THROUGH THE LANDS OF THE SERB

CHAPTER I

CATTARO—NJEGUSHI—CETINJE

I do not know where the East proper begins, nor does it greatly matter, but it is somewhere on the farther side of the Adriatic, the island-studded coast which the Venetians once held. At any rate, as soon as you leave Trieste you touch the bubbling edge of the ever-simmering Eastern Question, and the unpopularity of the ruling German element is very obvious. "I—do—not—speak—German," said a young officer laboriously, "I am Bocchese"; and as we approached the Bocche he emphasised the fact that he was a Slav returning to a Slav land. Party politics run high even on the steamboat.

We awoke one morning to find the second-class saloon turned into a Herzegovinian camp, piled with gay saddle-bags and rugs upon which squatted, cross-legged, a couple of families in full native costume, and the air was thick with the highly scented tobacco which the whole party smoked incessantly. The friendly steward, a Dalmatian Italian, whispered hastily, "This is a Herzegovinian family, signorin'. Do you like the Herzegovinese?" Rather taken aback, and not knowing what his politics were, I replied, stupidly enough, "I find their costume very interesting," This frivolous remark hurt the steward deeply. "Signorin'," he said very gravely, "these are some of the bravest men in the world. Each one of these that you see would fight till he died." Then in a mysterious undertone, "They cannot live without freedom ... they are leaving their own land ... it has been taken, as you know, by the Austrian.... They are going to Montenegro, to a free country. They have taken with them all their possessions, and they go to find freedom."

I looked at them with a curious sense of pity. Though they knew it not, they were the survivors of an old, old world, the old world which still lingers in out-of-the-way corners, and it was from the twentieth century quite as much as from the Teuton they were endeavouring to flee. All these parti-coloured saddle-bags and little bundles tied up in cotton handkerchiefs represented the worldly goods of three generations, who had left the land of their forebears and were upon a quest as mystical as any conceived by mediæval knight—they were seeking the shrine of Liberty. "Of old sat Freedom on the heights"; let us hope they found her there! I never saw them again.

On the other hand, in a boat with Austrian sympathies, the tale is very different. "I am a Viennese, Fräulein. Imagine what it is to me to have to travel in this dreary place! The people?—they are a rough, discontented set. Very ignorant. Very bad. No, I should not advise you to go to Montenegro—a most mischievous race." "And what about Bosnia and the Herzegovina?" "Oh, you will be quite safe there; we govern that. They are a bad lot, though! But we don't stand any nonsense."

Thus either party seizes upon the stranger and tries to prevent his views being "prejudiced." He seldom has need to complain that he has heard one side only; but there is a Catholic side, an Orthodox side, a Mohammedan side, there are German, Slav, Italian, Turkish, and Albanian sides; and when he has heard them all he feels far less capable of forming an opinion on the Eastern Question than he did before.

Dalmatia has its charms, but tourists swarm there, and the picturesque corners are being rapidly pulled down to provide suitable accommodation for them. Let us pass on, then, nor pause till we have wound our way through that wonderful maze of fiords, the Bocche, and landed on the quay at Cattaro. Cattaro is a tiny, greatly coveted, much-fought-for town. The natural port for Montenegro but the property of Austria, it swelters, breathless, on a strip of shore, with the waters in front of it, and the great wall of the Black Mountain rising sheer up behind. Its "heart's in the Highlands," but the enemy holds it as a garrison town; the Austrian army pervades the neighbourhood, and a big fort, lurking opposite, commands the one road from mountain to coast. Cattaro, after all, is only a half-way house to Montenegro, and this is why Austria lavishes so many troops upon it.

Behind the town starts the rough zigzag track, the celebrated "ladder of Cattaro," which until 1879 was the only path into Montenegro, and is the one the peasants still use. The making of the road was for a long while dreaded by the Montenegrins, who argued that a road that will serve for a cart will also serve for artillery. A tangible, visible gun was their idea of the means by which changes are wrought; but the road that can let in artillery can let in something more subtle, irresistible, and change-working. The road was made, and there is now no barrier to prevent the twentieth century creeping up silently and sweeping over this old-world land almost before its force is recognised. Whether the hardy mountain race which has successfully withstood the gory onslaught of the Turk for five hundred years, will come out unscathed from a bloodless encounter with Western so-called civilisation Time alone can tell.

The road from Cattaro to Cetinje has been so often written of that it is idle to describe it once again, nor can any words do it justice. After some three hours' climbing, we pass the last Austrian black-and-yellow post, and the driver, if he be a son of the mountain, points to the ground and says, "Crnagora!" (Tsernagora). Crnagora, gaunt, grey, drear, a chaos of limestone crags piled one on the other in inextricable confusion, the bare wind-swept bones of a dead world. The first view of the land comes as a shock. The horror of desolation, the endless series of bare mountain tops, the arid wilderness of bare rock majestic in its rugged loneliness, tell with one blow of the sufferings of centuries. The next instant fills one with respect and admiration for the people who have preferred liberty in this wilderness to slavery in fat lands.

Wherever possible, little patches of ground are cultivated, carefully banked up with stones to save the precious soil from being washed away, and up on the mountain sides scrubby oaks dwarfed and twisted by the wind find a foothold among the crags. Most of the men carry revolvers, and the eye soon becomes so much accustomed to weapons that on a return to unarmed lands everyone appears, for a few days, to be rather undressed. The road winds, the red roofs of Njegushi come in sight, and we make our first halt in a Montenegrin town, and rest our weary horses.

We enter the little inn, and our coachman claims his revolver, which is hanging with several others behind the bar, for none are allowed to enter Austria; they are deposited in some house near the frontier and picked up on the way back. George Stanisich, the big landlord, hurries up his womenkind to make ready a meal, looks after the drinks, and converses cheerfully on the topics of the day—preferably on the war, if there happens to be one. "Junastvo" (that is, heroism—"deeds of derring-do") is a subject that occupies a large space in the Montenegrin mind, and no wonder, and every man's ambition is to be considered a "dobar junak" (valiant warrior) and worthy of his forefathers.

Njegushi cannot fail to make a most vivid impression on the mind, for it is the entrance to a world that is new and strange. The little stone-paved room of the inn, hung with portraits of the Prince and the Tsar and Tsaritsa of Russia; the row of loaded revolvers in the bar; the blind minstrel who squats by the door and sings his long monotonous chant while he scrapes upon his one-stringed gusle; and the tall, dignified men in their picturesque garb, all belong to an unknown existence, and the world we have always known is left far below at the foot of the mountain. In Njegushi one feels that one has come a long way from England. It is, in fact, easy to travel much farther without being so far off. Yet the Montenegrin love of liberty and fair play and the Montenegrin sense of honour have made me feel more at home in this far corner of Europe than in any other foreign land.

Njegushi is the Prince's birthplace. His ancestors were some of a number of Herzegovinians who, intolerant of the Turk, emigrated in the fifteenth century. The village they left was called Njegushi, and they gave the same name to their new home. In connection with this I give here a curious tale which I have met with more than once. I repeat it as told; my informants, Servians, believed it firmly, but I can find no confirmation of it.

When these Herzegovinese migrated to Montenegro, a large body of them went yet farther afield and settled in the mountains of Abyssinia, among them a branch of the family of Petrovich of Njegushi, from which is directly descended Menelik, who preserves the title of Negus and is a distant cousin of Prince Nikola of Montenegro, and to this large admixture of Slav blood the Abyssinians owe their fine stature and their high standard of civilisation, as compared with the neighbouring African tribes.

The house of the Prince stands on the left of the road as we leave the town. The road ascends once more; a steep pull up through a bleakness of grey crags; we reach the top of the pass (3350 feet), and turn a corner. "Cetinje!" (Tsetinye), says the driver briefly, and there, in the mountain-locked plain far below, lies the little red-roofed town, a village city, a kindergarten capital, one of the quaintest sights in Europe, so tiny, so entirely wanting in the usual stock properties of a big town and yet so consciously a capital. Two wide streets which run parallel and are joined by various cross streets make up the greater part of it, and it has some 3000 inhabitants. As we enter the town the first building of importance stands up on the left hand, brand-new, a white stone building with a black roof. To any other capital it would not be remarkable either for size or beauty; here it looms large and portentous. It is the biggest building in the town, and it is the Palace of the Austro-Hungarian Legation. Not to be outdone, Russia has just erected an equally magnificent building at the other end of the town, which now lies between representatives of the two rival powers. "Which things are an allegory." Twenty years ago Cetinje was a collection of thatched hovels. To-day, modest as they are, the houses are all solidly built and roofed with tiles. Few more than one storey high, many consisting only of a ground floor, all of them devoid of any attempt at architecture; not a moulding, a cornice, or a porch breaks the general baldness: they are more like a row of toy houses all out of the same box than anything else. The road is very wide, and very white; a row of little clipped trees border it on each side, so clipped that they afford at present about as much shade as telegraph posts, and they all appear to have come out of the same box too. It is all very clean, very neat; not a whiff offends the tenderest nostril, not a cabbage stalk lies in the gutter. It is not merely a toy, but a brand-new one that has not yet been played with.

Cetinje is poor, but dignified and self-respecting. A French or Italian village of the same size clatters, shouts, and screams. Cetinje is never in a hurry, and seldom excited. It contains few important buildings. The only ones of any historic interest are the monastery, the little tower on the hill above it where were formerly stuck the heads of slain Turks, and the old Palace called the Biljardo from the fact that it contained Montenegro's first billiard-table. It now affords quarters for various officials and the Court of Justice. There are no lawyers in Montenegro, and this is said to simplify matters greatly. The Prince is the final Court of Appeal, and reads and considers the petition of any of his subjects that are in difficulties. Such faith have folk in his judgment that Mohammedan subjects of the Sultan have been known to tramp to Crnagora in order to have a quarrel settled by the Gospodar. That he possesses a keen insight into these semi-civilised people and a remarkable power of handling them is evident from the order that is maintained throughout his lands even among the large Mohammedan Albanian population, and it would undoubtedly have been much better for the Balkan peoples had he had larger scope for his administrative powers.

Cetinje's other attractions are the park, the theatre, and the market, where the stranger will have plenty of opportunity of wrestling with the language.

The language is one of the amusements of Montenegro. It is not an easy one. I hunted it about London for months, and it landed me in strange places. The schools and systems that teach all the languages of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America know it not. In the course of my chase I caught a Roumanian, a Hungarian, and an Albanian, but I got no nearer to it. I pursued it to a Balkan Consulate, which proved to consist entirely of Englishmen who knew no word of the tongue, but kindly communicated with a Ministry which consisted, so they said, entirely of very charming men, with whom I should certainly be pleased. The Ministry was puzzled, but wished to give me every encouragement. It had never before had such a run upon its language. It suggested that the most suitable person to instruct me would be an ex-Minister who had come over to attend the funeral of Queen Victoria. The ex-Minister was very polite, but wrote that he was on the point of returning to his native land. He therefore proposed that a certain gallant and dashing officer, attache to the Legation, should be instructed to call and converse with me once a week. "No remuneration, of course," he added, "must be offered to the gallant captain." "But suppose," I said feebly, "the captain doesn't care about the job; it seems a little awkward, doesn't it?" "Oh no," said the Consul, exultant; "when he hears it is by the orders of X., he won't dare refuse." As I am not a character in one of Mr. Anthony Hope's novels, but merely live in a London suburb, I thanked everybody and retired upon a small grammar, dazzled by the fierce light that my inquiries had shed upon the workings of this Balkan State, and wondering if all the others were equally ready to loan out Ministers and attaches to unknown foreigners.

