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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
Bram Stoker's seminal work, "Dracula," is a masterful blend of Gothic horror and Victorian sensibility, weaving a narrative rich in symbolism and psychological depth. The novel unfolds through the epistolary format, utilizing a collection of letters, diary entries, and newspaper clippings to build suspense and provide multiple perspectives on the haunting figure of Count Dracula. Set against the backdrop of late 19th-century England, the story explores themes of sexuality, fear of the foreign, and the clash between modernity and superstition, positioning it within the context of an era grappling with rapid industrialization and societal change. Bram Stoker, an Irish author and theater manager, drew inspiration from folklore, his own experiences in the bustling urban life of London, and travels throughout Europe to construct this iconic vampire tale. His background in theater imbued his writing with a sense of dramatic flair, crafting characters that resonate with both terror and intrigue. Stoker's fascination with the macabre and the unknown is evident, as is his exploration of the implications of desire and moral transgression, enriching the narrative with layers of meaning. "Dracula" is recommended for its profound commentary on human nature and societal fears, making it not just a horror classic but a pivotal work for understanding Victorian anxieties. Readers seeking a thrilling experience that invites introspection into the darker sides of humanity will find Stoker's tale both captivating and thought-provoking, ensuring its place in literary canon. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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DRACULA
Table of Contents
Introduction
In Dracula, the night advances as modern certainties flicker. Bram Stoker’s novel draws its power from the collision between empirical confidence and an ancient, shape-shifting threat, asking what happens when progress meets something that refuses to be measured. The story’s very materials—journals, letters, and clippings—become small lanterns held up to a vast darkness, illuminating both knowledge and its limits. Borders—national, bodily, moral—are crossed and contested, and the resulting unease feels uncannily contemporary. At its heart lies a drama of vigilance and vulnerability: a community of rational observers confronting a presence that resists reason, testing whether courage and cooperation can hold against predation.
This book endures as a classic because it crystallized the modern vampire myth while elevating Gothic fiction into a keen study of cultural anxiety. Its influence is enormous: Stoker’s Count became a template for countless novels, plays, and films, but the novel’s staying power rests on more than iconography. It binds terror to texture, embedding dread in weather reports, medical notes, and legal transactions. Critics and creators return to it to parse its layered tensions—modernity and myth, public order and private desire, nation and outsider. Its imaginative reach and structural daring secured it a permanent place in the literary conversation about fear, progress, and otherness.
Written by the Irish author Bram Stoker and published in 1897, Dracula is an epistolary novel that unfolds through dated entries, letters, telegrams, and newspaper extracts. Set in the late Victorian era, it begins with a young English solicitor traveling to a remote Transylvanian castle, where a courteous yet unsettling aristocrat finalizes a property transaction destined to ripple across borders. As events move to England, a circle of friends and professionals responds to strange disturbances with reasoned inquiry and moral resolve. Without unveiling outcomes, it is fair to say Stoker’s purpose was to craft a gripping tale that harnesses folklore, science, and suspense to probe the era’s deepest concerns.
The novel’s distinctive form is part of its genius. By assembling multiple voices—each with their habits of observation and bias—Stoker layers testimony into a mosaic that feels both immediate and forensic. Typewriters, phonographs, telegrams, and train timetables appear not as mere décor but as narrative instruments, measuring time, distance, and evidence with practical precision. This documentary texture heightens credibility while allowing dread to seep through ordinary routines. Readers become investigators alongside the characters, weighing dates, cross-referencing details, and sensing how minor discrepancies carry ominous weight. The effect is an uncanny realism, in which horror is not a rumor but a case carefully assembled before our eyes.
Dracula also reimagines the geography of Gothic terror. Instead of sequestering fear solely in crumbling castles and storm-lashed heights, Stoker carries it along shipping lanes and railway lines into the rhythms of a modern port city and the drawing rooms of respectable homes. The contrast is deliberate: the sublime, precarious vistas of the Carpathians yield to the crowded streets and bureaucratic confidence of late nineteenth-century England, yet neither setting offers real refuge. Architecture, weather, and landscape are never merely scenic; they mirror the novel’s concerns with thresholds and intrusions. The haunted castle and the gaslit city together compose a map of dread charted by modern travel.
Among the book’s central themes is the unstable balance between science and superstition. Physicians, lawyers, and scholars gather to test hypotheses, apply remedies, and consult archives, while facing phenomena that exploit the gaps in their knowledge. Stoker portrays this tension without caricature: sincere reasoning and ethical conviction are pitted against a cunning adversary who understands fear as well as force. The story contemplates how belief systems adjust under pressure and how collaboration across disciplines—and temperaments—can constitute a moral technology. In this sense, Dracula dramatizes the late Victorian effort to reconcile empirical vigilance with older wisdoms, charting the fragile frontier where evidence meets intuition.
The novel also navigates the era’s debates about desire and gender. Images of appetite, restraint, and transgression pulse beneath the narrative’s respectable surfaces, revealing the strain of maintaining social scripts under the weight of hidden longings. Stoker engages contemporary discussions about the New Woman and men’s roles, not through treatise but through encounters that complicate idealized domestic order. Intimacy, guardianship, and consent become high-stakes matters of health and identity, and the body emerges as both a vulnerable boundary and a field of contested meaning. Without resorting to prurience, the book foregrounds how fear and attraction can be intertwined—and how ethics are tested where they converge.
