the granary of the Austrian empire, trees grow well for fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years, and then die away.  The cause of this is, that the earth, although rich, is only from three to six feet thick, with sand or cold clay below; thus as soon as the roots descend to the substrata, in which they find no nourishment, rottenness appears on the top branches, and gradually descends.

At Kruahevitza, not very far from Pasharevatz, is a cave, which is, I am told, entered with difficulty, into the basin of which water gradually flows at intervals, and then disappears, as the doctor of the place (a Saxon) told me, with an extraordinary noise resembling the molar rumble of railway travelling.  This spring is called Potainitza, or the mysterious waters.

Posharevatz, miscalled Passarowitz, is historically remarkable, as the place where Prince Eugene, in 1718, after his brilliant victories of the previous year, including the capture of Belgrade, signed, with the Turks, the treaty which gave back to the house of Austria not only the whole of Hungary, but added great part of Servia and Little Wallachia, as far as the Aluta.  With this period began the Austrian rule in Servia, and at this time the French fashioned Lange Gasse of Belgrade rose amid the “swelling domes and pointed minarets of the white eagle’s nest."[17]

Several quaint incidents had recalled this period during my tour.  For instance, at Manasia, I saw rudely engraven on the church wall,—­

                Wolfgang Zastoff,
     Kaiserlicher Forst-Meister im Maidan. 
                Die 1 Aug. 1721.

Semendria is three hours’ ride from Posharevatz; the road crosses the Morava, and everywhere the country is fertile, populous, and well cultivated.  Innumerable massive turrets, mellowed by the sun of a clear autumn, and rising from wide rolling waters, announced my approach to the shores of the Danube.  I seemed entering one of those fabled strong holds, with which the early Italian artists adorned their landscapes.  If Semendria be not the most picturesque of the Servian castles of the elder period, it is certainly by far the most extensive of them.  Nay, it is colossal.  The rampart next the Danube has been shorn of its fair proportions, so as to make it suit the modern art of war.  Looking at Semendria from one of the three land sides, you have a castle of Ercole di Ferrara; looking at it from the water, you have the boulevard of a Van der Meulen.