In five minutes we had the boat on the davits again and the anchor on deck, and were beating down the coast. At five, a bend in the coast showed the white glimmer of the Sulina beacon, and we cut her speed down to a few knots, for our haven was in sight. Two hours later we crossed the bar and steamed into the Danube, and I went below for the hour that remained before daylight. CHAPTER VIII _We Send Our Cable and Find Ourselves with Five Francs and Expenses of $200 a Day, but Make a Financial Coup d’Etat and Sail for the Crimean Peninsula_ The Danube, some twenty miles before it reaches the sea, spreads out in an enormous delta and empties into the Euxine through three mouths, St. George’s to the south, Sulina mouth in the middle and Rilia to the north. The Sulina being the main artery of navigation was the one that interested us. Its channel has been cut in a straight line for perhaps eight miles from the sea, so that it looks more like a great canal than a river. Two breakwaters jut out for half a mile beyond the mouth to keep the silt brought down by the great volume of water from spreading out in a bar at the entrance of the channel. Two enormous steam dredges live between these breakwaters and spend their entire time in keeping the channel deep. The country all around the mouth is flat and swampy, and the little town is built on made ground, and, like Port Said and Suez, lives off the shipping that passes to and fro in the river. Until I saw Sulina on the map as the nearest cable station to Odessa, I had never heard of it, and was amazed to find it one of the big grain shipping centers of Europe. Many of the large steamers tie up there and load from elevators and barges. Roumania, it appears, is one of the most Utopian little states in Europe. The people are the left-overs of the high tide of the Roman Empire. When the centuries were countable on the fingers of one hand, the Romans settled the country. When the Vandals swept down on Rome, the arms of her prestige curled in like the tentacles of an anemone, leaving this little isolated community to struggle down through the storms of history. Though a thousand miles separates this little lake of Romans from the spring that poured them at its flood, the community grew and waxed strong and held itself intact in the furnace of turmoil and clash of medieval history. Roumania to-day is about the size of New York State. The Danube, her great artery, waters a plain as fertile as any in the world. Each year from seventy-five to a hundred million bushels of grain come down that river for shipment to the outer world. Sulina town is a handful of houses stretching along the river. Dozens of steamers lie alongside the stone embankment receiving their cargoes. Floating elevators, shrouded in the mist of their own dust, shoot the torrents of golden grain into the hatches that gape expectantly in the decks of the great sea-tramps.