Blood, in particular, is the novel’s most charged motif, carrying medical, moral, and cultural resonance. At a time shaped by evolving understandings of contagion and transfusion, Stoker treats blood as a record of kinship, a conduit of power, and a vulnerable threshold. The language of diagnosis, symptoms, and treatment permeates the pages, placing the crisis within the realm of casework while leaving space for the uncanny. This dual framing intensifies the story’s urgency: the threat is bodily and metaphysical at once. Readers feel the stakes not only in the suspense of pursuit, but in the intimate fear of contamination, inheritance, and the fragility of vitality.
Dracula’s cultural impact is extraordinary. Stage adaptations swiftly followed publication, and cinema etched the Count into collective memory—from Nosferatu in 1922 to Universal’s 1931 interpretation and later Hammer Films, each reshaping but reaffirming Stoker’s vision. Subsequent authors and creators have extended or resisted its template, yet they do so in reference to the standard it set: the aristocratic predator, the investigative ensemble, and the fusion of folklore with modern settings. The novel’s afterlife confirms its generative power; whether in literary experiments, television serials, or graphic narratives, its motifs are recycled and reimagined because they capture persistent anxieties with elegant, enduring clarity.
Stoker’s craft reflects patient research and theatrical sensibility. As a longtime theater manager in London, he understood pacing, staging, and the choreography of ensemble scenes; those skills shape the book’s alternating quiet and crescendo. He drew on travel, folklore, and documented practices to anchor the uncanny in recognizable procedures, visiting coastal Whitby—a site that becomes central to the novel’s English settings—and mining archives for telling detail. Rather than inventing a world ex nihilo, he curated a plausible reality into which terror could convincingly intrude. His intention was not merely to frighten, but to build a moral and psychological architecture around dread, so that fear resonates beyond the final page.
Reading Dracula today is to experience a master class in controlled escalation. The novel starts with curiosity and unease, proceeds through diagnosis and coordination, and builds toward determination and pursuit, each stage refining the characters’ understanding and resolve. Its emotional palette includes horror, pity, loyalty, and courage, and its atmosphere blends investigative excitement with deepening melancholy. The epistolary frame invites intimacy, making readers privy to private reflections even as a public threat grows. The result is a narrative that feels both communal and personal: a record of collective endeavor under extraordinary pressure, and a reminder that choices of trust and action are the true levers of fate.
Dracula remains relevant because it dramatizes questions that do not expire: how communities face the unfamiliar, how technology and belief intersect, how bodies and borders are protected or breached, and how ethical commitments withstand fear. Its themes—modernity versus ancient menace, the seductions of power, the resilience of friendship—continue to engage readers seeking more than jump scares. The book invites us to think about vigilance without paranoia, compassion without naiveté, and courage without bravado. That is why it has endured: not only as a founding text of vampire lore, but as a resonant study of human responses to darkness, written with precision, ingenuity, and haunting grace.
Synopsis
Bram Stoker’s Dracula unfolds through diaries, letters, telegrams, and newspaper clippings, creating a mosaic of perspectives that track a mysterious threat linking Transylvania and England. The story begins with Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, traveling east to finalize a property transaction with an aristocrat named Count Dracula. Harker records his journey into remote mountains, noting local superstitions and unsettling warnings. The epistolary structure grounds the narrative in firsthand testimony, establishing tone, place, and key correspondents, including Harker’s fiancée, Mina Murray, and her friend Lucy Westenra. This framework also introduces themes of observation, evidence, and the tension between rational inquiry and uncanny events.
At the Count’s castle, Harker encounters lavish hospitality set against pervasive isolation. Servants are absent, doors lock inexplicably, and his host appears mainly at night, deflecting questions about customs and lineage. Odd incidents accumulate: warnings go unheeded, mirrors are discouraged, and unexplained movements suggest Harker is watched. Gradually, he understands he is a captive rather than a guest, and his legal work enables the acquisition of multiple properties in London. Crates and preparations indicate an impending journey westward. Harker’s entries shift from professional notes to urgent pleas, charting his attempts to retain reason while plotting a risky escape from the fortress.
The narrative moves to the English coast, where Mina Murray visits the seaside town of Whitby while corresponding with Jonathan. Her friend Lucy Westenra, admired for her kindness, weighs proposals from several suitors, including Dr. John Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and the American Quincey Morris. Their letters and journals sketch a social circle marked by loyalty and restraint. A storm drives a derelict ship ashore, its crew missing and cargo consisting of earth-filled boxes bound for a new owner. Soon after, unsettling incidents occur at night, and Lucy’s sleepwalking returns, prompting her companions to watch over her with quiet, increasing concern.
Lucy’s condition worsens despite attentive care from friends. Dr. Seward, a psychiatrist who directs a nearby asylum, solicits help from his mentor, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, a scholar whose expertise straddles medicine and obscure traditions. The doctors pursue modern interventions, including transfusions, while also prescribing unconventional protective measures drawn from folklore. Their efforts stabilize Lucy at times, yet strange setbacks follow, often linked to nocturnal disturbances and unexplained punctures. The household institutes vigils and precautions as rumors spread of mysterious figures seen after dark. Through letters and medical notes, the narrative balances clinical observation with mounting unease about the illness’s nature.
Meanwhile, events in London widen the scope of the disturbance. Dr. Seward’s casebook features Renfield, a patient exhibiting cyclical mania and a fixation on consuming life to gain vitality, whose behavior seems to anticipate visitations by a "Master." Reports describe a tall, foreign gentleman acquiring properties around the city and appearing in diverse neighborhoods after dusk. Newspapers note unexplained injuries and anxious rumors, while Harker’s earlier records gain new relevance. The narrative cross-cuts these materials, suggesting coordinated movements and concealed intent. Amid civic normality, an organized threat quietly consolidates power, exploiting gaps between institutions, social decorum, and nighttime vulnerabilities.
