For three hundred miles down the
Dalmatian coast not one large river, scarcely a considerable stream,
descends from the too closely towering Dinaric mountains to the sea. If
we turn now to the northwestern angle which formed the shore of the
Roman province of Venetia, we find the coast line broken by at least
seven streams, two of which are great rivers.
These seven streams, whose mouths are crowded into less than eighty
miles of coast, drain an area which, reckoning from Monte Viso to the
Terglon Alps--the source of the Ysonzo--must be four hundred and fifty
miles in length, and may average two hundred miles in breadth, and this
area is bordered on one side by the highest mountains in Europe,
snow-covered, glacier-strewn, wrinkled and twisted into a thousand
valleys and narrow defiles, each of which sends down its river or its
rivulet to swell the great outpour.
For our present purpose, and as a worker out of Venetian history, Po,
notwithstanding the far greater volume of his waters, is of less
importance than the six other small streams which bear him company.
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