Page:Notes upon Russia (volume 2, 1851).djvu/50

the merchandise of the Russians is shipped at this place and carried into Lithuania, and the merchants usually put up at the monastery or at the inn.

I have, moreover, discovered that the Rha and the Borysthenes do not rise from the same source as some think. This I have learned from others, especially from the positive statement of several merchants who have trafficked in those parts. The course of the Borysthenes is as follows: — first, it flows southward past Viesma, then bending eastward, it passes by the towns of Drogobusch, Smolensko, Orscham, and Mohilev; then again turning southward, it passes by Kiev, Circassia, and Otzakov, and finally, falls into the ocean at a point where the sea seems to take the form of a lake; and Otzakov is, as it were, on a corner at the mouth of the Borysthenes. Our own route lay from Orscham to Smolensko, and we brought our baggage by ship as far as Viesma, where there was so great an inundation, that a monk conveyed Count Nugaroli and me a great distance through the woods in a fishing boat, and the horses accomplished the greater part of their journey by swimming.

The lake Dwina is nearly ten miles distant from the sources of the Borysthenes, and as many from the marsh of Fronov. Westward out of it there flows a river of the same name, at a distance of twenty miles from Vilna. It afterwards turns northwards, and falls into the German Ocean (called by the Russians, Vareczkoie Morie), near Riga, the capital of Livonia. It washes Vitepsko, Polotzko, and Dunenburg; but does not flow through Plescov, as a certain author has said. The Livonians call this river, which is for the most part navigable, Duna.

Lovat, the fourth river, is not at all to be compared with the other three. It rises either between the lake of Dwina and the marsh of Fronov, or out of the marsh itself, for I could not completely explore its source, although it is not far from the source of the Borysthenes. This is the river to