Correspondence from all parties is gathered and compared, allowing the characters to synthesize patterns otherwise hidden. Van Helsing proposes that the adversary belongs to a lineage associated with vampirism, a conclusion supported by physical evidence, historical research, and recurring signs. Skepticism yields to cautious acceptance as scientific methods and superstition intersect. The group resolves to coordinate action, pooling skills: legal knowledge, medical practice, linguistic ability, and familiarity with the city’s geography. They document procedures and set rules of vigilance. Protection of vulnerable individuals becomes central, as does limiting the enemy’s mobility and influence through targeted, legally and ethically constrained measures.
Acting on Harker’s documents and shipping records, the allies trace a network of properties connected by the shipment of earth-filled boxes. They infer that these containers function as refuges and seek to sanctify or neutralize them, thereby reducing the adversary’s reach. Searches across churches, houses, and abandoned sites produce both successes and narrow escapes. The antagonist tests their defenses, employing cunning, mobility, and psychological pressure. Surveillance, coded communications, and careful timing become crucial. Each step exposes the group to danger, but also clarifies the strategic map of the conflict, transforming scattered incidents into a focused campaign conducted across London.
Pressed by the group’s interventions, the foe retaliates, seeking to demoralize and divide them. Mina Murray, now closely involved, becomes both a target and a resource, as the team adopts new techniques—such as hypnotic suggestion—to gather intelligence from tenuous links. Medical safeguards, spiritual counsels, and rigorous documentation continue, but time constraints intensify. Evidence indicates the adversary’s retreat toward the frontier from which the threat first emerged. The protagonists organize a pursuit by multiple routes, coordinating rail, river, and overland travel. Their aim is to anticipate movements, restrict options, and confront the enemy before the consolidation of strength in familiar terrain.
As the narrative nears its climax, the journals record a race against season and distance, with each entry narrowing the gap between pursuers and pursued. The characters’ cooperation—combining science, law, faith, and practical skill—embodies the book’s central emphasis on collective resolve confronting predatory isolation. The epistolary method highlights how information, carefully gathered and shared, becomes a decisive instrument. Dracula presents the encroachment of ancient power upon modern society, testing the limits of technology, belief, and social bonds. The story culminates in an organized confrontation in harsh country, its outcome reserved for readers, while the documents affirm purpose, memory, and vigilance.
Historical Context
Dracula unfolds in the late Victorian era, roughly the 1890s, when Britain’s global metropolis and Eastern European borderlands brushed against each other through steam and telegraph. Its locations span Transylvania’s Carpathian Mountains, the Borgo Pass near Bistrița (then in Austria‑Hungary, now Romania), the Black Sea ports of Varna and Galatz, the North Sea harbor of Whitby in Yorkshire, and greater London. The narrative also moves through Purfleet in Essex, Hampstead, Piccadilly, and King’s Cross. The temporal setting is contemporary with publication in 1897, reflecting current technologies and institutions: railways, postal telegraphs, typewriters, phonographs, modern asylums, and policing, alongside older ecclesiastical and folkloric frameworks.
These places embodied stark contrasts in the 1890s. Transylvania and the Romanian principalities lay at the crossroads of Austro‑Hungarian administration, Ottoman retreat, and Romanian national consolidation after 1877–81 independence. Whitby prospered within the coal and shipping networks of the North Eastern Railway and coastal trade. London had become a city of over 5 million inhabitants, stratified by class, with West End affluence and East End poverty. Suburban villas, like those near Purfleet, coexisted with expanding docks, hospitals, and asylums. The novel situates its plot amid this mesh of modern mobility and bureaucratic systems, where distant frontiers could spill into the imperial capital.
By the 1890s the British Empire reached its symbolic zenith, marked by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and a maritime doctrine secured by the Naval Defence Act of 1889. Britain commanded global telegraph cables, a merchant marine dominating Black Sea and Mediterranean trade, and far‑flung garrisons from Egypt to India. Yet the empire faced anxieties: Irish unrest, Boer tensions in southern Africa, and periodic invasion scares. Dracula’s arrival in Yorkshire aboard a foreign ship and his stealthy movement into London mirror imperial Britain’s fear that the periphery could strike the center, challenging the complacency of a nation confident in sea power and bureaucracy.
The Eastern Question dominated European diplomacy in the 19th century, culminating in the Russo‑Turkish War of 1877–78 and the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Romania’s independence was recognized; Bulgaria gained autonomy; Serbia and Montenegro were affirmed; Bosnia and Herzegovina fell under Austro‑Hungarian administration. Black Sea ports like Varna became nodes where Ottoman, Russian, and Western interests intersected. The novel’s maritime route from Varna to Whitby, and references to Bistritz and the Carpathians, situate its menace within this reshaped Balkan geography. Dracula’s westward path figuratively exploits the new corridors opened by post‑Berlin commercial and transport integration between southeastern Europe and Britain.
Vlad III, known as Vlad Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, ruled Wallachia in intermittent reigns between 1448 and 1476–77. Born in 1431 in Transylvania to Vlad II Dracul, a member of the Order of the Dragon founded by Sigismund in 1408, Vlad III fought the Ottoman Empire under Mehmed II. His 1462 night attack near Târgoviște and notorious use of impalement created a durable reputation. Chronicles report forests of stakes and a charnel display to deter invaders. Stoker’s notes reveal he borrowed the name Dracula and select historical associations of frontier warfare and cruelty, transforming a 15th‑century voivode into a supernatural invader.
