In the neighbourhood of the Little Iron Gate, above Svinica, the Danube is over a thousand yards wide, and remarkably shallow. Yet when, in a few miles, we reach the Kazán, shut in by perpendicular cliffs, the river is narrowed to a hundred and eighty yards, and is said to be sixty yards deep. These magnificent masses of rock, some bare and jagged, some densely clothed with trees, form a series of beautiful pictures difficult to describe. At one point, on the right, above the nearer cliffs, rises a bold, bare mass showing white against the blue sky, in shape like Beachy Head--but a Beachy Head with wooded mountains for its base. Along the foot of the wall of rock on the left, runs the wonderful Széchenyi road, which has opened up the defile that for many centuries was only to be seen from the water. This road winding about, now a channel in the face of the rock, now bending inland to cross a gorge, sets us wishing for time to walk along it, to see the river from the many points it offers, to visit the little villages seen now and again where the mountains open out into small valleys. It has been said that where the Greben rock was partly blasted away there had been signs of a Roman road built along the face of it. As we go through the Kazán we are shown points where this road was fixed, sometimes against the very face of the cliff. Where modern engineering, by the use of explosives, has cut a highway along the left bank, the Romans, in making their road along the right one, were compelled to make it of timber, fixing the supports into holes bored in the cliff, and presumably strengthening them with struts--or so it was explained to me by a gentleman of Orsova, who had studied the subject. In places, the marks--a narrow ridge cut along a few feet above high water, and holes in which the supporting beams were inserted--are strikingly clear. This path, where it was taken along the rock face, is said to have been about six feet in width and to have formed a covered gallery. Why covered, I have not seen explained, possibly it was as a safeguard from things falling from above, and if so, is a remarkable parallel with the shed tunnels by which the trains running through the Rocky Mountains of the West are protected against snowslides. Where the Kazán gorge has widened somewhat, high up on the mountain, the Veterani cavern is pointed out--a place which takes its name from a gallant Austrian general who, in 1682, with a force of four hundred men, gallantly and successfully held it for three months against a greatly superior force. Some years later, in 1718, it was again held successfully by the Austrians, under Major Stein, against Turkish attacks. Though the entrance to the cavern is small, it is said to provide ample accommodation for a garrison of six hundred men, and is believed to have been utilized for military purposes as early as the time of the Roman occupation. [Illustration: THE KAZÁN]