There is a childish simplicity about the conversation of the up-country peasant folk that is quite charming. They are as pleased with a stranger who will talk to them as is a child with a kitten that will run after a string, and, like children, they have no scruples about asking what in a more "grown-up" state of society would be considered indiscreet questions, including even the state of one's inside. The women begin the conversation and retail the details to their lords and masters, who, burning with curiosity, stand aloof with great dignity for a little while, and end by crowding out the women altogether. Neither men nor women have the vaguest idea whence I come nor to what manner of life I am accustomed. When they learn that I have come in a train and a steamboat, their amazement is unbounded. That I come from a far countrie that is full of gold is obvious. "And thou hast come so far to see us? Bravo!" Much patting on the back, and sometimes an affectionate squeeze from an enthusiastic lady, who at once informs the men that I am very thin and very hard. "Bravo! thou art brave. Art married?" "No." Great excitement and much whispering. "Wait, wait," says a woman, and she shouts "Milosh! Milosh!" at the top of her voice. Milosh edges his way through the crowd. He is a tall, sun-tanned thing of about eighteen years, with the eyes of a startled stag. His mother stands on tiptoe and whispers in his ear that this is a chance not to be lightly thrown away. A broad smile spreads over Milosh's face. He looks coy, and twiddles his fingers. "Ask her! ask her!" say the ladies encouragingly. "Ask her!" say the men. Milosh plucks up courage, thumps his chest and blurts out, "Wilt thou have me?" "No, thank you," I say, laughing; and Milosh retires amid the jeers of his friends, but really much relieved. "Milosh, thou art not beautiful enough," say the men; and they suggest one Gavro as being more likely to please. Gavro takes Milosh's place with great alacrity, and the same ceremony is repeated. The crowd enjoys itself vastly, and tries to fit me out with a really handsome specimen. I glance round, and my eye is momentarily caught by a very goodly youth. "No! no! he's mine, he's mine!" cries a woman, who seizes him by the arm, and he is hastily withdrawn from competition amid shouts of laughter. "I have no money," says one youth frankly, "but thou hast perhaps enough." "And he is good and beautiful," say his friends. For they are all cheerfully aware that their faces are their only fortunes. There is a barbaric simplicity and a lack of any attempt at romance about the proposed arrangements which is exquisitely funny, for they are far too honest to pretend that I possess any attractions beyond my supposed wealth. I have often wondered what the crowd would do if I accepted someone temporarily, but have never dared try. Five offers in twenty minutes is about my highest record.

But all these are country amusements. Cetinje is far too civilised a city to indulge in them, and to "see Montenegro" we must wander much farther afield.

CEMETERY NEAR CETINJE.

CHAPTER II

PODGORITZA AND RIJEKA

Travelling in Montenegro—in fine weather, be it said—is delightful from start to finish. And to Shan, my Albanian driver, whose care, fidelity, and good nature have added greatly to the success of many of my tours, I owe a passing tribute. He is short and dark, a somewhat mixed specimen of his race, and hails from near the borders, where folk are apt to be so mixed that it is hard to tell which is the true type. Careful of his three little horses, and always ready in an emergency, he yet preserves the gay, inconsequent nature of a very young child. His veneer of civilisation causes him to assume for short intervals an appearance of great stiffness and dignity, but it melts suddenly, and his natural spirits bubble through. Thus, at an inn door before foreigners, he is stately, but in the kitchen to which I have been invited to accompany him, he waves his arms wildly and performs a war dance, chaffs the ladies, and makes himself highly agreeable. His tastes are simple and easily satisfied. I have stood him several treats of his own selection, and they usually cost about fourpence. One was an immense liver which was toasted for him in hot wood ashes, and which he consumed along with a whole loaf of bread—whereupon he expressed himself as feeling much better. His generosity is unfailing; at the top of a pass, in a heavy storm of sleet, he offered me the greatcoat he was wearing, and he is always ready to help a distressed wayfarer. One awful evening, when the rain was falling in torrents and it was rapidly growing dark, we were hailed, between Rijeka and Cetinje, by a man in distress. A sheep, his only one, which he was driving up to Cetinje, had fallen, wet and exhausted, by the roadside, and he knew not what to do. Shan was greatly concerned. He explained to me that the man was very poor, the sheep very tired and also that the sheep was a very little one, then he took it in his arms like a baby and arranged it on the box, where it cuddled up against him for warmth, and, through wind, rain, and the blackest night I have ever been out in, he drove three horses abreast, held up an umbrella, nursed the sheep, and sang songs till we arrived safely at our journey's end.

Acting on the principle of "Do as you would be done by," when his pouch is full, he distributes tobacco lavishly along the route with a fine "Damn-the-expense" air which one cannot but admire, and when not a shred remains, he begs it, quite shamelessly, of everyone he meets. When I first made his acquaintance, his appearance puzzled me. Learning that he was an Albanian, I remarked upon the fact to him; he immediately crossed himself hastily. "Yes, an Albanian," he admitted, "but Cattolici, Cattolici," and he added as an extra attraction, "and I came to Montenegro when I was very little." He persists in regarding me as a co-religionist; for the fact that I am neither Orthodox nor Mohammedan is to him quite sufficient proof. His Catholicism is quite original. Unlike most Catholic Albanians, who display a horror of the Orthodox Church, he is most pressing in his attentions to the Orthodox priests, and will never, if he can help it, be left out of a circle of conversation that includes one. One Easter Day I saw him persist in kissing, in Orthodox fashion, the village priest, who having more than enough osculation to go through with his own flock, did his best to dodge him, but was loudly smacked upon the back of the neck. His views upon doctrinal points are mixed, but his simple creed has taught him faith, hope, and charity "which is the greatest of the three."

Withal he is a bit of a buck, and likes to cut a dash in what he considers large towns. He strolls in when I am having dinner and converses with the company at large; he makes me a flowery speech—he is my servant; it is mine to command and his to obey; whatever I order he will carry out with pleasure. When he learns that I shall not require him till to-morrow, he beams all over his sun-tanned face. Then he fidgets and makes pointless remarks. I do not help him. He strolls with elaborate carelessness behind my chair and whispers hurriedly that towns are very expensive, and if I would only advance him a florin or two of his pay—I supply the needful, and later I meet him, a happy man, playing the duke among a crowd of friends, to all of whom he introduces me with great style and elegance. But his dissipations are very mild, though from the swagger he puts on you would think they were bold and bad. I have never seen him the worse for drink, and he is punctuality itself and very honest. Child of the race with about the worst reputation in Europe though he is, I would trust him under most circumstances.

Leaving Cetinje by its only road, we soon reach the top of the pass, and a sudden turn reveals the land beyond. We have come across Europe to the edge of Christianity, and stand on the rocky fortress with the enemy in sight. The white road serpentines down the mountain side, and far below lies the green valley and its tiny village, Dobrsko Selo; on all sides rise the crags wild and majestic; away in the distance gleams the great silver lake of Skodra. Beyond it the blue Albanian mountains, their peaks glittering with snow even in June, show fainter and fainter, and the land of mystery and the unspeakable Turk fades into the sky—a scene so magnificent and so impressive that it is worth all the journey from England just to have looked at it.

We cast loose our third horse, and rattle all the way down to Rijeka, skimming along the mountain side and swinging round the zigzags on a road that it takes barely two hours to descend and quite three to climb up again; for Cetinje lies 1900 feet above the sea, and Rijeka not much more than 200 feet.

Rijeka means a stream, and the town so called is a cluster of most picturesque, half-wooden houses, facing green trees and a ripple of running water and backed by the mountain side—as pretty a place as one need wish to see. The stream's full name is Rijeka Crnoievicheva, the River of Crnoievich, but for everyday use town and river are simply Rijeka. But its full name must not be forgotten, for it keeps alive the fame of Ivan Beg Crnoievich, who ruled in the latter half of the fifteenth century, in the days when Montenegro's worst troubles were beginning. Unable to hold the plains of the Zeta against the Turk, Ivan gathered his men together, burnt his old capital, Zabljak, near the head of the lake, retired into the mountains, and founded Cetinje in 1484. He built a castle above Rijeka as a defence to his new frontier, and swore to hold the Black Mountain against all comers. But he meant his people to grow as a nation worthily, and not to degenerate into a horde of barbarians. He founded the monastery at Cetinje, appointed a bishop and built churches. And—for he was quite abreast of his times—he sent to Venice for type and started a printing press at Rijeka. In spite of the difficulties and dangers that beset the Montenegrins, they printed their first book little more than twenty years later than Caxton printed his at Westminster. Ivan is not dead, but sleeps on the hill above Rijeka, and he will one day awake and lead his people to victory. The printing press was burned by the Turks, and the books which issued from it—fine specimens of the printer's art—are rare.

The stream Rijeka is a very short one. It rises in some curious caverns not much farther up the valley, and flows into the lake of Skodra. The town is built of cranky little houses, half Turkish in style, with open wooden galleries painted green—gimcrack affairs, that look as though they might come down with a run any minute, when filled as they frequently are with a party of heavy men. It has an old-world look, but, as most of the town was burnt by the Turks in 1862, appearances are deceptive. A perfect Bond Street of shops faces the river. Here you can buy at a cheap rate all the necessaries of Montenegrin existence. In the baker's shop the large round flat loaves of bread, very like those dug up at Pompeii, are neatly covered with a white cloth to keep off the flies.

Plenty of tobacco is grown in the neighbourhood. In the autumn the cottages are festooned with the big leaves drying in the sun, and you may see Albanians, sitting on their doorsteps, shredding up the fragrant weed with a sharp knife into long, very fine strips till it looks like a bunch of hair, shearing through a large pile swiftly, with machine—like regularity and precision. Tobacco is a cheap luxury, and I am told Montenegrin tobacco is good. Almost every man in Montenegro smokes from morning till night, generally rolling up the next cigarette before the last is finished.

