The rocky shoulder of Greben is all scarred and torn by the cuttings
which are gradually eating off its rugged and dangerous spur. Farther
down-stream a breakwater is in course of construction, intended to
divert the current from a shallow; and at some distance below, the great
black masses of drilling machines, all chains and iron posts and
funnels, are seen anchored in mid-stream, where they are constantly at
work blasting out a great ledge of rock which causes the rapids of the
Jur.
The cheery engineers, who had watched our descent of the rapids with
great interest, welcomed us when we landed with offers of substantial
hospitality, and over a good dinner we discussed the one topic which had
for us a common interest--the moods and caprices of the great river.
When we left them, at two o’clock, we had still a paddle of some
twenty-five miles before we should reach Orsova, where we proposed to
pass the night, not thinking it would be possible to camp in the gorge.
There would be no shelter from the violent up-stream wind until we
reached the entrance of the defile, so there was need of haste. Below
Greben the river sweeps around in a great curve from the south to the
north-east, a mile or more in width, then suddenly narrows, and takes a
remarkably straight course through a deep cleft in the mountains, until
it bends sharply towards the south again at the Iron Gates. The gorge
through which it passes is called the Kasan defile, and is far and away
the most impressive and wonderful feature of the scenery along the whole
river. Sheer limestone precipices many hundred feet in height rise up in
grand simple masses on either side, and as we approached the gorge it
looked as if some great convulsion of nature had wrenched the solid
rocks asunder, leaving the deep and narrow chasm for the passage of the
river. Before Count Széchényi built his road along the Hungarian bank,
in 1840, there had been no practicable pathway through the defile since
the great road built by Trajan for his soldiers and his army trains
during his Dacian campaign. At the entrance, where the river is
constricted to a width of only 180 yards, the straight cutting of the
modern highway and the great score in the cliffs left by Trajan’s road
are both prominent features in the landscape. Here the river rushes
violently past a high rock in mid-stream, which causes a dangerous
whirlpool just below, then plunges into the narrow cleft with a volume
of water 200 feet or more in depth, and swirls and boils and throbs with
great pulsations all along its swelling flood. Narrower and narrower
becomes the gorge, higher and higher the cliffs, and strange currents
and ominous whirls break the surface of the dark torrent. In the depths
of the chasm there is almost twilight gloom, and in the impressive quiet
the murmur of the impatient river sounds dull and low, like the breakers
on a far-off sea-shore. Still closer and closer crowd the giant cliffs,
until they almost touch. At last they force the mighty river into the
narrow compass of 120 yards; and then, as if fatigued with the effort of
strangling the resistless flood, withdraw again, and little by little
the current gains its familiar breadth, and spreads out into a pleasant
reach with high wooded hills, enclosing on the north a fertile valley
with ripening cornfields, and piling high on the south their rugged
summits almost perpendicularly
[Illustration: THE KASAN DEFILE]
over the water’s edge. Here the Roman road is almost practicable in
parts, and under a great towering precipice, where a projecting rock
pushes out boldly into the deep channel, the great general caused, in
the year 103, a tablet to be carved in the solid rock, on which may
still be read the inscription:
IMP·CAESAR·DIVI·NERVAE·F·
NERVA·TRAIANVS·AVG·GERM
PONTIF·MAXMVS·TRIB·OT * *
***** RIAE·CO *****
commemorating his victory over nature as well as over man. Nature has
not forgiven Trajan the desecration of this, one of her sublimest works,
and in the lapse of centuries she has gradually eaten away the hard rock
tablet, threatening it with utter destruction, in spite of the
projecting stone above it, until solid masonry supports have been
erected to hold the shattered inscription in its place. As we were
sketching the spot, with its interesting traces of the Roman road
showing where the posts were fastened to the rock to support the
platforms necessary to widen the path, two natives came paddling up
under the edge of the cliff in a dugout canoe, and moored their boat at
the corner, where, on the old Roman road-bed, they had a little fishing
camp. Canoe, implements, dress, were the same as in the days when their
remote ancestors piloted Trajan’s galleys through the dangerous eddies
of the defile. Dacia Felix is now only a name, and a shattered tablet
and crumbling traces of the first great highway along the Danube alone
remain to remind us of the great general’s conquests of this remote
region, and to suggest something of the civilization he founded there.
But the peasant is still unchanged in type and costume, speaks a
language closely allied to the old Roman dialect, tills the ground and
catches fish with the same rude implements that Trajan found in the
hands of the happy barbarians of Dacia Felix.
It was long after dark before we steered our canoes by the twinkling
lights of Orsova to the steamboat-landing there. The tinkle of gypsy
music in the garden restaurant by the river-bank echoed across the
silently-flowing stream, now silvered by the moon, which tardily rose
above the great mountains. We heard again the soft accents of the Magyar
tongue and the intoxicating strains of the csáardás. The wild gypsy
leader poured his music into our eager ears, drawing his nervous bow
under our very hat-brims, lest we should lose some quaver of the
stirring chords. Long into the night we sat there, captive to the music
and the beauty of the moonlit landscape, loath to lose one moment of the
few precious hours that remained to us in bewitching, beloved Hungary.
