"The horses began to tremble worse than ever and to snort and scream with fright. I could not see any cause for it, for the howling of the wolves had ceased altogether. But just then the moon, sailing through the black clouds, appeared behind the jagged crest of a beetling, pine-clad rock, and by its light I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling red tongues, with long, sinewy limbs and shaggy hair." - Bram Stoker, Dracula
There were no wolves, but my own entry into Transylvania could not have been more dramatic if Bram Stoker had scripted it.
We had left Bucharest after lunch, stopped briefly at the tombs of the Romanian kings at Curtea de Arges, and threaded through fields of yellowing corn stooks towards the valley of the Olt. By the time we left the riverside monastery at Cozia, a drum was summoning the monks for their evening prayers, as it has every day for the past 500 years. Darkness fell as we began the climb into the wooded peaks of the sub-Carpathians.
The traffic consisted of two contrasting streams. Coming down the mountainside were convoys of semi-trailers headed for Turkey. On our side of the road were wagons loaded with tree trunks, each with a team of straining horses at the front, lashed on by a driver in a tall fur hat.
Some were lit from behind by small, fiery cauldrons spewing black smoke, but more often they were all but invisible in the murk until we braked hard behind the pale spears of timber. The moon, waxing towards full, shone like a pearl from the tar of the river Olt. It began to rain. The wipers smeared the grime of Bucharest across the windscreen. At the summit, the road levelled and we skirted the hollow molar of the fortress that has guarded Red Tower Pass since the Middle Ages.
Transylvania - "beyond the forest" - lies in central Romania, cradled within the horseshoe formed by the Eastern Carpathians and the Transylvanian Alps. Thanks to Hollywood, the region is far better known as fiction than fact, yet the reality of Transylvania needs no embroidery.
Its landscape is still dominated by Saxon-fortified churches, hilltop citadels, palaces and Byzantine churches. In its craggy mountains, shepherds still guard their flocks from wolves and eagles, and their pastures are covered with wildflowers that pesticides and fertilisers have banished from most other parts of Europe. Even its folklore belongs to the Middle Ages - wolfmen, witches and, inescapably, Dracula.
Forget everything you ever learned from the big screen. Compared with the real thing, Bela Lugosi's Dracula was a wimp.
The inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula was a prince who was to become known as Vlad Tepes - Vlad the Impaler. Born in about 1431 in Sighisoara in southern Transylvania, he was the son of the military governor of the region who went by the name Vlad Dracul - Vlad the Dragon. As his offspring, Vlad Tepes assumed the diminutive "Dracula" - son of Dracul. At the time, Transylvania was a frontline state in the battle between Christianity and Islam. This was not a good time to be a prince. The Mongols were still dashing around eastern Europe and the Ottoman Turks, having recently taken Constantinople, were in an expansive mode.
Sent to Turkish Anatolia as a political hostage at the age of 11, Vlad Tepes returned home when his father was assassinated in 1447, and in no mood for trifling. When he finally succeeded his father as ruler of Wallachia, he invited the land-owning boyar families - who had murdered his father and buried alive his eldest brother - to an Easter Sunday feast. He slaughtered the lot.
Under his stern rule, most crimes were punishable by death by impalement, thus streamlining the legal process dramatically. Although his methods might have lacked finesse, Vlad Tepes was a passionate believer in law and order. In disguise, he would shop in the markets and "accidentally" overpay merchants. Those who failed this simple test of honesty were impaled, which ensured the highest standards of probity throughout his kingdom.
The present-day tourism industry of Romania has reason to be grateful to Vlad. Today there are Dracula restaurants, Dracula souvenir shops, Dracula tours and, in the city of Brasov, even Dracula Fast Food.
Conscripted into the myth, Transylvania's Bran Castle - "Dracula's Castle" - certainly looks the part. It sits at the entrance to Bran Pass, a narrow gap in the mountains, spookily towered and surrounded by dense forests. Despite its forbidding stance, it was little more than a customs post, and Vlad Tepes never spent more than a short time there.
Playing the Dracula connection for all it was worth, staff at the castle used to amuse themselves by leaping from coffins, until one day a tourist dropped dead from a heart attack.
Most compelling of all the historic wonders of Transylvania is Sighisoara, the citadel where Vlad Tepes was born. Founded in 1191 on a hilltop overlooking a river valley, Sighisoara has seen it all. Invading Turks, elephants, plague, fires and mercenary armies loom large in its history, although these days it's difficult to stand in its leafy square and imagine that the cobblestones once ran red.
Sighisoara remains a near-perfect example of a medieval town - a compact tangle of battlements and half-timbered houses and cobbled lanes that spiral up the hillside, and a stout clock tower, where medieval figurines parade on the quarter-hour.
The great cities of southern Transylvania - most notably Brasov and Sibiu - are splendidly endowed with palaces, great squares, fountains and opulent civic buildings.
Their business was trade. They prospered by virtue of their strategic location along the main trade routes between the Ottoman Empire and the cities of Europe. The interior of the Black Church in Brasov is decorated with ancient Turkish prayer rugs that were donated to the church by the travelling salesmen of the day, perhaps as thanksgiving for a safe return from the East, or as rent for the use of the church as a storehouse.
Interspersing the cultural jewels are long stretches of Transylvanian countryside that might have sprung from an old engraving - muddy villages where the houses are huddled defensively along the main street, some crowned with stork nests, and in the fields, scarved peasant women sheaving corn.
Paradoxically, it is communism that has conserved Transylvania.
While the delinquent totalitarian Ceausescu razed Byzantine churches and Parisian-style apartment blocks in Bucharest, the countryside was left to its own devices. Apart from a few modern atrocities, Ceausescu's regime underwrote the preservation of the Transylvanian countryside through neglect.
It's a curious fact that Ceausescu - deposed and shot in 1989 - is a closed chapter in Romania these days. "We just want to forget," said Catalin, my guide in Sibiu, when I prodded too much into the recent past.
Vlad the Impaler, on the other hand - now there was a ruler, and Catalin would happily launch into a long reminiscence of some piquant cruelty, as if it all happened yesterday.