“Here was indeed the Danube at last, which till then, seen in detail, and most unfavourably, in its swollen and irregular state, we had never comprehended as the great, the stupendous, the noble river which it is. Springing in the very heart of that Europe, of which it is the great artery, and sweeping along with its silver rolling waters, too vast and majestic to be turbulent, undiminished in volume, unvarying in course from land to land, till now, where we could distinguish it far off in the vast plains that lay around us--it came, turning its mighty stream through the green meadows which it fertilized, and rushing deep and wide, as though it had gathered all the rivers of earth to its bosom, beneath our feet, rolled on away to that wild and stormy sea, whose tremendous billows cannot, even for twenty miles, resist its current. The country, of which we obtained a panoramic view from this spot, was but one succession of fertile plains, but the river was still in flood, and the distance rendered the details of the opposite shore quite indistinct.” From Sistov to Rustzuk--a distance of about forty miles the Danube flows past the low, reed-grown banks, broken up and enislanded by ditches and small branches of the stream on the left, and past the low, bare hills of Bulgaria on the right, with little to vary the sameness beyond the passing of islands and the sight of some of the waterfowl with which these lower parts of the river abound. FOOTNOTES: [16] “The Poems of Cynewulf.” Translated into English prose by Charles W. Kennedy (1910). CHAPTER XIII RUSTZUK TO THE BLACK SEA “Swol’n by the tribute of a score of lands The mighty river merges in the sea.” When Rustzuk is reached, the Danube has attained a width of about two and a half miles, the right bank still marked by low hills, the left still flat and marshy. Rustzuk is a large town of about forty-six thousand inhabitants, having a picturesque appearance from the water, with its scattered houses on the hillsides, its trees, and the slender minarets which pleasingly vary the lines of other buildings. Long-regarded as a place of great strategic importance, the town suffered much during the wars of Turkey with her neighbours. It was bombarded by the Russians from the opposite shore in 1877; since Bulgarian independence was assured it has developed rapidly; and, no longer a fortified place--it was dismantled in accordance with the terms of the Berlin Treaty of 1878--is now an important trading centre, having communication with the Black Sea port of Varna. Though most picturesque as seen from the Danube, Rustzuk is an interesting town, its mixed population affording considerable variety of costume, and its large Turkish bazaar retaining much of Oriental colour.