direction,
especially of an early morning. Against the dawn in the East are
silhouetted the minarets and domes and the palace roofs of the city;
then, as the light increases, the white buildings are distinguished more
clearly through a purple mist that rises from the waters, until the ship
enters the Bosphorus, gliding past the shipping and the boat traffic
along the shore of the harbor. The beauties of the Bosphorus have been
described in every book of travel that has ever included this section of
the world in its descriptions: it is undoubtedly the most beautiful
waterway that may be found in any country.

Emerging into the Black Sea from the Bosphorus, one strikes the
Bulgarian coast not far above that neck of land on which Constantinople
is built. Along this stretch of coast up to the mouth of the Danube
there are two harbors, Varna and Burgas. Each is terminus of a branch
railroad leading off from the Nish-Sofia-Constantinople line. Behind
Burgas lie the level tracts of Eastern Rumelia, or Thrace, as that part
of the country is still called. But Varna is above the point where the
Balkan Range strikes the coast, all of which is steep and rocky.

Above Varna begins the Delta of the Danube, up which steamers and
heavily laden barges sail continuously, but here also begins the neutral
territory of Rumania, the Dobruja, the richest section of the Danube
basin, which was ceded to Rumania by Bulgaria after the Second Balkan
War.

CHAPTER XLV

THE CAUCASUS--THE BARRED DOOR

We now come to that section of the eastern theatre of the war which
received the least extended notice in printed reports--the barred
doorway between Europe and Asia,--the Caucasus. Not because the fighting
there was less furious, but because the region was less accessible to
war correspondents. The struggle was in fact quite as bloody and even
more savage and barbarous here than elsewhere, for on this front Russ
meets Turk, Christian meets Moslem, and where they grapple the veneer of
chivalry blisters off.

Here again, as in Galicia, we come to a natural frontier, not only
between two races, but between two continents. For here, crossing the
isthmus between the Black Sea and the Caspian, stretches a mountain
range over seven hundred miles in length, rising abruptly out of the
plains on either side. These are the Caucasus Mountains, forming the
boundary between Europe and Asia.

The higher and central part of the range (which averages o