The left bank is as flat as the banks of the Rhine below Cologne, but the right bank is high, occasionally well wooded, and not devoid of a certain tame picturesqueness.

Early on the second day the steamer reaches Kazan, once the capital of an independent Tartar khanate, and still containing a considerable Tartar population.

Several metchets (as the Mahometan houses of prayer are here termed), with their diminutive minarets in the lower part of the town, show that Islamism still survives, though the khanate was annexed to Muscovy more than three centuries ago; but the town, as a whole, has a European rather than an Asiatic character.

If any one visits it in the hope of getting "a glimpse of the East," he will be grievously disappointed, unless, indeed, he happens to be one of those imaginative tourists who always discover what they wish to see.

And yet it must be admitted that, of all the towns on the route, Kazan is the most interesting.