[Illustration: REMAINS OF TRAJAN’S ROAD NEAR ORSOVA]
Like all frontier towns, Orsova has a heterogeneous population, which
gives interest to an otherwise dull and unattractive place. Besides its
commercial importance on the river, and also on the through railway line
from Budapest to Bucharest, it is, in summer-time at least, the
halting-place for the great multitudes of Roumanians and Hungarians who
resort to the baths of Méhadia, or the Herkulesbad, as it is usually
called, from the old Roman name, Thermae Herculis, a most picturesque
and luxurious establishment of sulphur baths a few miles inland, in a
wonderful gorge of the Carpathians.
Among the motley collection of peasants seen in the streets, the Turk in
all his squalor is met here for the first time on the Danube. By the
Treaty of Berlin, the small fortified island of Ada Kaleh, three miles
below Orsova, was ceded to Austria, and the citadel was ordered to be
razed. But as the whole population consisted of Turks, and there seemed
to be no humane method of getting rid of them, they were allowed to
linger on, not acquiring rights of citizenship in Austria, nor yet
responsible to the Sultan in any way, paying no taxes to either
Austro-Hungary or Turkey. The wily Turk makes the most of his position,
and drives a thriving trade in all sorts of knick-knacks, picks up a
good income out of the crowd of tourists who visit the island for a
sight of a real Turk in his own home, and sells the best tobacco that
can be bought north of the Balkans, and at prices which argue against
his assurance that he has paid duty for it at the Austrian customs. Just
beyond this island the Danube bends sharply to the south-east, and three
or four miles below the Roumanian frontier tumbles its full, broad
current over a great ledge of rocks, which for a mile and a half in
width extend across the river, and leaving only a narrow and intricate
channel for steamers near the Roumanian shore, always dangerous to
navigation, and at low-water impassable except by boats of shallow
draught. In this mile and a half of rapids the river falls sixteen
feet, and the broad defile at this point is known as the Iron Gates.
[Illustration: FROM BELGRADE TO RUSTCHUK]
The Turks originally applied the name Iron Gates (Demir Kapou) to the
rapids just below Drenkova as well as to those near Orsova, calling them
respectively Upper and Lower Iron Gates. The name, which signified
obstructions to navigation rather than natural gateways in the
mountains, is now commonly applied to the lower rapids only, and the
traveller who has passed through the Kasan defile usually expects to
find a still more wonderful gorge at the Iron Gates below. He is sure to
be disappointed, for the Iron Gates are only a series of dangerous
rapids at the point where the river broadens out after leaving the
mountains, and the scenery there is, by comparison with that of the
Kasan defile, tame and uninteresting. With the Carpathian ends the
series of remarkable gorges and defiles which has marked the course of
the river at intervals from its source down, for the vast plain of
Roumania extends from the foot-hills here to the shores of the Black
Sea. The Iron Gates have been since earliest history of great military
and political importance, forming as they do a natural barrier on the
great water-way between the East and the West. According to Strabo, the
Danube ended here and the Ister began, for the lower river was known to
the Greeks as the Ιστρος. There is no record of any mention of the upper
Danube before the first century B.C., when it was discovered by the
Roman armies under Cæsar, who probably gave it the name Danubius. Max
Müller, in his study of the origin of the name of the Danube, says that
the Latin name is probably a translation of the Aryan word _danu_,
which, in the védas, means moist, or an adaptation of the old Persian
word of the same spelling which means a river. It is scarcely necessary
to add that the river has now a different name in several of the
countries through which it flows. The Germans call it the Donau, the
Hungarians the Duna, the Roumanians the Dunari, and the Servians,
Bulgarians, and Russians the Dunai.
The Iron Gates marks in the history of our trip the loss of the Admiral
of the fleet who, having exhausted all the time at his disposal, was
obliged to leave us here, to the regret of all of us and his own intense
disappointment.
The International Corps of Engineers, who are carrying out the
improvements of navigation on all the rapids of the Carpathian gorge,
have begun to cut a canal through the rocks at the Iron Gates along the
Servian bank. The work has been in progress since the autumn of 1890,
and will be completed in 1893. Trajan’s engineers actually completed
part of a similar canal a few rods farther inland, and the material of
the ancient enbankments is now employed in the construction of the
modern dikes. Like the conscientious travellers we were, we inspected
the works, and at the invitation of the engineers, spent a pleasant
half-day there. In common with so many other undertakings the world
over, the labor is mostly in the hands of the Italians, who look exactly
like so many workmen on the Croton Aqueduct. At noon they gathered at
the doorway of the ГОСТИОНИЦА НЕВ ЈОРК--GASTHAUS NEWY JORK--quite the
same as at the corner groceries of the One-hundred-and-something Street
above the Harlem River, and only left the spot during the hour of rest
to watch the futile rage of a flock of Servian and Roumanian geese at a
sleepy Hungarian eagle chained to a perch--an active symbol of a
possible political situation which appealed strongly to the ready
Italian wit.