Late Victorian Britain experienced recurrent invasion and degeneration scares, driven by shifting power balances and technological change. The Franco‑Prussian War of 1870–71 demonstrated the speed of mobilization; the Panjdeh incident in 1885 brought Britain and Russia to the brink over Central Asia; and public debates raged over coastal defenses, army reform, and naval sufficiency. The Naval Defence Act 1889 mandated a two‑power standard, but journalists such as W. T. Stead warned of unpreparedness during the 1884 navy scare. Telegraphy, railways, and steamships shrank distances, while disease outbreaks and immigration controversies suggested the porousness of Britain’s borders. The 1892 Hamburg cholera epidemic heightened fears that pathogens and people could arrive unnoticed at British ports. At the same time, urban crowding and anxieties about moral decline fed theories of national degeneration. Within this climate, Dracula embodies the specter of reverse colonization: a powerful aristocrat from Europe’s contested frontier who exploits modern logistics, loopholes in quarantine, and commercial shipping to establish a base inside the metropolis. He arrives on a storm‑tossed vessel at Whitby, transfers legal property through solicitors, distributes his boxes via rail and cart, and uses the anonymity of London’s vastness to disperse his influence. The protagonists’ countermeasures likewise reflect contemporary defense thinking: information sharing, rapid communication by telegraph and messenger, coordinated pursuit by rail, and the use of maps, timetables, and record‑keeping. The novel thus transforms policy debates about border security, intelligence, and civil‑military preparedness into a narrative of private citizens organizing an ad hoc home defense. It suggests that Britain’s vaunted systems can be exploited by a determined foreign foe, but that coordinated, data‑driven response can repel the incursion. This dramatizes late 19th‑century political anxieties in concrete, operational terms.
Maritime trade connected the Black Sea grain ports with Britain. Varna and Constanța shipped cereals and timber across the Bosporus and Mediterranean to Atlantic markets in the 1880s–90s. Whitby, though smaller than Hull or London, received coastal and foreign vessels and maintained lifeboat and lighthouse services. The notorious Hamburg cholera outbreak in 1892 caused British quarantines and port sanitary inspections under the Public Health Acts. In the novel, a foreign schooner named Demeter reaches Whitby crewless, a storm driving it ashore. Its cargo of earth from Eastern Europe and the chain of ports evoke contemporary fears that ships could carry not only goods, but hidden threats.
Between 1860 and 1897, medicine was transformed. Pasteur and Koch established germ theory; Lister introduced antiseptic surgery in 1867; Charcot and Bernheim debated hypnotism; neurology and psychiatry expanded under institutional frameworks; and X‑rays appeared in 1895. Blood transfusion, attempted since James Blundell’s work in the 1810s–20s, remained risky before Landsteiner’s ABO discovery in 1900. In the book, Dr Seward keeps phonograph case records, Van Helsing fuses cutting‑edge science with folklore, multiple transfusions are administered to Lucy without knowledge of blood groups, and Mina is hypnotized to trace Dracula’s movements. These practices mirror contemporaneous hopes and limits of medical modernity in Britain and Europe.
The 1890s saw the social figure later dubbed the New Woman emerge from concrete reforms: the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, expanding teacher training, typewriting and clerical employment, and higher education openings at Girton College (1869) and the University of London (full degrees for women from 1878). Bicycles and public reading rooms symbolized mobility and literacy. Victorian marital and sexual norms were debated in periodicals and courts. Mina Murray’s shorthand, typing, and systematic archiving reflect these new competencies, while Lucy Westenra’s suitors and her peril dramatize anxieties surrounding female agency and desire. The narrative registers Britain’s unsettled gender politics.
Metropolitan policing had professionalized since 1829, with a Criminal Investigation Department formed in 1878; yet the Whitechapel murders of 1888, attributed to the unknown killer called Jack the Ripper, exposed investigative limits, sensationalist press dynamics, and the vulnerability of urban women. Forensic science was embryonic; fingerprinting would be adopted in England in 1901. In the novel, the protagonists often work around or ahead of official authorities, coordinating private surveillance, following receipts, and piecing together evidence from diaries and bills of lading. This reflects a society where public security institutions coexisted uneasily with private networks and press‑driven detective enthusiasm.
Vampire beliefs in Habsburg‑ruled Serbian territories sparked European attention in the 1720s and 1730s, with investigations at Medvegia and accounts of Arnold Paole circulating widely. Maria Theresa’s mid‑18th‑century reforms, advised by physician Gerard van Swieten, discouraged exhumations and stakeings as superstition. In the 19th century, ethnographers cataloged Carpathian legends; Emily Gerard’s essay Transylvanian Superstitions (1885) and her book The Land Beyond the Forest (1888) offered English readers a lexicon of nosferatu, strigoi, charms, and apotropaic practices. The novel draws directly on such compilations, embedding Eastern European folk practices within a modern Western frame to stage a collision of belief systems.
Railways and telegraphs stitched Europe together by the 1890s. The Orient Express began service in 1883, symbolizing rapid travel between Paris and the Balkans. In Britain, the North Eastern Railway linked Whitby to regional centers; parcel post and money orders accelerated commerce; the General Post Office telegraph network provided near‑instant communication. The typewriter (Remington’s 1870s models) and Edison’s 1877 phonograph modernized documentation. In the novel, journey times, train tables, and wire messages are crucial to strategy; typed transcripts become a shared database; phonographic notes preserve clinical detail. Technology enables both Dracula’s mobility and his pursuers’ coordinated, data‑centric response.
