The bare rocks, white and grey, sometimes rising sheer from the deep water, sometimes with steep slopes covered with high beech, oak, and walnut forests; the winding road along the left, successively take the eye and impress the memory with a series of wonderful pictures. At times it reminded me of some of the gorges in the Canadian rockies, in the way in which it presents “in the most striking combination, all those qualities, features and appearances which are the essential constituents of sublimity in natural landscape”; and it is made the more impressive by the knowledge that it has been a centre of the struggles between East and West, that it was one of the routes, the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of which were conquered by the indomitable Romans. We see in imagination the narrow path along which toiling slaves must have passed dragging the heavy boats against the powerful current. History adds its glamour to a scene that is naturally grand. Near the village of Dubova on the Hungarian side, the Danube reaches its narrowest point for many hundreds of miles--not much wider than it is at far distant Ulm--the bases of the massive rocks reaching so near that as we approach they seem, as above Visegrád though far more grandly, to form the end of a land-locked lake. The passage is reduced to a hundred and twenty yards where the river has forced its way through the rocky barrier here, and looking back, the scene is no less strikingly fine than as we approached. Such a scene as this might well have been in Shelley’s mind when he wrote: “I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains”; or when he described-- “The vast ravine whose rifts did pour Tumultuous floods from their ten thousand fountains.” After passing this narrowest part, the channel begins to widen out immediately. The mountains on the left begin to fall away, and as we emerge from the gorge we have the Hungarian village of Ogradena on the left, and, opposite, a large tablet, cut on the face of the precipitous rock, which is a direct link with the Roman occupation of this territory nearly two thousand years ago. It is not possible, as the steamer bears us swiftly down the stream, to see the details of the time-worn inscription, which is supposed to commemorate at once the completion of the wonderful river-side road from near Orsova to Galambócz (Golubacz), and the Dacian campaign of the year 103. The inscription--amid much defaced ornamentation--has been read as-- IMP. CÆS. D. NERVÆ. FILIUS. NERVA. TRAJANUS. AUG. GERM. PONT. MAX....