It was only two or three days now, to the time when I must set sail for Finland and Sweden on my way home, and so I went to say farewell to some of my new friends, on the heights of the Domburg.
When Crane and I were here a year ago and climbed to the top of this fortified height from which we had our first view of Tallinn, I never thought I should be climbing it again to take tea with friends in one of the old stone houses on its top.
The tremendous flight of wide stone stairs leads boldly skyward through a green park with trees and flowers, and many resting- places, each one facing a lovely view. It rises to a paved street that runs along the top on the right, and on the left slopes more gently down again to the level of the town. In winter this sloping road is reserved for coasting and skiing, the children guarded and traffic warded off by the police. Along the top are the Houses of Parliament that once were a Russian prison for political offenders.
These same persecuted agitators have now turned their former prison into Houses of Law - in their own words, Houses of Justice and Freedom. Opposite them is the cubical red Russian church, with its blue domes, still functioning. Formerly this whole lofty height was the chosen site for the homes of the Baltic aristocrats, but now the various ministries are housed in their former dwellings.
The unpretentious house of Konstantin Päts, the President, is here also, down a side street.
My hostess lived in one of six apartments remodeled from the stables of a deposed Baron, set around a court that was once his barn-yard. The interior was charming, with deep embrasured windows commanding a great view of the harbor far below, and the factories and freight yards surrounding it. Miles of tall chimneys, and gleaming windows, some of them at this hour sheets of gold, stretched for miles down there. The level sun turned the hundreds of railway tracks into straight silvery lines traced on the black earth. Many ships floated on a pink and green sea.
After tea, the women sang to me, according to their endearing custom, songs of farewell, and then escorted me home, down the Short Leg. Tallinn, you must know, has two legs, one long and one short. The Long Leg is a street that plunges down to the level of the walled city somewhat more decorously than the other, but still wildly enough. The street called Short Leg jumps through a tunnel, falls down stairs, wriggles under arches, through court yards, and one church-yard, and lands almost at the door of the Kuld Lõvi Hotel. Stumbling down it, I felt triumphant, for I had gone up the stately front stairs a year ago as an unknown and unknowing visitor from abroad, and now plunged down the back stairs like a family friend.
(To be continued)
A Search For a Happy Country (38)
Järjejutt
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