Born in Dublin in 1847, Bram Stoker matured amid Irish constitutional turmoil. The Land War (1879–82), the Irish National Land League, and the First and Second Home Rule Bills (1886, 1893) split the United Kingdom over sovereignty and local autonomy. Fenian dynamite campaigns in London between 1881 and 1885 heightened fears of internal subversion. Stoker, long resident in London as manager of the Lyceum Theatre, navigated Anglo‑Irish networks with unionist sympathies. The book’s preoccupation with borders, loyalty, and a coordinated metropolitan response to a stealthy foe resonates with late Victorian debates over how a liberal empire should police its own integrity.
The Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869 subjected women in garrison towns to compulsory examinations, prompting intense protest and repeal in 1886. Syphilis and tuberculosis haunted medical reports; eugenic ideas were coined by Francis Galton in 1883; Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) framed cultural decline as pathology. Blood, purity, and contamination acquired quasi‑political meanings. In the book, the exchange of blood through transfusions, vampiric bites, and the spread of corruption through intimate contact echo public health and sexual anxiety. Lucy’s wasting illness and Mina’s infection literalize debates about invisible contagion, moral panic, and the policing of bodies.
London’s population rose from 3.2 million in 1861 to over 6 million by 1901, creating stark contrasts between West End opulence and East End overcrowding. Bazalgette’s sewers in the 1860s improved sanitation, yet slum conditions persisted. After pogroms in the Russian Empire from 1881, immigrants arrived in the metropolis, provoking nativist agitation that culminated in the Aliens Act of 1905, after the novel’s publication. Docklands, warehouses, cemeteries, and suburban villas formed a mosaic of thresholds and liminal spaces. Dracula’s lairs at Carfax and Piccadilly exploit the city’s compartmentalized geography, while the heroes’ taxis, trains, and messaging trace the pathways of modern urban life.
By yoking folklore to stenographs, and medieval titles to deeds of purchase registered by London solicitors, the novel interrogates the self‑confidence of a bureaucratic modernity. It critiques the assumption that imperial sea power, professional expertise, and urban policing could neutralize all threats. The foreign adversary uses legal instruments, shipping networks, and real estate to naturalize himself within Britain’s fabric. The group’s response—collaborative, empirical, multi‑disciplinary—suggests a model citizen defense while exposing institutional blind spots in quarantine, law enforcement, and public health. The narrative thus functions as a political fable about the limits of Victorian systems under stress.
It also exposes social tensions. Class divides are visible in the dependence on servants, coachmen, and asylum attendants, whose labor makes elite mobility possible yet whose vulnerability is easily exploited by predation. The treatment of Roma intermediaries and Eastern peasants reflects imperial hierarchies and xenophobic caricature, inviting readers to scrutinize British stereotypes about Europe’s margins. Gender politics are critiqued as Mina’s competence is alternately prized and constrained by protective paternalism. The motif of infection questions moralized public health measures that targeted women. In presenting fear of outsiders alongside failures of institutions, the book offers a caution against complacent power and prejudicial governance.
Author Biography
Bram Stoker (1847–1912) was an Irish novelist and theatre manager, best known for the Gothic masterpiece Dracula (1897). Working across the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, he combined administrative discipline with imaginative breadth, producing fiction that helped define the modern vampire and invigorate horror’s engagement with urban life, travel, technology, and superstition. Stoker’s dual career—first as a civil servant and critic in Dublin, then as business manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre—placed him at the intersection of popular entertainment and literary culture. His novels and stories traverse folklore-inflected romance, sensation, and supernatural terror, while his nonfiction reflects a practical mind attuned to institutions, performance, and readership.
Raised in the Dublin suburb of Clontarf, Stoker endured a prolonged childhood illness before experiencing robust health in adolescence, an oft-noted biographical arc that parallels his later fascination with vitality and decay. He studied mathematics at Trinity College Dublin in the 1860s, where he was active in athletics and debating societies and began publishing reviews and essays. During these formative years he developed a lasting admiration for Walt Whitman, expressed in correspondence that reveals his engagement with broader transatlantic literary currents. Irish storytelling traditions and the Gothic fiction of figures such as Sheridan Le Fanu also provided models, sharpening his sense of atmosphere, place, and moral ambiguity.
After university Stoker entered the Irish civil service, working at Dublin Castle, where he built a reputation for diligence and organizational skill. He began writing theatre criticism for the Dublin Evening Mail, cultivating a voice attentive to performance, staging, and audience response. A laudatory review of the actor Henry Irving initiated a professional connection that proved decisive. In the later 1870s Stoker moved to London to become Irving’s business manager at the Lyceum Theatre, a post he would hold for decades. The role involved touring, finances, and publicity, exposing him to international venues and the mechanics of spectacle while leaving late-night hours for fiction.
Stoker published across genres even as theatrical responsibilities intensified. His early fiction included the children’s collection Under the Sunset (1881) and the novel The Snake’s Pass (1890). Mid-1890s experiments such as The Watter’s Mou’ and The Shoulder of Shasta explored coastal settings, peril, and romance. With Dracula he synthesized travel impressions, contemporary technology, and folklore into an epistolary narrative of journals, letters, and recordings. Research trips, time spent in Whitby on England’s northeast coast, and consulting library sources on Central and Eastern Europe informed the novel’s geography and mythic texture. The book’s careful structure channels shifting perspectives to produce dread, moral resolve, and momentum.
