So great is the deposit carried hither by the many mouths through which the great river discharges itself into the Black Sea, that one authority states that in thirty years the delta was extended in one part by as much as two miles. Only about nine per cent. of the water is discharged by that which has now been made the main navigable channel, by far the greater portion--as much as sixty-seven per cent.--going by way of the Kilia mouths, where in ordinary flood times as much as three thousand cubic feet of mud and sand are poured into the sea per minute. Such is the volume and force of the water poured by the Danube into the Black Sea, that it is said to be “perceptible at the distance of fifty miles from its mouths.” Dr. Edward Daniel Clarke, in the voluminous account of his travels (1798-1802) recorded that “having passed the Isle of Serpents, we fell in with the current of the Danube. So great is the extent over which the waters diffuse themselves, from the shallowness of the sea, that, although the discharge is scarcely adequate to our notions of so considerable a river, the effect is visible for several leagues by the white colour communicated. Dipping buckets in the waves, we observed that the water was almost sweet at the distance of three leagues from the mouth of the river, and within one league it was perfectly fit for use on board. The shore is very flat all the way from Odessa to the Danube, and so low near the river’s mouth, that no other object appears to those who approach the shore than tall reeds rising out of the water, or the masts of vessels lying in the river.” Dr. Clarke’s disappointment as to the “inadequate” mouth of the Danube suggests that he did not realize that the sea coast--“nowhere two feet above the sea”--of the delta between the Kilia and St. George’s mouths is over fifty miles in length. His reference to the Isle of Serpents suggests that, though more than twenty miles to the east of Sulina, the story of that island, the shores of which are reached by its waters, may fittingly form a termination to the story of the Danube.