The town possesses a burgomaster, a post-office, a steamboat office, a Palace, and an inn, which provides a good dinner on market days. It is a clean, prosperous, friendly, and very simple-minded place—I did not realise how simple-minded till I spent an afternoon sitting on the wall by the river, drawing the baker's shop, with some twenty Montenegrins sitting round in a crimson and blue semicircle. It was in the days when I knew nothing of the language, and the Boer War was as yet unfinished. I drew, and my friend talked. A youth in Western garb acted as interpreter. He ascertained whence we had come, and then remarked airily, "Now, I come from Hungary, and I am walking to the Transvaal. This man," pointing out a fine young Montenegrin, "is coming with me!" Stumbling, voluble and excited, in very broken German, he unfolded their crazy plan. They were both brave men and exceedingly rich. "I have two thousand florins, and a hundred more or less makes no difference to him," kept cropping up like the burden of a song. Their families had wept and prayed, but had failed to turn them from their purpose. They were going to walk to the Transvaal. "But you can't," we said. He was hurt. "Of course not all the way," he knew that. They had meant to walk across Albania to Salonika, but the Consul at Skodra had put a stop to this dangerous scheme. Now they were going by sea from Cattaro to Alexandria, and thence, also by sea, to Lorenzo Marques. After this, they should "walk to the Transvaal." "Why don't you walk from Alexandria?" we asked. He answered quite seriously that they had thought of this, but they had been told there was a tribe of Arabs in the centre of Africa even more ferocious than the Albanians, so, though they were of course very brave men, they thought on the whole they preferred the boat. When they arrived, they meant to fight on whichever side appeared likely to win, and then they were going to pick up gold. We thought it our duty to try and dissuade them from their wild-goose chase, but our efforts were treated with scorn. "What can you do? You speak very little German, and your friend nothing but Servian." "No, he doesn't," said the Hungarian indignantly. "He speaks Albanian very well, and I—I know many languages. I speak Servian and Hungarian." The idea that a place existed where no one spoke these well-known tongues was to him most ridiculous, and the Montenegrin, to whom it was imparted, smiled incredulously. We urged the price of living and the cost of Machinery required in gold-mining. The first he did not believe; the second he thought very silly. The gold was there, and he was not such a fool as to require a machine with which to pick it up.

BAKER'S SHOP, RIJEKA.—ALBANIAN AND TWO MONTENEGRINS.

The Montenegrin, who had been bursting with a question for the last quarter of an hour, insisted on its being put. "Could he buy a good revolver in Johannesburg?" He waited anxiously for a reply. "You see," explained the Hungarian, "he must leave his in Montenegro." "But why? It looks a very good one." The Montenegrin patted his weapon lovingly; he only wished he could take it, it would be most useful, but ... in order to reach the boat at Cattaro he must cross Austrian territory, and you are not allowed to carry firearms in Austria! He shook his head dolefully when we said that permission could surely be obtained. "No, this was quite impossible; under no circumstances could it be managed. You don't know what the Austrians are!" said the Hungarian mysteriously. The unknown land, the unknown tongues, the British, the Boers, the rumble-tumble ocean and the perils of the deep were all as nothing beside the difficulty of crossing the one narrow strip of Austrian land. We told him revolvers were plentiful in Johannesburg, and the prospect of finding home comforts cheered him greatly. We parted the best of friends.

From Rijeka the road rises rapidly again, and strikes over the hills, winding through wild and very sparsely inhabited country. The mountain range ends abruptly, and we see the broad plains stretching away below us, with the white town of Podgoritza in the midst of it. The plain is very obviously the bed of the now shrunken lake of Skodra, and the water-worn pebbles are covered with but a thin layer of soil. But both maize and tobacco seem to do well upon it, and every year more land is taken into cultivation. The rough land is covered with wiry turf and low bushes, and swarms with tortoises which graze deliberately by the roadside. The river Moracha has cut itself a deep chasm in the loose soil between us and the town, and tears along in blue-green swirls and eddies. We have to overshoot the town to find the bridge, and we clatter into Podgoritza six or seven hours after leaving Cetinje, according to the weather and the state of the road.

Podgoritza is the biggest town in Montenegro, and has between five and six thousand inhabitants. It is well situated for a trading centre, for it is midway between Cetinje and Nikshitje, and is joined by a good road to Plavnitza, on the lake of Scutari, so is in regular steamboat communication with Skodra and with Antivari via Virbazar. Its position has always given it some importance. As a Turkish garrison town it was a convenient centre from which to invade Montenegro; to the Montenegrin it was part of his birthright—part of the ancient kingdom of Servia—and as such to be wrested from the enemy. It was the brutal massacre of twenty Montenegrins in and near the town in time of peace (October 1874) that decided the Montenegrins to support the Herzegovinian insurrection and declare war. Podgoritza was besieged and taken in October 1876. The walls of the old town were blown to pieces with guns taken from the Turks at Medun, and an entirely new town has since sprung up on the opposite side of the stream Ribnitza. Podgoritza (= "At the Foot of the Mountain"), if you have come straight from the West, is as amusing a place as you need wish to visit. It has not so many show places as Cetinje even, and its charm is quite undefinable. It consists in its varied human crowd, its young barbarians all at play, its ideas that date from the world's well—springs, subtly intermingled with Manchester cottons, lemonade in glass-ball-stoppered bottles, and other blessings of an enlightened present. The currents from the East and the West meet here, the old world and the new; and those to whom the spectacle is of interest, may sit upon the bridge and watch the old order changing.

The Montenegrin town of Podgoritza is clean and bright. The long wide main street of white stone, red-roofed shops with their gay wares, and the large open market square where the weekly bazaar is held, are full of life. Both street and market-place are planted with little trees, acacias and white mulberries; and the bright green foliage, the white road, the red roofs, the green shutters, the variety of costume, make an attractive scene in the blaze of the Southern sun. Across the gold-brown plain rise the blue mountains where lies that invisible line the frontier. The slim minarets of the old Turkish town shoot up and shimmer white on sky and mountain; the river Ribnitza flows between the old town and the new, and over the bridge passes an endless stream of strange folk, the villagers of the plain and the half-wild natives of the Albanian mountains passing from the world of the Middle Ages to a place which feels, however faintly, the forces of the twentieth century. Bullock carts, with two huge wheels and basket-work tops, trail slowly past, groaning and screeching on their ungreased axles. Look well at the carts, for our own forefathers used them in the eleventh century, and they appear in the Harleian MSS.

Everything moves slowly. All day long folk draw water from the stone-topped well on the open space between the old town and the new—draw it slowly and laboriously, for there is no windlass or other labour-saving contrivance, and the water is pulled up in a canvas bag tied to a string. Three or four bagfuls go to one bucket.

In spite of the fact that Podgoritza is the centre of the Anglo-Montenegrin Trading Company and deals in Manchester cottons, the day seems distant when it will lose its other simple habits. I was walking one day down the "High Street" with a friend, when a young Albanian went to call on his tailor. He came out presently with a fine new pair of the tight white trousers that his clan affects. He exhibited them in the middle of the road to two or three friends, and they were all evidently much struck with the make and embroidery. If the garments were so charming "off," what would they be "on"! The whole party hurried across to the shop door of the happy purchaser, and such an alarming unbuckling and untying began to take place that we! discreetly went for a little walk. On our return the transfer had been effected. Two friends were grasping the garment by the front and back, and the wearer was being energetically jigged and shaken into it. This was a tough job, for it was skin-tight. The legs were then hooked-and-eyed up the back, and presently the youth was strutting down the middle of the road stiff-kneed and elegant, with the admiring eyes of Podgoritza upon him, and a ridiculously self-conscious smile.

BULLOCK CART, PODGORITZA.

Wandering gipsy tribes turn up here, too; mysterious roving gangs, their scant possessions, tin pots and tent poles, piled on ponies; their children, often as naked as they were born, perched on top of the load. They have no abiding place; impelled by a primeval instinct, they pass on eternally. Extraordinarily handsome savages some of them are, too. I have seen them on the march—the men in front, three abreast, swinging along like panthers; half stripped, clad in dirty white breeches and cartridges; making up with firearms for deficiency in shirts, and carrying, each man, in addition to his rifle, a long sheath knife and a pistol in his red sash, their matted coal-black locks falling down to their beady, glittering black eyes, which watch you like a cat's, without ever looking you straight in the face. Their white teeth and the brass cases of the cartridges sparkling against their swarthy skins, they passed with their heads held high on their sinewy throats with an air of fierce and sullen independence. Behind follow the boys, women, and children, with all their worldly goods; golden-brown women with scarlet lips and dazzling teeth, their hair hanging in a thick black plait on either side of the face, like that of the ladies of ancient Egypt; holding themselves like queens, and, unlike their lords and masters, smiling very good-naturedly. So entirely do they appear to belong to an unknown, untamed past, that I was astonished when one of them, a splendid girl in tawny orange and crimson, addressed me in fluent Italian outside the Podgoritza inn. "I am a gipsy. Are you Italian?" Italy was her only idea of a foreign land, and England quite unknown to her. She hazarded a guess that it was far off, and imparted the information to a little crowd of Albanian and Montenegrin boys who were hanging around. When the servant of the inn thought the crowd too large, he came out to scatter it. The boys fled precipitately; the girl stood her ground firmly, as one conscious of right, and told him what she thought of him volubly and fiercely, her eyes flashing the while. He retired discomfited, and she informed us superbly, "I told him the ladies wished to speak to me!" Unlike the Montenegrins, she understood at once that we were merely travelling for travelling's sake, and regarded it as perfectly natural. She retired gracefully when she had learnt what she wished to know.

The Montenegrin and Albanian gipsies are mostly Mohammedans, and what is vaguely described as Pagan. They seldom or never, it is said, intermarry with the people among whom they wander, but keep themselves entirely to themselves. One day the old quarter of Podgoritza was agog with a Mohammedan gipsy wedding. From across the river we heard the monotonous rhythmic pulsation of a tambourine, and at intervals the long-drawn Oriental yowl that means music. We strolled down to the bridge and joined the very motley collection of sight-seers. Gay and filthy, they gathered round us, and enjoyed at once the spectacle of two foreigners of unknown origin and the festivity which was going on in the back garden hard by. It could hardly be called a garden, it was the yard of a squalid little hovel backing on the river, and was filled with women in gorgeous raiment walking backwards and forwards in rows that met and swayed apart, singing a long howling chant, while the pom-pom and metallic jingle of the tambourine sounded over the voices with mechanical regularity. Presently all fell aside and left a space, into which leapt a dancing-girl, a mass of white silk gauze with a golden zouave and belt and a dangling coin head-dress. She wreathed her arms gracefully over her head and danced a complicated pas-seul with great aplomb and certainty, her white draperies swirling round her and her gold embroideries flashing in the sunlight. When she ceased, the party withdrew into the dirty little hut, and as we were now the whole attraction to the obviously verminous crowd we withdrew also. The hut was the headquarters of the bridegroom, and this was a preliminary entertainment. Next morning, four carriages dashed into the town at once, bringing the bride and her escort from Skodra in Albania. The horses' heads were decorated with gaily embroidered muslin handkerchiefs, and the bride's carriage was closely curtained and veiled. The amount of men and weapons that poured out of the other vehicles was astounding. When three carriages had unloaded, the bride's carriage drove up close to the entrance of the yard in which the hut stood, and the men made a long tunnel from door to door by holding up white sheets; down this the bride fled safe and invisible, while curiosity devoured the spectators on the bridge. Every window in the hut was already shuttered and barred, and we thought there was no more to be seen.

