As we went away from Semendria the chief of police was among the party assembled to see us off, and here, we thought, was the opportunity to see whether our passports would be honored. We offered them to the official, modestly at first, but he would not even look at the envelopes. “But they are our passports,” we urged. “They cost us a lot of money and trouble, and if no official looks at them they will be wasted, for they are only good for one year!” But he resolutely declined to have anything to do with them, although we increased the urgency of our request almost to the strength of a demand, and we left, quite ready to believe the statement of a scoffing friend in Budapest, who declared that any one could travel the whole length of the Danube with no more of a passport than a restaurant bill of fare, which would satisfy the officials as well as the best parchment with signatures and seals. [Illustration: RAMA] At Bazias, on the Hungarian side of the river, the terminus of the railway from Temesvár, and the point where the tourist usually takes a steamer for the trip through the Kasan defile and the Iron Gates, there is nothing on shore more interesting than a railway restaurant; but the landscape is very grand and beautiful. The hills completely mask the course of the river as the traveller approaches them from up-stream, and the fine ruin of Castle Rama, on the Servian side, seems to stand on the shore of a large lake with a southern boundary of great mountains. From Rama the river sweeps majestically around to the south past Bazias, and narrows somewhat as it winds among the first great foot-hills of the mountain range, spreading out again after a few miles into another lake-like reach, which in turn has on its southern horizon an apparently impassable chain of mountains--this time the real Carpathians.