We had our usual enemy, a violent head-wind, on the day we trusted our
fleet to the mercies of the Pregrada rapids at the Iron Gates, and we
had a busy quarter of an hour escaping the whirlpools and avoiding the
cross-seas. Unable from our low position to judge of the best channel in
the surging waves, we kept as straight a course as the angry and
baffling currents would permit, and came out safely in the comparatively
smooth waters below, where we had a moment to look at the landscape from
mid-stream, and to vote it disappointing after the grand scenery of the
Kasan defile. For a mile or two farther on we found we must steer with
care, for vicious swirls would suddenly appear and almost snatch the
paddles from our hands. Great sturgeon weirs near the Servian shore
marked the end of the violent currents, and after passing these we
floated tranquilly away down a reach dotted all over with gourds marking
the nets and sturgeon lines, which here are set on every side. A
pleasant open country was now before us, with hot yellow hills and a
town on either hand--Kladovo, with brick fortress and modern earthworks,
on the Servian shore, and Turnu Severin high up on a bluff across the
river just below. As we had not yet landed in Roumania, we decided to
coast along the left bank and see if the landing-place was more
interesting than the long straggling modern town which looked so
commonplace and unattractive. As we drifted down close to the groups of
quaint craft, studying
[Illustration: REMAINS OF TRAJAN’S BRIDGE, TURNU SEVERIN]
these novel vessels, the first we had seen with masts and sails, we
noticed, on the river-bank below, the ruined pier of Trajan’s bridge,
and thought we would land there and make a sketch of it. As we passed
the town we saw a soldier in a white linen uniform trying his best to
keep pace with us; but as he made no sign, we did not dream he had any
other motives than those of curiosity. Just above the ruins a party of
soldiers was bathing, a sentinel stood guard in front of a sentry-box,
and a few rods farther down men were washing horses, and women were
beating clothes on the rocks. We turned our bows towards the bank at the
ruined pier, when a sharp hail from the sentinel caused us to look up.
“Keep off!” he commanded in vigorous Roumanian. But we, seeing no
fortifications anywhere, and having no more sinister intentions than the
mild pursuit of art, knew no reason why we should not go ashore where
the natives were at work, and continued to paddle slowly towards the mud
bank. “Keep off! keep out in the stream!” he yelled again. “Is there a
war here?” we asked, with an attempt at humor. “No; but you sha’n’t
land! Keep off, or I’ll shoot!” “Shoot away; you can’t hit!” we
retorted, believing it to be the idle threat of a soldier only half in
earnest. But he grew more and more excited as we approached, and,
drawing a cartridge from his pouch, showed it to us, and pushed it into
his rifle. Just at this moment the soldier whom we had seen running
along the shore came up breathless, and took command of the military
force, promptly ordering the sentry to cover us with his rifle, until
the bathing soldiers might seize our canoes. We held off for a few
moments, just out of reach, and then, thinking the farce had gone far
enough, went ashore and surrendered ourselves to the corporal, the
sentry, and the dozen half-naked soldiers. Armed with two expensive and
hitherto useless passports, we followed the corporal a long distance
into the town to the headquarters, showed our papers to the officer of
the day, who immediately gave us our liberty, with polite apologies for
the annoyance his men had caused us. When we reached the canoes again,
we distributed cigarettes to the bathing party who had guarded our
fleet, and sent a few up the bank to the belligerent sentinel, who did
not scorn the gift from his recent enemy. A little Jew boy standing
near, not having received his share of the cigarettes, remarked, with
some feeling and unconscious humor, “If the sentinel had fired at you, I
suppose you’d have given him cigars!”
Floating down a great loop of the river in a dry and yellow landscape,
we recovered from the excitement of our first adventure with the
military, and, as we went along, watched the chattering Servians
harvesting on one shore, and the Roumanian women, in the simple costume
of white linen chemise, and long woollen fringe hanging behind from the
girdle which binds a brilliantly colored apron to the waist, drawing
water in classic-shaped jars, or spinning
[Illustration: ROUMANIAN PEASANTS]
from the distaff as they walked. Now and then groups of men so
resembling the old Dacians, with loose tunic and trousers, sandals,
broad belt, and sheepskin cap, that they almost looked like
masqueraders, wandered over the arid slopes, spots of brilliant white on
a background of sunny yellow. Even the soldiers we saw at the little
huts which now stood on the bank at frequent intervals, were as barbaric
in appearance as the peasant, and could only be recognized as military
by the accoutrements they carried. Along one placid reach we came upon a
great fleet of dugout canoes, each with two Servians, floating down with
the current, dragging clumsy nets as they went. Landing below the little
village, whose red-tiled roofs peeped out from among thick foliage, they
drew in their nets, towed their boats up against the stream, and,
chattering all the while with incessant vigor, drifted down again as
before. Almost the only houses to be seen on the Roumanian shore were
the huts of the pickets, which occupied every point, and guarded every
possible landing-place. We realized the fact but slowly, and only after
some experience, that we were now under the eye of military supervision,
from which we were not to escape until we should paddle out into the
Black Sea.
[Illustration: SERVIAN FISHING-CANOES]