Dracula received mixed yet attentive reviews on publication and steadily gained cultural traction, eventually eclipsing Stoker’s other books in renown. He continued to publish ambitious fiction, including The Mystery of the Sea (1902), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), and later The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), alongside the substantial memoir Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906). These works revisit themes of perilous discovery, archaeology, spectral threat, and modern communications. Critics have noted his interest in legal procedure and professional expertise, visible from his earlier manual The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879) to narrative problem-solving in his novels.
Stoker’s fiction is marked by tension between empiricism and the uncanny: doctors, lawyers, and record-keepers confront enigmas framed by superstition and borderlands. Telegraphy, typewriting, and phonographic recording function as tools of coordination and testimony, aligning with his managerial background. His admiration for Whitman and affinity with Irish and British Gothic traditions sit alongside engagement with continental folklore recorded by nineteenth-century writers, an amalgam that situates fear within modern networks of travel and information. While primarily a craftsman of popular narrative, he also articulated views on professionalism and the theatre through published commentary, reinforcing his status as a mediator of stage and page.
After the death of Henry Irving in the early 1900s, Stoker devoted increased attention to writing and to preserving the Lyceum’s memory while contending with periods of ill health. He died in London in 1912. Posthumously, Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914) gathered uncollected tales and cemented his reputation as a writer of unsettling atmosphere and narrative drive. Stage versions of Dracula in the 1920s and film adaptations in the 1930s accelerated the novel’s global reach. Today his work anchors discussions of Gothic modernity, empire, gender, and contagion, and remains widely read, taught, and reimagined across literature, theatre, and screen.
DRACULA
CHAPTER I.
JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL.
(Kept in shorthand.)
3 May. Bistritz.—Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called “paprika hendl[1],” and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians. I found my smattering of German very useful here; indeed, I don’t know how I should be able to get on without it.
Having some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps of the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a noble of that country. I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina.
In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the south, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the west; and Szekelys in the east and north. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns. This may be so, for when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they found the Huns settled in it. I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.)
I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then. I had for breakfast more paprika, and a sort of porridge of maize flour which they said was “mamaliga,” and egg-plant stuffed with forcemeat, a very excellent dish, which they call “impletata.” (Mem., get recipe for this also.) I had to hurry breakfast, for the train started a little before eight, or rather it ought to have done so, for after rushing to the station at 7.30 I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour before we began to move. It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?
All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear. At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts of attire. Some of them were just like the peasants at home or those I saw coming through France and Germany, with short jackets and round hats and home-made trousers; but others were very picturesque. The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course petticoats under them. The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who are more barbarian than the rest, with their big cowboy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. On the stage they would be set down at once as some old Oriental band of brigands. They are, however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion.
It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontier—for the Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovina—it has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows marks of it. Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease.
Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country. I was evidently expected, for when I got near the door I faced a cheery-looking elderly woman in the usual peasant dress—white undergarment with long double apron, front and back, of coloured stuff fitting almost too tight for modesty. When I came close she bowed, and said: “The Herr Englishman?” “Yes,” I said, “Jonathan Harker.” She smiled, and gave some message to an elderly man in white shirt-sleeves, who had followed her to the door. He went, but immediately returned with a letter:—
“MY FRIEND,—Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well to-night. At three to-morrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land.
“Your friend,
“DRACULA.”
4 May.—I found that my landlord had got a letter from the Count, directing him to secure the best place on the coach for me; but on making inquiries as to details he seemed somewhat reticent, and pretended that he could not understand my German. This could not be true, because up to then he had understood it perfectly; at least, he answered my questions exactly as if he did. He and his wife, the old lady who had received me, looked at each other in a frightened sort of way. He mumbled out that the money had been sent in a letter, and that was all he knew. When I asked him if he knew Count Dracula, and could tell me anything of his castle, both he and his wife crossed themselves, and, saying that they knew nothing at all, simply refused to speak further. It was so near the time of starting that I had no time to ask any one else, for it was all very mysterious and not by any means comforting.
Just before I was leaving, the old lady came up to my room and said in a very hysterical way:
“Must you go? Oh! young Herr, must you go?” She was in such an excited state that she seemed to have lost her grip of what German she knew, and mixed it all up with some other language which I did not know at all. I was just able to follow her by asking many questions. When I told her that I must go at once, and that I was engaged on important business, she asked again:
“Do you know what day it is?[1q]” I answered that it was the fourth of May. She shook her head as she said again:
“Oh, yes! I know that, I know that! but do you know what day it is?” On my saying that I did not understand, she went on:
“It is the eve of St. George’s Day[2]. Do you not know that to-night, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Do you know where you are going, and what you are going to?” She was in such evident distress that I tried to comfort her, but without effect. Finally she went down on her knees and implored me not to go; at least to wait a day or two before starting. It was all very ridiculous, but I did not feel comfortable. However, there was business to be done, and I could allow nothing to interfere with it. I therefore tried to raise her up, and said, as gravely as I could, that I thanked her, but my duty was imperative, and that I must go. She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind. She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round my neck, and said, “For your mother’s sake,” and went out of the room. I am writing up this part of the diary whilst I am waiting for the coach, which is, of course, late; and the crucifix is still round my neck. Whether it is the old lady’s fear, or the many ghostly traditions of this place, or the crucifix itself, I do not know, but I am not feeling nearly as easy in my mind as usual. If this book should ever reach Mina before I do, let it bring my good-bye. Here comes the coach!