But our presence had been already noted. A commotion arose among the men at the door of the hovel. A young Montenegrin onlooker came up, pulled together all his foreign vocabulary and stammeringly explained, "They wish you to go into their house." All the men in the crowd were consumed with curiosity about the hidden bride, and obviously envied us the invitation. We hesitated to plunge into the filthy hole. We didn't hesitate long, though. The bride and her friends meant to show off their finery to the foreigners; a dark swagger fellow who would take no denial was sent out to fetch us, and we followed our escort obediently to the cottage door. We paused a half-second on the doorstep; it looked bad inside, but it was too late to go back. A passage was cleft for us immediately, and we found ourselves in a long low room with a mud floor—a noisome, squalid den in which one would not stable an English donkey. There was no light except what came through the small door and the chinks. It was packed with men; their beady, bright eyes and silver weapons glittered, the only sparks of brightness in the gloom.

As my eyes got accustomed to the subdued light, I saw in the corner a huge caldron of chunks of most unpleasant-looking boiled mutton, with floating isles of fat, and my heart sank at the thought that perhaps our invitation included the wedding breakfast. The men guarding the door of the inner apartment parted, and we went in. No man, save the bridegroom, entered here. It was a tiny hole of a room, but its dirty stone walls were ablaze with glittering golden embroideries and it was lighted by oil lamps. The floor was covered with women squatting close together, their brown faces, all unveiled, showing very dark against their gorgeous barbaric costumes. It was a fierce jostle of colours—patches of scarlet, orange, purple and white, mellowed and harmonised by the lavish use of gold over all, coin head-dresses, necklaces, and girdles in reckless profusion. In the light of common day it would doubtless resolve itself into copper-gilt and glass jewels, but by lamplight it was all that could be desired. On a chair, the only one in the room, with her back to the partition wall, so as to be quite invisible to the men in the next room, sat the bride, upright, motionless, rigid like an Eastern idol. Her hands lay in her lap, her clothes were stiff with gold, and she was covered down to the knees with a thick purple and gold veil. There she has to sit without moving all day. She may not even, I am told, feed herself, but what nourishment she is allowed is given her under the veil by one of the other ladies. At her feet, cross-legged on the ground, sat the bridegroom, who I believe had not yet seen her—quite the most decorative bridegroom I ever saw, a good-looking fellow of about five-and-twenty, whose black and white Albanian garments, tight-fitting, showed him off effectively, while the arsenal of fancy weapons in his sash gave him the required touch of savagery. He gazed fixedly at the purple veil, endeavouring vainly to penetrate its mysteries, and, considering the trying circumstances in which he was placed, seemed to be displaying a good deal of fortitude. The air was heavy with scented pastilles, otherwise the human reek must have been unbearable.

Everyone began to talk at once, and it was evident from their nods and smiles that we had done the correct thing in coming. Unfortunately we couldn't understand a word, but we bowed to everyone, repeated our thanks, and tried to express our wonder and admiration. Whether we were intended to stay or not I do not know, but, haunted by a desire to escape with as small a collection of vermin as possible, and also to evade the chunks of mutton in the caldron, we backed our way, bowing, into the outer room after a few minutes, and were politely escorted to the entrance. Judging by the smiles and bows of everyone, our visit gave great satisfaction. After we left, the doors were shut, and there was a long lull, during which the mutton was probably consumed. If so, we escaped only just in time. In the afternoon the tambourines and sing-songs started again, and far into the night the long-drawn yowls of the epithalamium came down the wind.

In spite of the mixed Christian and Mohammedan population, excellent order is maintained. The more I see of the Montenegrin, the more I am struck with his power of keeping order. It is a favourite joke against him that when he asks for a job and is questioned as to his capabilities, he replies that he is prepared to "superintend," and it turns out that he is unable to do anything else. But not even our own policeman can perform the said "superintending" more quietly and efficiently. To the traveller the Mohammedan is very friendly. The attempt of a man to draw or photograph a woman is an insult which is not readily forgiven and may lead to serious consequences, but as long as one conforms to local customs these people are as kindly as one could wish, and not by a long way so black as they have often been painted. As a matter of fact a large proportion of the rows that occur all over the world between different nationalities arise from someone's indiscreet attentions to someone else's girl. And this is why a lady travelling alone almost always has a friendly welcome, for on this point at any rate she is above suspicion.

The Orthodox Montenegrin is equally anxious to make one feel at home. At Easter-tide, when the whole town was greeting each other and giving pink eggs, we were not left out. "Krsti uskrshnio je" ("Christ has risen") is the greeting, to which one must reply, "Truly He has risen," accepting the egg. People go from house to house, and eggs stand ready on the table for the visitors, who kiss the master and mistress of the house three times in the name of the Trinity. Montenegrin kisses—I speak merely as an onlooker—are extremely hearty. It is surprising what a number they get through on such a festival. For four days does the Easter holiday last.

Montenegrins take their holidays quietly. It used to be said of the Englishman that he takes his pleasures sadly. But that was before the evolution of the race culminated in 'Any and 'Arriet. The Montenegrin has not yet reached this pitch of civilisation. I wonder whether he inevitably must, and if so, whether what he will gain will at all compensate for what he must lose. For civilisation, as at present understood, purchases luxuries at the price of physical deterioration. High living is by no means always accompanied by high thinking, and ... the end of it the future must show. When the Montenegrin has learnt what a number of things he cannot possibly do without, let us hope he will be in some way the better. It is certain he will be in many ways the worse.

Things Christian lie on one side of the Ribnitza, and things Mohammedan on the other. The Turkish graveyard lies out beyond the old town, forlorn and melancholy as they mostly are. The burial-ground of the Orthodox is on the Montenegrin side of the town. The dead are borne to the grave in an open coffin, and the waxen face of the corpse is visible. The coffin-lid is carried next in the procession. I was told that this curious custom originated in the fact that sham funerals were used when the Balkan provinces were under Turkish rule as a means of smuggling arms. But I doubt this tale. For the custom used to prevail in Italy, and does still, I believe, in Spain. It is, in all probability, much older than the Turks, and a tradition that dates from the days when burning and not burial was the usual way of disposing of the dead and the body was carried to the funeral pyre upon a bier. The open coffin, the funeral songs, and the commemorative feasts annually held on the graves by many of the South Slavs, the lights and incense burnt upon the graves, and the lighted candles carried in the funeral processions together reproduce, with extraordinary fidelity, the rites and ceremonies of the Romans. And how much older they may be we know not.

CHAPTER III

OSTROG

I have driven the road many a time since, and I have been again to Ostrog, but I shall never forget that day three years ago when I went there for the first time. It was the only part of that journey about which our advisers said we should find no difficulty; "foreign languages" were spoken, and there would be no trouble about accommodation. We started from Podgoritza early and in high spirits.

The valley of the Zeta is green and well cultivated. It narrows as we ascend it, and an isolated hill crowned with the ruins of a Turkish fortress stands up commandingly in the middle. This is the "bloody" Spuzh of the ballads, the stronghold that guarded the former Turkish frontier. Montenegro at this point was barely fifteen miles across, and Spuzh and Nikshitje gripped it on either hand. From being a border town with an exciting existence Spuzh has subsided into an unimportant village. Danilovgrad, on the other hand, a few miles farther on, a town founded in memory of the late Prince, is full of life, and though a bit rudimentary at present, shows signs of soon becoming large and flourishing. It is possible now to drive right up to the lower monastery of Ostrog by a fine new road, but this did not yet exist on my first visit, and we pulled up at Bogatich—a poverty-stricken collection of huts and a tiny church. A tall, lean, sad-eyed Montenegrin, with his left arm in a sling, came out of the little "han" to greet us, bringing with him a strong whiff of carbolic. They were a melancholy little household. His wife, who brought water for our reeking horses, had had her right arm taken off an inch or two below the elbow, and carried the bucket horribly in the crook of the stump. They cheered up when they heard we wanted a guide to the monastery, and called their daughter from the shed for the purpose.

She came out, a shy, wild-looking thing of about fifteen, barefooted, her knitting in her hands, accepted the job at once, tied our two hand-bags on her back with a bit of cord, and we started up in search of the unknown, armed with a leg of cold mutton, a loaf of black bread, a sketch-book, and a flask of brandy.

It was midday, and almost midsummer; the air was heavy with thunder, and no breath of a breeze stirred as we scrambled up the loose stones. The girl snorted loudly like a pig, to show us the way we should go, and took us, in true Montenegrin fashion, straight up from point to point without heeding the zigzags of the horse-track except where the steepness of the rock compelled her. The way soon became steeper and steeper, in fact a mere rock scramble, and it was abominably hot; and when suddenly our plucky little guide, who had as yet shown no signs of fatigue, gave out all her breath with a long whistle and pointed to the nearest patch of shade, we gladly called a halt. The great advantage of a girl-guide is that she takes you to the right place and you can rest on the way. Little boys as a general rule are vague and inconsequent; they pick up crowds of friends en route, even in the most desolate and apparently uninhabited spots, and you don't generally arrive at your destination. Either they don't know the way, or they conduct you to another spot, for reasons of their own.

We sat with our girl, and made futile attempts to converse with her. It was a wild, lonely spot, and save the rough track worn by generations of pilgrims, as rugged as it was created. Great grey limestone rocks arose around us, with sturdy young trees sprouting in the crannies; a small grey snake wound its way over the sunbaked stones, and a tortoise scrambled about the grass alongside. The valley shimmered in a hot haze far below, and beyond towered the bare crags of the opposite mountains. We seemed a very long way from anywhere. Appearances were however deceptive, as a short scramble brought us to a wall, a gateway, and some buildings. The girl seemed to think we had now arrived, and we imagined that we were about to find the guest-house where French, Italian, and German were spoken. We passed through the gateway on to a long wide shelf on the mountain side, 1900 feet above the sea. Two or three very poor cottages stood at the entrance, and at the farther end a tiny church, crudely painted with a maroon dado of geometrical patterns, and three small houses all apparently shut up and uninhabited. Not a soul was to be seen. The girl went into one of the cottages and fetched a tin pot of cold water, which we all drank greedily, seeing which the cottage woman came out and supplied us with as much as we required, and gave us a bench to sit on. She was mildly concerned at our appearance, for we had sweated all through our shirts, and the girl had left a black hand-print on my back, but she spoke no word of any other language but her own, and speedily retired again to her cottage. We sat on the bench and pondered, feeling very forlorn. If this were Ostrog, as the girl assured us with vigorous nods, it was not worth the roasting scramble. We were miserably disappointed, but decided that, as we had come to see Ostrog, we would see it properly, and that, if there were any inhabitants, they had not finished the midday siesta. We squeezed into a patch of shadow and cut up the mutton and black bread with a pocket-knife; the girl gladly assisted, and ate like a wolf, bolting large chunks with great appetite. There was quite a cheery lot of brandy in the flask, and as we carefully packed up the remains of the meal, in case of a siege, we felt very much better.

