GAY BUDAPEST.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3380, 27 June 1927, Page 7

GAY BUDAPEST.

(By H. J. Greeuwall)

At five this morning a highly-scented, curiy-moustached man entered my sleeping compartment on the train and invited me to produce all the money 1 possessed. He was not an Hungarian bandit, but merely a uniformed Inspector of Customs. For hall an hour after he had withdrawn my a bin was scented) with all the perfumes of Arabia.

The change from Roumania to Hungary is dramatic. One leaves behind squalor, dirt, and inefficiency for a country which the war ruined, but which lias pricked up again quickly. The wide plains of Hungary are dotted with well-built, white-walled, roofed cottages standing in green meadows full of pigs, cows, and sheep. Goose girls tend the birds and their innumerable offspring, little balls of yellow fluff. In the distance there is a blue smudge on tho horizon, the bills near Budapest, and then we slowly enter the famous city which stands on both banks of the Danube. Buda the lower city, Pest on the frowning heights which look down on the yellow, turgid Danube —blue and beautiful, alas! only in that delightful waltz of Herr Strauss, Budapest always reminds me of some exotic amber wine looked at through a cup of powder blue glass. Budapest, unlike its near neighbor Vienna, does not sparkle or scintillate. It is halfOriental, barbarous, gipsy. In fact, it is Hungarian. The beautiful women of Budapest walk with the sensuous sway of the Oriental, their dark, inscrutable faces betray their gipsy origin. They are sad and melancholy in their music, their art, and their theatre, but gay when the spirit moves them. Gipsies. Hungary, this “Royal Republic,” is aching for the coming of a king. The regent, Admiral Hortby, lives in the old Hapsburg palace on the bills of Pest in greater pomp than many inonarchs surround themselves with to-day. Mine. Hortby, who is said to be the most beautiful woman in Hungary, has ladies in-waiting who ride in royal coaches with footmen and coachmen bear the royal arms and have crowns emblazoned on them in place of number plates.