5 May. The Castle.—The grey of the morning has passed, and the sun is high over the distant horizon, which seems jagged, whether with trees or hills I know not, for it is so far off that big things and little are mixed. I am not sleepy, and, as I am not to be called till I awake, naturally I write till sleep comes. There are many odd things to put down, and, lest who reads them may fancy that I dined too well before I left Bistritz, let me put down my dinner exactly. I dined on what they call “robber steak”—bits of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper, and strung on sticks and roasted over the fire, in the simple style of the London cat’s-meat! The wine was Golden Mediasch, which produces a queer sting on the tongue, which is, however, not disagreeable. I had only a couple of glasses of this, and nothing else.
When I got on the coach the driver had not taken his seat, and I saw him talking with the landlady. They were evidently talking of me, for every now and then they looked at me, and some of the people who were sitting on the bench outside the door—which they call by a name meaning “word-bearer”—came and listened, and then they looked at me, most of them pityingly. I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd; so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out. I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were “Ordog”—Satan, “pokol”—hell, “stregoica”—witch, “vrolok” and “vlkosl[3]ak”—both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either were-wolf or vampire. (Mem., I must ask the Count about these superstitions.)
When we started, the crowd round the inn door, which had by this time swelled to a considerable size, all made the sign of the cross and pointed two fingers towards me. With some difficulty I got a fellow-passenger to tell me what they meant; he would not answer at first, but on learning that I was English, he explained that it was a charm or guard against the evil eye. This was not very pleasant for me, just starting for an unknown place to meet an unknown man; but every one seemed so kind-hearted, and so sorrowful, and so sympathetic that I could not but be touched. I shall never forget the last glimpse which I had of the inn-yard and its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing themselves, as they stood round the wide archway, with its background of rich foliage of oleander and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the centre of the yard. Then our driver, whose wide linen drawers covered the whole front of the box-seat—“gotza” they call them—cracked his big whip over his four small horses, which ran abreast, and we set off on our journey.
I soon lost sight and recollection of ghostly fears in the beauty of the scene as we drove along, although had I known the language, or rather languages, which my fellow-passengers were speaking, I might not have been able to throw them off so easily. Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom—apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the “Mittel Land” ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillsides like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told that this road is in summer-time excellent, but that it had not yet been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadars would not repair them, lest the Turk should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point.
Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling upon them and bringing out all the glorious colours of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water. One of my companions touched my arm as we swept round the base of a hill and opened up the lofty, snow-covered peak of a mountain, which seemed, as we wound on our serpentine way, to be right before us:—
“Look! Isten szek!”—“God’s seat!”—and he crossed himself reverently. As we wound on our endless way, and the sun sank lower and lower behind us, the shadows of the evening began to creep round us. This was emphasised by the fact that the snowy mountain-top still held the sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate cool pink. Here and there we passed Cszeks and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves. Here and there was a peasant man or woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were many things new to me: for instance, hay-ricks in the trees and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the delicate green of the leaves. Now and again we passed a leiterwagon—the ordinary peasant’s cart, with its long, snake-like vertebra, calculated to suit the inequalities of the road. On this were sure to be seated quite a group of home-coming peasants, the Cszeks with their white, and the Slovaks with their coloured, sheepskins, the latter carrying lance-fashion their long staves, with axe at end. As the evening fell it began to get very cold, and the growing twilight seemed to merge into one dark mistiness the gloom of the trees, oak, beech, and pine, though in the valleys which ran deep between the spurs of the hills, as we ascended through the Pass, the dark firs stood out here and there against the background of late-lying snow. Sometimes, as the road was cut through the pine woods that seemed in the darkness to be closing down upon us, great masses of greyness, which here and there bestrewed the trees, produced a peculiarly weird and solemn effect, which carried on the thoughts and grim fancies engendered earlier in the evening, when the falling sunset threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds which amongst the Carpathians seem to wind ceaselessly through the valleys. Sometimes the hills were so steep that, despite our driver’s haste, the horses could only go slowly. I wished to get down and walk up them, as we do at home, but the driver would not hear of it. “No, no,” he said; “you must not walk here; the dogs are too fierce!” and then he added, with what he evidently meant for grim pleasantry—for he looked round to catch the approving smile of the rest—“and you may have enough of such matters before you go to sleep.” The only stop he would make was a moment’s pause to light his lamps.
