Just below Widdin, at the Bulgarian town of Arčer Palanka, the general course of the Danube changes from the south to the east; and to the town of Cernavoda, in the Dobrudscha, about 300 miles below, the river keeps the latter direction with few and slight deviations. The long, straight reaches were here enlivened by many sailing-vessels of the fifteenth-century type, with high ornate sterns, and single mast set midway between the bow and stern. Sometimes
TURKISH QUARTER, WIDDIN
TURKISH VESSELS
we met them gayly ploughing their way up-stream, with every bellying sail drawing full, and again we saw them dragged slowly against the current by a long line of patient Turkish sailors harnessed to a tow-rope; or else we came across them tied to the trees in some quiet spot awaiting a favorable wind, the decks covered with sleeping sailors, no man on watch. The Roumanian shore from Kalafat down for scores of miles at a stretch is as straight and level as if drawn with a ruler, and the landscape on that bank of the river is reduced to its simplest terms. The Bulgarian side is seldom monotonous, and never for any long distance flat and marshy. High grassy hills approach the river, and recede again at intervals, enclosing between their spurs great fertile meadows covered with farms. Here and there on the bare slopes of the rounded hills quite extensive villages are seen, usually at some distance from the river. Many of these are only great irregular collections of hovels dug in the ground and roofed with earth, and even the best of them can boast no more than one or two buildings of a better type than the ordinary hut of sun-dried bricks or of wattle and mud. Most of the habitations, together with the great straw and hay ricks—always the prominent feature of every village—are enclosed by walls of mud or by wattled fences, and the streets, which ramble along casually between these boundaries, are seldom better than gullies or watercourses. The interiors are often surprisingly neat and tidy, even in the rudest hovel, and whitewash is used with freedom.