Servia and the Servians 1862 William Denton

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SEBYI.A .AND f'HE SERYI.4.NS.
steamboat, in its course toward the mouth of the
riv~r, passes on the one side in front of bold cliffs, with
a fertile strip of land at the foot, oftentimes resembling
the Undercliff in the Isle of Wight; and on the other
a line of long low islands, covered with fragrant shrubs,
in which the only sign of life is a small Austrian guardhouse,
or the encampment of half a dozen wood-cutters.
From Bazias, a little above the western entry to the
so-called Iron Gates of the Danube, the scenery undergoes
a change. Near that place the range of the Carpathians
crosses the river, which has broken itself a
course and now flows through a ravine formed during
some convulsion of nature. Here the scenery on
both sides is of the most romantic character, and the
wildness and stem sublimity of the precipices on both
banks of the stream have given to this part of the
country the name of the Iron Gates. It is a portal of
rock, through which the river flows, over ledges which
in some places are barely covered with water. Bold
bluffs of marble and of the hardest limestone rnn
down into the water, whilst gigantic crags of porphyry,
twisted into the most fantastic shapes and tinted with
every colour of the rainbow, are seen in wavy bands or
zigzag moulding, regular as though the workmanship
of man, but on a scale utterly beyond the power of
human hands to rival Masses of many hundred feet
in length present the fantastic appearance of an enormous
agate, scored over with lines of faultless regularity
which seem to counterfeit even whilst they mock the
art of the engraver.
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