In its cafions the Dniester River assumes all the characteristics of a plateau river. Its waters generally take up the entire bottom of the canon, leaving very little space for the abodes of men. The incline of the river is not uniform, but constitutes a series of slight steps. Sections with rapid currents alternate with quiet depths. The small brooks which come down the short lateral gorges of the Dniester canons bring great masses of loose stones and rubble into the river bed, as a result of the reckless destruction of forests, and build constantly growing cones of rubble, which the river must remove slowly and laboriously. They also form dangerous shoals and hinder the development of navigation on the Dniester. The river also forms regular rapids, near Yampil, where a layer of granite stretches clear across the river. For this reason the Dniester, tho navigable along a stretch of almost 800 km., has not become an important waterway. The navigation of the Dniester, which becomes more active from Khotin on, is now on the wane. Eight hundred years ago sea vessels were still able to reach the old Ukrainian royal city of Halich.
The floods of the Dniester are famous. In the spring, when the snows melt in the Carpathians, the Dniester Plain is converted into a great river-lake. The Carpathian tributaries bring the main stream so much water, that it *it cannot easily flow off thru the narrow cafion, and so, floods the whole wide Dniester Valley for weeks. Then there is high water even in the cafion of the Dniester, but it has little scope.
Near Tiraspil, the Dniester Valley widens out again. Swampy plavni wilds extend on both sides of the river. In a beautiful, rapidly growing delta, the Dniester empties into itsliman, which it is slowly filling in with its precipitates. Two narrow outlets (hirl6) break thru the bar of the liman and connect it with the sea.
Between the Dniester and the Boh, not one river finally empties into the sea. Even the largest rivers of the region, the Little and Big Kuyalnik and the Tilihul end their courses in limans, which are. entirely closed off by bars.
The valleys of these coastal rivers are narrow, becoming wider at last, when they are about to enter the limans. The current is always slow and the water often evaporates completely in the summer.
The Boh, falsely named the Southern Bug, is a real plateau river. It rises in the village of Kupil, near the source of the Sbruch, on the Austrian border, and flows as a typical Podolian mud-streamlet, in a flat valley, covered with ponds and swamps. But, beginning at Mezibiz, its bed becomes rocky, the valley slopes become high and keep approaching each other. The Boh Valley gradually becomes a canon-like "yari" altho it is at no point so deep as the Dniester Valley. The granite-gneiss formations of the Ukrainian horst appear here as picturesque shore rocks and slopes along the river and form innumerable rapids (as, for example, Constantinivka) in the river bed. Stony beds and narrow, rocky valleys are also found in the most important tributaries of the Boh — the Sob, Siniukha, Inhul on the left; the Kodima and Chichiclea on the right. All of them have little water, and in dry summers only a chain of ponds marks the valley road of the river. The main stream, too, has not much water, being unfit for navigation even in the time of the spring floods. Only the last 130 kilometers of its course, from Vosnesensk down, are navigable. At the entrance of the Inhul the Boh begins to widen considerably, the current becomes slow, and the depth at Mikolaiv sufficiently great to enable smaller sea vessels to reach its harbor. Slowly widening, the river gradually turns into the Buh liman, which has the winding outline of a river and unites with the great liman of the Dnieper. The entire length of the Boh is over 750 kilometers.