Then down the wide white path from the houses came a man, an old, old man in Western garb. He tottered up, and we hailed him in all our known languages; French and Italian failed, but he responded to German, and started at once on his own autobiography. He was an old soldier, he had fought under Karageorgevich. Now he had retired here to end his days. "They" had sent him here, and "they" had made him dig his grave. It was waiting for him on the mountain side. He was very lonely, and had no one to talk to. As soon as we could stem the torrent of his remarks, we asked him about quarters for the night. "Had we an introduction from the Archimandrite at Cetinje?" "No?" Then we had better go back where we had come from, and we had better start at once, if we meant to get to Nikshitje that night. We were appalled. He repeated obstinately, "You must go, and if you take my advice, you will go at once. I can do nothing for you. They," he admitted mysteriously, "cannot bear me. It is useless for me to ask them. They can speak nothing but Servian, and you will not be able to make them understand. They would have to send for me. Moreover, they are asleep." He pointed to "their" house. We asked when "they" were likely to wake up again, and he said it would be in about an hour's time. We doubted his statements, for his air was very malevolent, so as our little maiden was already coiled up on the ground fast asleep, we thought it would be just as well to rest until "they" could be appealed to. The old gentleman "who had no one to talk to" went off and indulged in an animated conversation with the cottage woman, while we dozed under a tree. When we aroused ourselves again, not much rested, we saw the shutters of "their" house were now open, so we marched up to the front door, knocked, and awaited results tremulously.

Nothing happened; we knocked a second time, and fled down the steps. Immediately the door flew open, and there was the Archimandrite of Ostrog himself, in long black gown, crimson sash, and high velvet hat—a little old man whose thin iron-grey locks flowed on his shoulders. He came rushing down the steps and shook us by the hands, saying, "Dobar dan, dobar dan" (good-day), as heartily as though he had been expecting us and we had come at last. We said, "Dobar dan," also, with enthusiasm, and then the conversation came to an abrupt conclusion. He showed us with great ceremony into his sitting-room, and made us sit on the sofa, while he sat opposite on a chair. We felt acutely uncomfortable—not one single word of English, French, German, or Italian did the good man know. We made him understand that we had come from England, which amazed him, and that we had walked from Bogatich. Then we stuck hopelessly and helplessly, while he, undaunted, went on in his native language. It seemed as if our climb to Ostrog had failed, and that flight was all that was left for us. We got up and said "good-bye" politely. Our departure he would by no means permit. "Sjedite, sjedite!" he cried, waving us back to the sofa, and down we sat again, feeling much worse. A Montenegrin about six feet four inches in height, clad in a huge brown overcoat, answered his summoning bell, and presently returned with two glasses of cold water on a brass tray which he offered to us ceremoniously, towering over us and watching us with lofty toleration, as a big dog does a little one. He waited patiently until we had drunk every drop, collected the glasses, and silently retired from the room backwards.

A horrible silence ensued. We took out our watches and showed them to each other, in hopes that the Archimandrite would then understand that our time was really up. But no. A fearful wrestle with the language followed, and lasted till the Big-Dog Montenegrin reappeared, this time with two cups of coffee. We obediently began to consume this, and the Archimandrite, despairing of ever making us understand single-handed, instructed his servant to fetch the gentleman-who-spoke-German. Through him we were at once informed that the Archimandrite offered us hospitality for the night in the house over the way. We were much amazed, and accepted gratefully. With apologies, he then inquired if we were married, and hastened to assure us that there was no disgrace attached to the fact that we were not. We were slightly dismayed when we were told we now had the Archimandrite's gracious permission to visit the shrine, and that we were to start at once.

We were put upon the right track and left to our own devices. We had been up since five, and had only had a scrappy, unhappy doze under the tree, so we told each other we would go to sleep on the first piece of ground that was flat enough. Having zigzagged up some way through the wood, we lay down on a piece of grass, and should have been asleep in a minute had not two natives appeared, an old man and a handsome lad. They seemed much interested and concerned. I merely said it was very hot, and hoped it would be enough for them. Not a bit of it. They started an argument. I said I didn't speak the language, so they shouted to make it clearer, and kept pointing up the path. What they meant I did not know. It was evident, though, that the Handsome Lad did not mean to be trifled with. He squatted alongside of us and shouted in my ear, while the old man sat down and showed signs of staying as long as we did. So we wearily started upwards again, and the Montenegrins, delighted at having made us understand, went their way much pleased with their own cleverness. We dared not rest again, and soon reached the upper monastery of Ostrog, which was so strange and unexpected that the sight of it did away with all thoughts of fatigue at once.

The path ended on a terrace cut in the rock 2500 feet above the sea. The small guest-house stood against the mountain side, and a flight of newly made steps led up through a stone doorway to a series of caverns in the cliff face, cunningly built in and walled up to form tiny rooms, which cling to the rock like swallows' nests. The big natural arch of rock that overshadows them all is grimed with the dead black of smoke, and two great white crosses painted on the cliff mark the shrine. Straight above rises the almost perpendicular wall of bare rock, and far below lies the valley. This is the eagle eyrie that, in 1862, Mirko Petrovich, the Princes father, and twenty-eight men held for eight days against the Turkish army of, it is said, ten thousand men. The Turks tried vainly to shell the tiny stronghold, and even a determined attempt to smoke out the gallant band failed. Mirko and his men, when they had used all their ammunition and had rolled down rocks upon the enemy, succeeded in escaping over the mountains, under cover of night, and reached Rijeka with the loss of one man only. It is a tale which yet brings the light of battle to the eyes of the Montenegrin and sends his fingers to caress the butt of his revolver, and must be heard from Montenegrin lips to be appreciated. A hundred years before, thirty men held this same cavern against an army, and wild as these tales sound, the first glance at the place forces belief. Twice only have the Turks succeeded in occupying it. Once after Mirko and his men left it, and once in 1877, when Suleiman Pasha held it, sent the proud message to Constantinople that he had conquered Montenegro and that it was time to appoint a Turkish governor—and was soon in hot retreat to Spuzh, losing half his men on the way. The lower monastery has, on the other hand, been burnt and rebuilt some ten times.

We sat and stared at the scene of these wild doings. The black, smoke-grimed cavern told of the fierce struggle, and the great white cross of the holy man whose body rests within. Sveti Vasili (St. Basil), a local saint, was, early in the eighteenth century, Metropolitan of the Herzegovina. In his old age he sought refuge in the mountains from Turkish persecution, and passed his last days in this remote cavern cared for and reverenced by the Christian peasants. Shortly after his death they scooped out the rock and formed and dedicated to him the tiny chapel where his body still rests. His shrine is held in the profoundest veneration, and on Trinity Sunday (O.S.) pilgrims flock thither in thousands, tramping on foot from Bosnia, the Herzegovina, from Albania, even from the uttermost corners of the Balkan peninsula—a wonderful and most impressive sight. Not Christians alone but also Mohammedans come to the shrine of St. Vasili of Ostrog, for "four hundred years of apostasy have not obliterated among the Bosnian Mussulmans a sort of superstitious trust in the efficacy of the faith of their fathers," and they come in hopes of help to the shrine of the man who suffered for it. And so also do those strange folk, the Mohammedan Albanians. I have passed the night up there in pilgrimage-time, when the mountain side was a great camp and the greater part of the pilgrims slept by watch fires under the stars; but in spite of the mixed nationalities and the difference of religion, perfect order prevailed, and I saw many acts of friendliness and consideration between folk from very different parts.

The precious relics have always been removed in times of danger, and saved from the fate of those of the Servian St. Sava, which were publicly burned by the Turks. They were, of course, removed during the last war. The coffin is not a weighty one and the soldiers were strong, but it became so heavy as they were carrying it down the valley that they knew not what to do. This they took as a sign from the saint that they should stop. They awaited the Turks, and triumphantly defeated them. At the close of the war the relics were restored to the chapel without any difficulty.

As we sat and looked at the knot of little cliff huts, a figure quite in keeping with them came through the doorway and slowly approached us. A magnificent old giant, with a silver beard and long white locks that flowed upon his shoulders, and showed him to be a priest. A tall black astrachan cap was on his head, and in spite of the heat he wore a heavy cloak of dark blue cloth lined with fur, a long blue tunic, and wide knickerbockers shoved into heavy leather boots at the knee. His high cap and his big cloak gave him great dignity, and he welcomed us with superb stateliness. Then, intimating we were to follow him, he conducted us to his residence. It was a narrow little cave fronted in with planks. Here we had to sit down while he fumbled at what was apparently a small cupboard door. He threw it open, and behold—an oil painting of himself, set in a gorgeous gilt frame that contrasted oddly with its rough surroundings. It was evidently a presentation portrait, and he sat down beaming by the side of it, for us to have every opportunity of admiring the likeness. We spread all our scanty stock of Servian adjectives of approval about recklessly, and the result was that from some mysterious corner he produced a black bottle and a small liqueur glass, opaque with dirt. He held the glass up to the light and looked at it critically; even he realised that it was unclean; then he put in his thumb, which was also encrusted with the grime of ages, and he screwed it round and round. No effect whatever was produced on glass or thumb, for the dirt in both cases was ingrained. For one awful second he contemplated his thumb, and I thought he was going to suck it and make a further effort; but no, he was apparently satisfied, and he filled the glass with a pale spirit, which we hoped was strong enough to kill the germs. We drank his health with a show of enthusiasm which seemed to gratify him, for he patted us both affectionately.

UPPER MONASTERY OSTROG.

He then showed us up a wooden step ladder to a still tinier cavern, a dim cabin almost filled up by his bed, whose not over white sheets betrayed the unpleasing fact that Ostrog was still subject to nocturnal attacks and much bloodshed. In a glass case on the wall hung his two medals, one Russian, the other Montenegrin, and, next these, three signed and sealed documents in Cyrillic characters. He began reading out place-names in Montenegro, Bosnia, and the Herzegovina, pointing to his medals, and would gladly have "fought all his battles o'er again," if we could but have understood him. His great treasure he displayed last, a large and handsome walking-stick elaborately mounted in gold filigree set with plates engraved with the said names. His admiration for it was unbounded, and he handled it respectfully. The rugged old giant, and his trophies, standing huge in his tiny lair up in the heart of the mountains, the light from the little window falling on his silver hair and beard, the glittering filigree, the dim squalid background, his pride and glee over his treasures, and the royal air with which he showed them, conjured up a whole life-drama in one swift instant. He broke the spell himself by putting the stick carefully back into its case, and, bowing and crossing himself reverently before a little ikon of Our Lady, led the way out to the chapel.

