An example of the excellent writing in A Time of Gifts

To give you a sense of Patrick Leigh Fermor's writing in A Time of Gifts, his travel memoir from 1977 (about his walk across Europe in 1933), here is part of his description of the "nearly amphibian" (!) castles he came upon as he walked along the Danube:

"Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved the short winter days."

Note the excellent use of detail, the tight sentences structure, the limited use of simile, the active voice, and occasional throwback word (moulting, throve), and the surprising way in which he describe the winter darkness, as if the mountains themselves are taking action. He goes on:

"Those buildings look too forlorn for habitation. But , in the tiny, creeper-smothered window, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Who lived in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew?"

Who, indeed? Frightening just to imagine the faint lights appearing at dusk. And note the hilarious reference to the family trees inside these old mansions. Then, among other potential inhabitants, he imagines:

"...a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus mustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark."

Who can top that for a vision of the last remnants of an attenuated aristocracy?