When it grew dark there seemed to be some excitement amongst the passengers, and they kept speaking to him, one after the other, as though urging him to further speed. He lashed the horses unmercifully with his long whip, and with wild cries of encouragement urged them on to further exertions. Then through the darkness I could see a sort of patch of grey light ahead of us, as though there were a cleft in the hills. The excitement of the passengers grew greater; the crazy coach rocked on its great leather springs, and swayed like a boat tossed on a stormy sea. I had to hold on. The road grew more level, and we appeared to fly along. Then the mountains seemed to come nearer to us on each side and to frown down upon us; we were entering the Borgo Pass. One by one several of the passengers offered me gifts, which they pressed upon me with earnestness which would take no denial; these were certainly of an odd and varied kind, but each was given in simple good faith, with a kindly word, and a blessing, and that strange mixture of fear-meaning movements which I had seen outside the hotel at Bistritz—the sign of the cross and the guard against the evil eye. Then, as we flew along, the driver leaned forward, and on each side the passengers, craning over the edge of the coach, peered eagerly into the darkness. It was evident that something very exciting was either happening or expected, but though I asked each passenger, no one would give me the slightest explanation. This state of excitement kept on for some little time; and at last we saw before us the Pass opening out on the eastern side. There were dark, rolling clouds overhead, and in the air the heavy, oppressive sense of thunder. It seemed as though the mountain range had separated two atmospheres, and that now we had got into the thunderous one. I was now myself looking out for the conveyance which was to take me to the Count. Each moment I expected to see the glare of lamps through the blackness; but all was dark. The only light was the flickering rays of our own lamps, in which steam from our hard-driven horses rose in a white cloud. We could now see the sandy road lying white before us, but there was on it no sign of a vehicle. The passengers drew back with a sigh of gladness, which seemed to mock my own disappointment. I was already thinking what I had best do, when the driver, looking at his watch, said to the others something which I could hardly hear, it was spoken so quietly and in so low a tone; I thought it was, “An hour less than the time.” Then, turning to me, he said in German worse than my own:—
“There is no carriage here. The Herr is not expected, after all. He will now come on to Bukovina, and return to-morrow or the next day; better the next day.” Whilst he was speaking the horses began to neigh and snort and plunge wildly, so that the driver had to hold them up. Then, amongst a chorus of screams from the peasants and a universal crossing of themselves, a calèche, with four horses, drove up behind us, overtook us, and drew up beside the coach. I could see from the flash of our lamps, as the rays fell on them, that the horses were coal-black and splendid animals. They were driven by a tall man, with a long brown beard and a great black hat, which seemed to hide his face from us. I could only see the gleam of a pair of very bright eyes, which seemed red in the lamplight, as he turned to us. He said to the driver:—
“You are early to-night, my friend.” The man stammered in reply:—
“The English Herr was in a hurry,” to which the stranger replied:—
“That is why, I suppose, you wished him to go on to Bukovina. You cannot deceive me, my friend; I know too much, and my horses are swift.” As he spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger’s “Lenore:”—
The strange driver evidently heard the words, for he looked up with a gleaming smile. The passenger turned his face away, at the same time putting out his two fingers and crossing himself. “Give me the Herr’s luggage,” said the driver; and with exceeding alacrity my bags were handed out and put in the calèche. Then I descended from the side of the coach, as the calèche was close alongside, the driver helping me with a hand which caught my arm in a grip of steel; his strength must have been prodigious. Without a word he shook his reins, the horses turned, and we swept into the darkness of the Pass. As I looked back I saw the steam from the horses of the coach by the light of the lamps, and projected against it the figures of my late companions crossing themselves. Then the driver cracked his whip and called to his horses, and off they swept on their way to Bukovina.
As they sank into the darkness I felt a strange chill, and a lonely feeling came over me; but a cloak was thrown over my shoulders, and a rug across my knees, and the driver said in excellent German:—
“The night is chill, mein Herr, and my master the Count bade me take all care of you. There is a flask of slivovitz [the plum brandy of the country] underneath the seat, if you should require it.” I did not take any, but it was a comfort to know it was there, all the same. I felt a little strange, and not a little frightened. I think had there been any alternative I should have taken it, instead of prosecuting that unknown night journey. The carriage went at a hard pace straight along, then we made a complete turn and went along another straight road. It seemed to me that we were simply going over and over the same ground again; and so I took note of some salient point, and found that this was so. I would have liked to have asked the driver what this all meant, but I really feared to do so, for I thought that, placed as I was, any protest would have had no effect in case there had been an intention to delay. By and by, however, as I was curious to know how time was passing, I struck a match, and by its flame looked at my watch; it was within a few minutes of midnight. This gave me a sort of shock, for I suppose the general superstition about midnight was increased by my recent experiences. I waited with a sick feeling of suspense.
Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road—a long, agonised wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night. At the first howl the horses began to strain and rear, but the driver spoke to them soothingly, and they quieted down, but shivered and sweated as though after a runaway from sudden fright. Then, far off in the distance, from the mountains on each side of us began a louder and sharper howling—that of wolves—which affected both the horses and myself in the same way—for I was minded to jump from the calèche and run, whilst they reared again and plunged madly, so that the driver had to use all his great strength to keep them from bolting. In a few minutes, however, my own ears got accustomed to the sound, and the horses so far became quiet that the driver was able to descend and to stand before them. He petted and soothed them, and whispered something in their ears, as I have heard of horse-tamers doing, and with extraordinary effect, for under his caresses they became quite manageable again, though they still trembled. The driver again took his seat, and shaking his reins, started off at a great pace. This time, after going to the far side of the Pass, he suddenly turned down a narrow roadway which ran sharply to the right.
Soon we were hemmed in with trees, which in places arched right over the roadway till we passed as through a tunnel; and again great frowning rocks guarded us boldly on either side. Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches of the trees crashed together as we swept along. It grew colder and colder still, and fine powdery snow began to fall, so that soon we and all around us were covered with a white blanket. The keen wind still carried the howling of the dogs, though this grew fainter as we went on our way. The baying of the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side. I grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses shared my fear; but the driver was not in the least disturbed. He kept turning his head to left and right, but I could not see anything through the darkness.
Suddenly, away on our left, I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The driver saw it at the same moment; he at once checked the horses and, jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. I did not know what to do, the less as the howling of the wolves grew closer; but while I wondered the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a word took his seat, and we resumed our journey. I think I must have fallen asleep and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be repeated endlessly, and now, looking back, it is like a sort of awful nightmare. Once the flame appeared so near the road that even in the darkness around us I could watch the driver’s motions. He went rapidly to where the blue flame rose—it must have been very faint, for it did not seem to illumine the place around it at all—and gathering a few stones, formed them into some device. Once there appeared a strange optical effect: when he stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same. This startled me, but as the effect was only momentary, I took it that my eyes deceived me straining through the darkness. Then for a time there were no blue flames, and we sped onwards through the gloom, with the howling of the wolves around us, as though they were following in a moving circle.
