MOSQUE IN SILISTRIA
has played in the history of European Turkey for the last hundred years, we anticipated finding a stronghold far more grand and imposing than any on the river, with the possible exception of Belgrade and Peterwardein. Whatever may have been in past times the strategical importance of the place, it certainly gave us little notion of its strength. It occupies the whole of a low point projecting far into the
FROM RUSTCHUK TO SULINA
river, which here spreads out into a broad shallow reach, filled with long low islands. Along the greater part of the water-front of the town are two walls, one within the other, more resembling embankments to protect the town from inundations than constructions for military purposes. Behind these walls, as seen from the river, domes and minarets rise above the roofs of the town, which rambles back from the river to the great bare slopes behind. All over the tops of the hills are visible the lines of great earthworks, rounded and softened by the weathering of many seasons. After the usual passport formalities, we wandered about the town for an hour or more, waiting for it to wake up, and had sufficient leisure to examine the extensive improvements in progress here, which bid fair to reduce at no distant date the picturesque old town to the commonplace level of a modern city. We could not help, however, being interested in the building of an enormous school-house, which will be, when finished, the most imposing modern structure in the town—a gratifying indication of the successful enforcement of the compulsory education law in Bulgaria.
After the hundreds of miles of uninteresting scenery on the Roumanian shore, it seemed as if monotony could go no further, but opposite Silistria the far-off hills recede still more, the bank grows flatter, and at last degenerates into a swamp, with nothing but the wretched picket huts to break the interminable line of small willow-trees. Sluggish branches of the river straggle off to the left and cut the morass into two large islands, honey-combed with lakes and intersected by lagoons. High grass-covered hills skirt the right bank, and here and there, at long distances apart, villages make irregular brown patches on the yellow slopes. The long reaches become more and more desolate, and in the narrow channels among the numerous islands there is the solitude of an unexplored wilderness, and the banks are a tangle of great trees and undergrowth. Black mud everywhere covers the shallows, and the banks are lined with a sticky, fetid deposit, and sometimes, after sunset, the odor emanating from this mass of river scourings is almost overpowering. We often landed on what appeared to be a hard beach, only to find it a jelly of mud, with a thin crust of sand on top, through which we broke at every step. All the river men we met were suffering from the Danube fever, which, in the lower river, is the constant scourge of the population.
CHAPTER XVIII
