Wiborg I found to be the third city of Finland in point of population. It is situated at the end of a large bay where a review of the Russian Baltic fleet is generally held every summer. There is nothing in Wiborg calculated to especially interest strangers, who in fact, only visit it en route to the celebrated falls of Imatra, some forty miles distant to the north. These falls may be reached both by canal and post-road. It is best perhaps to go by one and return by the other. Every morning a small steamer leaves Wiborg for Lake Saima, " the thousand isles " — recalling, but not resem bling, those in the St. Lawrence River. Lake Saima is nearly as large as Lake Wenern in Sweden. The Saima Canal is a grand triumph of engineering skill, being in some respects not unlike the Gotha Canal, to which I devoted a recent chapter. It was con structed at a cost of $2,000,000, by a Swedish engineer, in 1856. The lake is 256 feet above the Gulf of Fin land, and it has therefore been found necessary to con struct as many as twenty-eight locks to withstand so great a pressure of water as this difference in level naturally implies. These locks are most substantially built of the famous granite rock of Helsingfors. From a town on the lake we are forwarded by diligence to Imatra, where I find an immense but well-kept hotel.
The falls have been misnamed, since there is no perpendicular descent of water; they deserve rather to be designated as rapids. They vividly recalled those in the Niagara River below the suspension bridges. They are formed by the rushing of a small river between steep granite walls. The violence and roar of the water are appalling. The rapids gradually slope through a distance of about half a mile, the whole amount of descent being sixty feet. A capital view of them is obtained from the side of the river opposite the hotel. The style of transport thither is calculated, however, to try weak nerves and giddy heads, for you are drawn across the seething, tempestuous flood in a basket slung on wire ropes. The river must have been of much greater volume ages ago, for the limits of its old bed are clearly defined in the vicinity of the rapids. Here there are several pot-holes, containing boulders which cannot have gyrated for centuries.
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