The entrance was a low, narrow, rough-cut slit; he bowed twice and crossed himself, saw that we did the same, then stooped down and went into a small irregular cavern, its rough-hewn walls rudely frescoed with Byzantine figures. It was very dark; one small window, hacked through the cliff face, and the narrow doorway alone lighted it. Upon the rough ikonostasis he pointed out the figure of St. Vasili in bishop's robes. Then slowly and solemnly he began lighting the candles, striking a light with flint and steel. It took him a long time, and his age was betrayed by his tremulous hands and evidently weak sight. When he had finished, and the cavern was a-twinkle with tiny flames, he approached the shrine. Removing the covering, he fumbled with the lock, opened it, and then threw back the lid slowly and respectfully. There lay the embalmed body of the saint; the slipper-clad feet, the embroidered robes, and the gold crucifix on the breast, only, showing. Modern science and ancient faith had combined for perhaps the first and the last time, and the face and hands of the saint were neatly covered with carbolised cotton-wool. I was jolted back into the twentieth century with a rough shock. The sense of smell—perhaps because it is a wild-beast one—brings up its trains of associations more swiftly than any other, and the life of the old world and the life of the modern one leapt up in sharp contrast.

To the old man, on the other hand, the scent was the odour of sanctity. He was filled with awe and reverence, and gazed at the body like one seeing a wondrous vision for the first time. He bent down slowly and kissed the slippered feet, the crucifix on the breast, and the cotton-wool over the face, crossing himself each time. Then, fearful lest we should omit any part of the ceremony, he seized us each in turn by the back of the neck, poked our heads into the coffin and held them down on the right spots. We followed carefully the example he had set, and completed our pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Vasili. He slowly closed and locked the coffin, and rearranged the drapery upon it. Then we debated together as to how an offering was to be made. He, however, helped us out of the difficulty. He took a small metal bowl from the window, placed it reverently upon the coffin and counted some very small coins into it ostentatiously, clink, clink, then turned his back discreetly and began slowly extinguishing the candles. He allowed just sufficient time to carry out the approved ritual, and hurried back eagerly to inspect the bowl. It appeared that we had acted quite correctly on this occasion also. Coming out through the narrow door into the open air again, we prepared to go; but the old man stopped us, pointed upwards, and shouted for someone. The "someone" came, and turned out to be the Handsome and Haughty Lad who had so cruelly chivied us down below. He gazed at us with a superior smile, and in obedience to his orders led us up to a yet higher cavern, where he showed us a spring of very cold clear water. This is highly prized by the pilgrims to the shrine, who all bring bottles or gourds to fetch some away in. The Lad, I think, expected us to do so, and as he had, as he imagined, made us understand by shouting before, he tried the same system again with great violence. We hastily remunerated him for his trouble, in hopes of changing his ideas, and he was sufficiently mollified to shake hands with us. Whereupon we said good-bye, and left him.

Evening was drawing in when we reached the lower monastery, and service had just come to an end in the little church. The Archimandrite, followed by his small congregation, came out as we approached. We were sleepy, dirty, and hungry, and the prospect of another interview in Servian before getting food or rest was almost too much for us. To our dismay, we were again conducted to the Archimandrites sitting-room. Our relief was great when we heard the words, "Vous parlez français, mesdemoiselles?" and we were introduced to a tall man in the long black robes and high cap of the Orthodox ecclesiasts. Singularly beautiful, his long brown hair flowing on his shoulders, he stood there more like a magnificent Leonardo da Vinci than a living human being. He spoke gently and kindly in the oddest broken French, expressing himself in little rudimentary sentences, begging us to be seated and telling us we were very welcome; "for we are Christians," he said simply, "and is not hospitality one of the first of the Christian virtues? I, too, am a guest here to-night. But you who have come so far to see us, it is the least we can do for you. From England," he repeated, "alone, all the way from England to see Montenegro, quelle voyage! véritablement des héros! In Montenegro you are as safe, vous savez, as in your own homes, but the journey—all across Europe, that is another thing!" The Archimandrite, he explained, regretted that our room was so long in being prepared for us. "It is because we have had a pilgrimage here lately and have had to accommodate very many people. Therefore there was no place suitably furnished for you, but they are putting down the carpets, and it will soon be finished." We were horrified, and begged they would not take so much trouble; but he would not hear of it. "Oh, it is a great pleasure to us all to know that in England there is such a good opinion of Montenegro that two ladies will come all alone into our country and trust us; that the English should wish to know us!" I felt like an impostor; it was embarrassing to be given hospitality as the bearer of good-tidings from Great Britain, but to our innocent-minded entertainer the idea seemed quite simple and sufficient. He had nothing but good to say of everyone. For the two small boys who came in with the usual cold water and coffee, he was filled with admiration—their build, their muscular limbs, their honest, open faces. "Montenegrin faces," he said, "ah! but they are beautiful my faithful Montenegrins! It is my life," he went on, "to help these poor people. I have a church, a little, little church, away among the rocks. It is there that I live. If I had known, mesdemoiselles, before, that you were travelling this way, it would have given me great pleasure to show it to you. But I did not know until yesterday"; and he added, with a smile at our astonishment, "Oh yes, in this country, vous savez, one hears of all strangers."

The conversation was broken off by the announcement that our rooms were ready, and we all went over in a solemn little procession to the house over the way, the two ecclesiasts, the four servants and ourselves, and were shown in with many apologies for the poorness of the accommodation. The dear good people were putting the finishing touches when we entered, and had arranged two large rooms most comfortably. The Archimandrite satisfied himself that the water jugs were full, that we had soap, and that the beds were all right. Then both gentlemen shook hands with us and wished us good-night, and withdrew. An anxious quarter of an hour followed, during which we wondered whether we were going to be fed or not, and regretted that we had bestowed the remains of the bread and mutton on the girl; for we had been knocking about since five a.m., and it was now eight p.m. Then there came a most welcome knock at the door, and we were taken to a large dining-room and a good dinner. It was a solemn meal. We were waited on by four men, who came in and out silently, supplied our wants, stood at attention and gazed at us stolidly. The largest was about six feet four and built to match, but extremely tame in spite of his weapons and his I size. I don't think he had the least idea how very small he made us feel.

Early next morning the Archimandrite and our friend were already about, and came to see us breakfast and to beg that we would write our names in the visitors' book. We said all that we could in the way of thanks to our kind entertainer; he murmured a blessing over us, we shook hands, and were soon wandering down the mountain side.

CHAPTER IV

NIKSHITJE AND DUKLE

Nikshitje is but two hours' drive from the beginning of the Ostrog track, over a mountain pass and down on to a big plain. Nikshitje, says the Prince, is to be his new capital, and work is going on there actively. That it cannot be the capital yet a while seems pretty certain, for it is a very long way from anywhere, and the foreign Consuls and Ministers, who at present lament their isolation from the world and all its joys at Cetinje, would all cry "Jamais, jamais!" in their best diplomatic French, if called upon to transfer themselves to the heart of the land. It is certainly very beautifully situated; the wall of mountains which encircle the big plain is as fine as any in the country, and it is neither so cold in winter as is Cetinje, nor in summer so hot and close as the low-lying plain of Podgoritza. But until there is a road or a railroad that will connect Nikshitje quickly with the coast, it cannot compete in importance with Cetinje. A line that would connect Servia with Antivari via Nikshitje, join the two Servian peoples, and give Servia a port for export, is so much against Austrian interests, both commercial and political, that Austria will under no conditions permit it to pass through any territory over which she has control. There is no speedier way of drawing truthful political opinions from a mixed company of various nationalities than to design fancy railroads over tender territories. At present no line exists in the Balkan peninsula that runs from north-east to south-west. And in the present disgraceful state of all territory that is under Turkish "government" no new lines through any of the Sultan's property are probable. The love of the Montenegrin for Nikshitje is based partly on sentimental grounds; for the taking of Nikshitje, the biggest Turkish stronghold on their northern frontier, was one of the chief events of the last war. Nikshitje fell in 1877, after a four months' siege conducted by Prince Nikola himself.

That the Prince really intends Nikshitje to be the capital of his country is evident. We have a forecast of its coming splendour in the large and really fine church dedicated to St. Vasili, which stands well placed on a little hill, close by a solid and well-proportioned building, designed with a stern simplicity well in keeping with the Montenegrin spirit. Within, it is lofty and spacious, and the bare stone walls are hung with lists of those who fell in the last war. Russia found the money, and Montenegro the labour. The mouldings and capitals are all cut by Montenegrins, and the engineer that built it is a Montenegrin. Nikshitje has a right to be proud of it. At the foot of the hill on which the new church stands is a tiny little old church, the church of the Montenegrins in Turkish times. In those dark days it was almost completely buried under the earth for safety. Now, with the addition of a fat new tower, it shows itself in the light of day.

The battered ruins of the great Turkish fort that was once a thorn in Montenegro's side stand on the long low hill that overlooks the town, and a stone or two with Turkish inscriptions and a few Turkish guns upon the grass are all that tell of its former holders. Whatever the future may have in store for the Montenegrins, let us hope that it will always be remembered to their credit that they have played an heroic part in the freeing of Europe from the Ottoman curse. A tumbledown mosque and some dozen Mohammedan Albanian families are now the only traces left in Nikshitje of the Asiatic invader.

Beyond the town, the land is well cultivated, and maize, tobacco, rye, and potatoes flourish, provided there is sufficient rainfall in the summer. Montenegro at present needs, more than anything, some system of water storage. A superfluity of rain falls in the wet seasons, and the melted snow swells the streams to torrents, but this all flows away for lack of dams or cisterns, and in a spell of hot weather the ground is parched. In the summer of 1902 no drop of rain fell between the middle of May and the beginning of September; there was no corn for food, and no tobacco for export. The people in the mountains, who depend on the plains for corn, were in terrible straits, were reduced to eating fern, grass, and beech bark, and were only saved from starvation by buying foreign maize with the money that had been intended for road-making and other public works.

While Nikshitje, the capital that is to be, is slowly growing, Dukle (Dioclea), the capital that was, the birthplace of the line of Nemanja kings who led Servia to greatness, is slowly mouldering on the plain of Podgoritza. Long prior to Servian days Dukle was known to the world. Already in the early years of the Christian era the Romans had conquered Illyria and organised it as a Roman province, and Dioclea, as it was then called, has come down to fame as the reputed birthplace of Diocletian. Some two and a half miles from Podgoritza, where Zeta and Moracha meet, lies all that is left of the old town. "The parents of Diocletian," says Gibbon, "had been slaves in the house of Anulinus, a Roman senator; nor was he himself distinguished by any other name than that which he derived from a small town in Dalmatia from whence his mother deduced her origin." Whether Dukle is or is not the "small town in Dalmatia," I cannot tell. It is, at any rate, known to be among the first towns taken from the Illyrians by the Romans. It would be interesting to learn whether it is not to a considerable intermixture of the aboriginal Illyrian blood that the Montenegrins owe their superiority to the other Serbs. Some theory is required to account for it, and as the strength of the Servian empire arose from this particular corner, and as the Albanians, their next-door neighbours, are believed to be direct descendants of these same Illyrians, this seems to be the most workable one. There is a certain indefinable quality best described as "gameness," and this both Albanians and Montenegrins possess to a marked degree. It is also the quality of the Herzegovinese, who are mountain men too, and it was in the mountains, we are told, that the aboriginal inhabitants lived after the Servian invasion.

