From the days of the Romans there has been talk of a canal around the Lower Iron Gate; and on the right bank of the river and near the Servian village of Sip, there were traces of the work begun by the Emperor Trajan to this end. In modern times the subject has been discussed, surveys have been made and estimates completed for a series of canals that should carry boats around both the Iron Gates and render the Danube navigable for its entire length. The money could be raised without difficulty, but there is an obstacle to the work in the shape of the political objections of Turkey. No matter on what basis the enterprise is proposed, Turkey has always set her face against it; the “Sick Man” is fearful that a canal round these falls would still further impair his health and therefore he says “No,” and repeats it with emphasis. Time and again the subject has been discussed at Vienna and Constantinople, and always with the same results—Turkey’s opposition.
On one occasion Austria announced that nolens volens the canal would be made, and thereupon Turkey stood up on her ear—she cannot stand easily on her feet—and threatened to go to war when the first spade full of dirt was lifted, and on more than one occasion Turkey has proposed to close the Danube to commerce by sealing up its mouth and permitting nothing but fish and water to pass either way. I am not sure that she did not want to prevent the ascent or descent of the fish through fear that they would carry something contraband. Turkey is a goose and doesn’t know the necessities of the nineteenth century. She ought to close business as a nation and sell out to somebody of decent intelligence.
It was near sunset when we went on board the steamer below the second Iron Gate. We had made five changes in the day; large boat to four-wheeled one, four wheeler to carriages, carriages to boat, boat to carriages at Orsova, and carriages to boat again. We steamed on during the night, and in the morning when I went on deck I had my first view of Turkey. As there were no houses in sight at my first glimpse I did not think it very different from any other country, but as soon as we sighted a town, and the domes and minarets of the mosques came into view, the scene was changed. Northward lay the great plain of Bulgaria, while to the south was Bosnia, a province of the Ottoman empire. The southern bank was more hilly and broken than the northern, and villages were more numerous there. They looked pretty at a distance, but when you approached them nearly, the beauty vanished.
The first Turkish town I saw was the reverse of attractive, and the picture grew no better very fast, as we descended the river. The streets, as I saw them from the boat, were dirty, and there were piles of rubbish just above the landing. The people on shore were as dirty as the streets, and I speedily made up my mind not to ask for a consular appointment to any of the Turkish towns on the Lower Danube.
We didn’t want to go ashore very much, and we couldn’t have gone very much if we had wanted to. There had been some cholera in Austria in the summer, and the Turkish government had established a quarantine against the Upper Danube. Had we chosen to land at Widin or any of the Turkish towns where the boat stopped we should have been taken with a pair of tongs and led into the quarantine station. We should have been smoked, and scorched, and physicked, and poulticed, and dosed for eleven days in a shed with a flimsy roof and flimsier sides, and with no floor, and with no companions beyond natives of the country, fleas, rats, and stray dogs. If we had survived it, we should have been let off at the end of that time to see the next poor wretch put through, and if we had fallen sick under the treatment we should have been sent to the hospital, which is about three times as bad as the quarantine. Altogether the quarantine was not seductive from an aesthetic point of view, and I determined to keep out of it. If any reader of this volume ever has the choice between a kettle of boiling oil and a Turkish quarantine I advise him to take the oil.
At all the landings where we stopped the officials made a great fuss to keep the loafers back, for fear they would take the cholera. We had no passengers for these landings, but we generally had letters, papers, and merchandise. Letters and papers were received with a stick or a pair of tongs and thrown into a tin box, which a boy instantly carried off to a sulphur fire, where its contents could be disinfected.