Be this as it may, Dukle, by Podgoritza, was a Roman town of some size, and was afterwards the capital of the early kingdom of Servia. It is a forlorn, lonesome, "sic transit" spot, inhabited by numbers of tortoises peering about with their aged, old-world little faces and wrinkled, leathery necks. Tesseræ work up through the turf, fine cornices and mouldings lie about among the brambles, and the live green acanthus flourishes near the stony leaves of big Corinthian capitals. One slab-paved road remains, all that is left of what appears to have been a forum, some fifty yards long, with the bases of columns strewn along it at intervals, and at the farther end of it the remains of a small building with a round apse. A man lives in a hut hard by and cultivates a few patches of ground among the ruins, which are so smothered in vegetation that it is difficult to form any good idea of the plan of the town. It was explored about ten years ago by some archæologists, but there is probably a good deal yet to be found, as the peasants still pick up many coins and odds and ends of bronze work. The remains of a small basilica church have been dug out, whose broken shafts and bits of marble chancel rails are strewn on the ground, and tesseræ are plentiful among the grass. The marble remains of the forum and many of the cornices and mouldings that are scattered about the ruins are Roman, but a large proportion of the houses, the foundations of which cover several acres, are, I believe, of a later date, and may belong to the old Servian town. A bas-relief of Diana—a mediocre enough specimen of art—lies among the bushes on a bank, gaining a strange pathos from her surroundings, as she stares with stony eyes, the only survivor of the dead capital. All around stand the everlasting hills, keeping majestic watch over the ruins which have seen the passing of two empires, and the river tears along through a stony chasm hard by, and the lean rugged figures of the one or two peasants among the ruins only add to the loneliness.

But this place was once the centre of such learning and civilisation as the land possessed, and "the Monk of Dioclea" was one of Servia's earliest chroniclers. The now almost forgotten town is marked in the map of Ptolemy (circa 150 A.D.). It is mentioned as a famous town in 1162, and it was given by King Milutin as the residence for his son in 1317. After this date little or nothing is heard of it, nor is it known when finally it ceased to be inhabited and crumbled into decay.

CHAPTER V

OUR LADY AMONG THE ROCKS

"To drawe folk to Heaven by fairnesse
By good ensample, this was his busynesse.
For Christe's lawe and his apostles twelve
He taught, but first he followed it himself."

A rough jolt over the wide bare plain; a heavy rainstorm blurring the bleak mountains of the Turkish frontier; no living being in sight save an Albanian woman with her few sheep cowering under the lee of a bush; cut off from the rest of the world by the enshrouding mist, we drove over one of the desolate places of the earth in quest of the little church among the rocks. Of a sudden the sun burst through, hot and brilliant; the plain quivered, golden and glittering, through the rising steam; the clouds parted and rolled back, and revealed the mountains all around us, fiercely, vividly blue, and as lonely as the day they were created.

Two small rocky hills rose up out of the plain, and our driver pulled up suddenly. "You must go on foot," he said; "it is not far," and he pointed to a stony track round the hillside. Doubtfully we started among the rocks and wild pomegranates, till turning a corner we struck a well-marked footpath, and saw the tall black-robed figure of our friend awaiting us at the top of the ascent. "I saw a carriage across the plain," he said, as he came forward, "and I knew it must be you." He welcomed us cordially, and turned towards his little domain. A bare stone wall built up against the hillside with a big wooden cross at the top, and a tiny cottage with a patch of cultivated ground close by, were all that could be seen of it. All around were wild and untouched rock and bush. "My little church," he said, as he led the way to the entrance, "was not built by hands. It was made by God. His church among the rocks." He crossed himself, and we entered.

He lit a taper and held it aloft. We were in a long narrow cavern, water-worn, with traces of stalactite deposit on the rough walls. At the farther end the altar candles burned brightly, lighting up the picture of Our Lady over it, and making the rest of the cave darker by contrast. "See," he said, "it is veritably a church! Is it not in the form of a cross?" and he showed us how a smaller cave opened into it on either side, making a rude nave and transept. The walls at the chancel end were painted with saints and angels, quaint and stiff, their archaic Byzantine forms in perfect keeping with the rough surroundings, and therefore true decoration. "When I have celebrated the Messe here," he continued, "when I have prayed all alone in the silence, then holy things come to me, pictures, vous savez, and I paint them here upon the wall." He held up his taper and threw light upon a great head of Christ. "This is the last I have made. There is no paint left," he added simply. "Nor do I know really which is the proper way to use it. I cannot, I think, take long to learn. My poor attempts, they give pleasure to my people, and they understand."

He led the way into the tiny transept on the left. "Here, you see, I have made for them the Holy Sepulchre"; and we saw by the light of the little taper a bier covered with a black and gold cloth, and a painting of the dead Christ. "They come to me, the poor wayfarers, for consolation, so weary, so suffering. I tell them of Him. I bring them in here and I show them the wounds on His feet. Then they understand. So I can teach them. To help the afflicted, that is religion. Some days I write, songs of religion, of the visions that I see; for the light that is given to us we must employ to show the path toothers." He looked inspired as he stood there, a majestic black-robed figure, the taper, like a guiding star, in his hands, the light of the altar candles falling on his finely cut spiritual features, the solitary sentinel of this Christian outpost. "The church of God, built by His hands in the wilderness; to care for it is all my life," he said humbly. He extinguished the lights, and we stepped out into the sunshine. By the side of the church he pointed out a second cavern in which rises a clear spring of water, the same, maybe, which carved the nave and transepts. It makes the hermitage possible in this otherwise waterless spot, and flows off underground to hew its way silently through the rock.

We turned to say good-bye to him. "But no!" he cried, "you have come so far to see me, I beg you will rest for a while in my house. When shall I again see visitors from England?" He led the way into his cottage; visitors, not only from England but from the outside world at all, are scarce with him. I think we called to his mind a whole host of recollections; for he started at once, and the time flew as he unfolded the story of his life in little sentences, earnestly and quickly, from time to time drawing his black gown across his breast with a swift dramatic action that gave point to his speech. He had been educated in a Russian university, and thence had gone to Paris. He regretted not having visited London. "It seemed so far," he said; "now it seems that I was so near!" But all the time the mountains called to him. "I cannot live away from the mountains and my poor Montenegrins. In the great towns, it was here that I wished to be. I intended to come here and to make a large monastery. But my family did not wish me to lead the religious life. My grandfather was a rich man—not what in England you would call rich, but rich in Montenegro. When I became religious, he gave me none of the money, not any. I have not been able to carry out my plan. It was God's will. My work is here. It is to help my poor Montenegrins to keep their faith. Without faith what is a nation? Ah! I have travelled and I have seen sad things. But in your country, mademoiselle, they have faith. The Church of England and our Church, they have differences, that is true, but they are slight. We are all Christians; there are so many points upon which we can agree. We must not let those others separate us. Your Church has shown great friendship to ours. Your Archbishop has sent us a letter not long ago. It has given great pleasure. Your Church is a Church; you have deacons, bishops; but in Switzerland—the Protestants—that I cannot understand. It is sad.

"Savez-vous," he went on, "I know what a war is. I was a soldier in our last war. We are all soldiers here, you see." "Where were you?" I asked. "It was in the valley of the Zeta—the Turks came down." He stared wide-eyed at a vision of horror and broke off. "It is too horrible to speak of—these scenes; it is all horrible in war. I have seen it. Pray God that we shall have peace. But a day of trial is coming to my poor Montenegrins. Ah, mademoiselle, you understand them. They are so uncivilised and so rough, but they are so good, so simple. You, who travel among them, know how good they are. You will tell them in England—will you not?—of my poor people. Civilisation brings knowledge and many, many wonders, but it does not bring happiness. These poor good people, they have no idea what life is out in the great world, and it is coming to them. And I know what it means, this civilisation. I have lived in Paris—in Paris, savez-vous," he said vehemently. "All I can do is to help them to keep their faith. Till now they have lived with God and the mountains. Here they come to me, the poor, the afflicted, they come to me for help. Some nights I give shelter to as many as fifteen wayfarers. Then they tell me their troubles, and I pray with them. Some of them," he admitted regretfully, "have not lived quite rightly. In the morning I celebrate the Messe in my little chapel, and then they go on their way comforted. On Sundays many people come, and I speak to them, here before the chapel, the words that are given to me. It is very little that one needs in this life. We have so short a time here."

A boy, his pupil and his only companion in his hermitage, came in with coffee, and the giving and the accepting of this simple refreshment seemed to give our host great pleasure. He questioned us about our relatives, and told us of his own. "Once," he remarked quite casually, "I was married," but he did not pursue the subject. He told us of the days when there were only twenty houses in Cetinje—when the chiefs of the land used to meet in council with the Prince, all sitting on the ground in a bare shed where a sheep was roasting for their dinner; how the Prince used to sit under a tree and try prisoners; how there were no roads, no towns, only a few collections of thatched huts. All this only twenty years ago! The poetic, imaginative nature of the Montenegrin. "He lives with the things he imagines. Even now, you see how he carries his gun, his revolver, his knife! He likes to think that he is guarding his house and his land. The weapons are a symbol to him. No Montenegrin likes to go unarmed. In the evening, when he returns to his little cottage, his wife meets him. She takes his gun and puts it in the corner. His weapons are laid aside. It is all peace; he is returned to his wife and children. That is old life. Now it is even said that a railway will be made. But who knows? Where can there be money for such an undertaking?" Truly railway companies and all such things seemed impossibly remote as we sat in this lonely hermitage listening to the hopes and fears of the ascetic visionary. When we arose to say good-bye, he stood over us in the doorway and gave us his blessing.

We stepped out into the world again, and looked over the rough moorland plain. The Turkish frontier fort shone white upon the mountain side some three miles away, and there was no other sign of life as we stared over the lonely land. He read our thoughts at once. "It is a wild spot, yes, and a rough journey that you have made to see me. Few strangers have yet been here. One day three of your countrymen came, but you are the first Englishwomen. It is lonely, and even a little dangerous. You must not try to cross the plain when it is dark, for there are bad men who rob and kill. Yonder, that is Albania. It is so easy for them to come across. Even last night there were armed men; they came up towards my little house and they threatened me with their guns." "And what did you do?" we asked eagerly. "I stood here," he said simply, "and I cried to them, 'The Lord God has said, Thou shalt not kill.' Then they went away," he added, after a pause, in a matter-of-fact manner.

What a scene! The fearless figure alone under the night sky, and the gang of human beasts shrinking awestruck down the rocks as they heard out of the darkness "the voice of one crying in the wilderness." We said farewell. He stood at the top of the path for a few minutes watching our descent, and as we turned the corner we saw his tall dark figure turning towards the little chapel "which is his life."

CHAPTER VI

ANTIVARI

Antivari is not easily reached from Cetinje. You can retreat to Cattaro and then take the weekly steamer. If, however, you have come to Montenegro to see Montenegro, it is better to choose the cross-country route. I have been there more than once, but the first journey thither will suffice. We were raw to the country and knew nothing of the language, so everyone tried to persuade us not to go, or at any rate to take an interpreter. But unless a route is so complicated that a guide is absolutely necessary, I infinitely prefer worrying it out alone; and as for languages, everyone knows that one wants food, drink, and sleep. The only precautions we took were to ascertain that there was an "inn with three beds" at Prstan, the port for Antivari, and to get the hotel to telegraph for a couple of horses to meet us at Virbazar, and we started from Rijeka in the early morning, by steamer. Arrived off Virbazar, we clambered down into a large canoe, along with sixteen Montenegrins, to whom we were a deeply interesting sight, and proceeded very slowly up the river, for the boat was heavily laden with freight and passengers. Neither Montenegrins nor Albanians have much idea of paddling their own canoes. They merely stab and prod the water at irregular intervals with wooden shovels, expending a good deal of energy with very little result; but they wobble along somehow. We speculated anxiously as to what we should do if the horses had not turned up, and were much relieved to see a respectable pair of steeds on the bank. Virbazar is a tiny village on an island on the river, and has no particular features save its bridge. This is a singular structure. It is built of stone, but is so narrow that it is only passable by foot passengers single file. Even if wide enough, though, vehicles would find a difficulty in tackling it, for it changes its style of architecture abruptly in the middle, and, having begun well and loftily, drops suddenly and proceeds to the farther bank with smaller arches and a narrower path at a much lower level. Whether rival architects started from opposite sides, or whether one-half is a "restoration" of the other, and if so which, I do not know. I think, however, it must have been evolved by Turks.

We picked our way across it, attended of course by a fair proportion of the population, and made our way towards the horses. The population objected strongly to our claiming them, but as we persisted, someone had the sense to go and fetch the horse-boy. He, a swarthy Albanian—a wiry, cheerful thing about twenty—produced from the recesses of his garments our telegram. This was read aloud, everyone was satisfied, our mysterious appearance was explained, and the "two good horses" were led up on to the high road. In Montenegro one must always ride astride. Of course it would be possible to take a side-saddle, but I do not think it would be any advantage. The horses are not accustomed to it, and the mountain tracks are very bad. It is much easier to balance on a scrambling horse when astride; it is possible to dismount in a hurry on either side, and it is far less tiring for a very long day's ride, both to horse and rider.

There is a very good carriage road to Antivari, but no carriages to go on it. The only diligence runs once a week; sometimes it fits the boat, and sometimes it doesn't. There is a bridle path which is a short cut, but is so rough that a good deal of it must be done on foot. The road winds up the Crmnitza valley—green, rich, and fertile, a land of vines, maize, and tobacco. Higher up, the mountain sides are well wooded. At the top of the pass the scenery is superb. There is always a strange fascination about the top of a pass. When once it is reached there seems to be no limit set to our wanderings; we enter a new land, and plunge into the beyond—the beyond that is ever a-calling. The top of the Crmnitza valley is crowned by the ruins of a Turkish fort; twenty-five years ago this was Turkish territory, and our horse-boy was a son of the conquered soil. He was a Mohammedan Albanian, and seemed to think he had got a most amusing job. He made the most violent efforts to talk to us, roared with laughter when we did not understand, and poured out torrents of conversation when we did. We plunged down the old bridle track, and scrambled over rocks and bushes along the mountain side. At one point he stopped us and treated us to an amusingly realistic pantomime of cutting off heads and throwing bodies down the rocks. It was a pity we had not command of his language, for this pathless, rugged hillside, with the battered remains of another Turkish fortress on the shoulder below us, was a fine background for a gory tale. Far away below us, beyond the silver-grey olives on the slopes and the fertile plain, gleamed the blue Adriatic; a few cottages clustered on the edge of the bay, and the road led straight to them. "Prstan!" said the boy, and we thought we were nearly there; but there were weary zigzags before we reined up our tired beasts in the waning light by the edge of the sea.

A gipsy camp, a post-office, half a dozen dilapidated cottages, a harbour about the size of a pocket-handkerchief, the Prince's country house, and a lonely beach where the waves splashed—this was Prstan, and the farthest and smallest of the cottages was the "inn with the three beds." The beds are all in the same room, which is also the dining-room, and there is nothing of the stiff conventionality about the establishment that one finds in a hotel starred by Bædeker, but all is clean and the food is excellent, and Maria Bulatovich, the kindly hostess, speaks Italian.

We started betimes next morning to see Antivari. The local coffee stall—a packing-case set up on end with an Albanian coiled up inside it—was doing a roaring trade, and the gipsy camp hard by was getting up and shaking itself. Antivari lies some three miles inland. You don't see it till you are nearly arrived, as it is stowed away between two great mountain spurs. The road twists and twines through magnificent olive gardens, where huge hoary giants sprawl in a thousand grotesque shapes; you turn a corner, suddenly Antivari appears, and the first sight of it is very startling. On a rocky eminence in the midst of the hollow stands gaunt and grim the dismantled Turkish town—battlements, walls, roofless houses and shattered churches—just as it was left after the war, a terrible relic, the grey bones of a city mouldering under the sun and sky, like a gibbeted felon.

We climbed up the steep street of the modern bazaar, with its cranky little wooden shops and gay Albanian inhabitants, to the big gateway of the old town. A sentinel is always on guard here, but in response to the magic word "Engleske" he smilingly passed us in. It is a dead, creepy, ghostly city, strangled and throttled with a tangle of vines and brambles which rend the walls and wreathe door and arch. A forest of fig trees and cherry plums run riot in room and court, and find root-hole on the topmost battlements. Grass grows knee-high in streets that, even now, are thickly strewn with rusty fragments of shells; beautiful pieces of mouldings and a window or two tell of the old town of the Venetians, and the remains of fresco still fade and crumble on the church walls. Man has departed, and nature has stepped in, and is surely and silently finishing the work of destruction. We wandered for an hour in this ghostly spot, looking over the battlements, a sheer drop into the valley below, wrestling with the vegetation, and haunted by a feeling that in spite of the blue sky and sunshine none of it was real.

RUINS OF ANTIVARI.

Antivari fell in January 1878, after a long siege. The defenders made a gallant resistance, and, when forced to surrender, laid a train to the powder magazine. Prince Nikola had a very narrow escape from the ensuing explosion, and the already shattered city was ruined beyond the possibility of repair.

Antivari is marked on the map, but one's first impression of it is that there is now no such place, so scattered are the houses and so scanty the population. Yet it speaks three languages—Turkish, Servian, and Albanian; is divided by three religions—Mohammedan, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic; and has a Roman Catholic Archbishop all to itself. The bishopric is a very old one, established originally at Dioclea, but transferred to Antivari, some say as early as the tenth century. Antivari was Venetian till 1479, and the flock must then have been a large one; now it is reduced to some six hundred souls, all Albanian. At least, so they call themselves. But just as every Mohammedan tells you he is a "Turk," and every one of the Orthodox that he is a Montenegrin, so does every Roman Catholic say that he is an Albanian; and three men who in feature, complexion, and build are as alike as three individuals can well be, will all swear, and really believe, that they all belong to different races. It is not improbable that they are a blend of all three. Most of the inhabitants are Mohammedan. The district is but thinly populated, and is said to be fever-stricken.

Down below on the plain, among the scattered houses, are the ruins of the konak of the former Turkish Pasha, Selim Beg, whose tyranny is still fresh in the minds of the people. The Christians especially were his victims, and many are the tales of the tortures he inflicted. To one unfortunate man he gave a thousand blows upon the soles of the feet When Antivari fell, Selim Beg, who was as cowardly as he was cruel, fled in terror to hide himself from the victorious Montenegrins. Fate so ordained that he rushed for shelter to the house of this same tortured Christian. Terror—stricken, Selim recognised his former victim, and abjectly begged for mercy, and the man to whom he had shown none threw himself on his knees before the crucifix and in an ecstasy poured forth his thanks to the Lord, who had thus permitted him to witness the humiliation of his enemy. "He hath thrown down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree." He spared the life of his torturer, and Selim Beg, after making a servile attempt to gain the friendship of Prince Nikola, retired to Corfu, where, according to my informant, he died "like the beast that he was." This curiously dramatic tale, the truth of which is, I believe, undisputed, throws a strong light upon the Albanian and the sanctity of the "guest"—the man who begs shelter.

We returned to Prstan and Maria's hospitable roof, and all further explorations in the afternoon were put a stop to by the weather. In rushed Maria and shut and barred the door, for the wind was hurling the rain in sheets against the cottage, and we sat in semi-darkness, lit up now and then by a blaze of lightning. Suddenly there came a loud knocking at the door. I grappled with the iron bar, dragged it back with difficulty, and admitted a tall old Montenegrin, whose wet coat, dripping pony, and travelling-bag showed he had come to stay. His amazement at seeing us was quite funny. I thought of the third bed and my heart sank. But Maria transferred herself to the kitchen, and gave up her room to the new-comer. It was evident from her excitement that she considered him to be of great importance. He was, in fact, a relative of the Prince.

We had a gay dinner that night. The little Austrian Vice-Consul, who was a Hungarian, turned up, and the old Montenegrin was resplendent in his best clothes, for he was going to the Palace that evening. He was a tall, thin, handsome man, with a most kindly face and exquisite manners, and was painfully anxious that we should have the best of everything the resources of the place could supply. He told us (the Hungarian translating) that he had met two English ladies once before, in 1865! It was a very long journey, he wondered how we had dared to come. When once in Montenegro everyone was safe—but travelling through all the other countries! The English, he had been told, wanted to see and know everything; they travelled everywhere. It must be a very expensive habit! It had perhaps cost us one hundred florins (about £8) to come this distance. We admitted that it had, and he seemed overcome by the amount. "And it takes not only money but time" said my companion. He laughed merrily. "Time! What is time? Time is nothing. You live, and then you die." The idea of reckoning "time" tickled him vastly. "Time," said the Hungarian, to show his superior knowledge, "is thought very much of by the English. I have been told that they have a proverb which says 'Time is money.'" We corroborated this report—to the astonishment of both men, for even the Hungarian thought this was going rather far. The Montenegrin thought it one of the wildest statements he had ever met with, and shook his puzzled head, but his kindly eyes twinkled with fun.

I think I see him now as he wished us good-night—a resplendent figure in his green embroidered coat, his crimson and gold waistcoat, his dark blue knickerbockers, white gaiters and new sandals, bowing himself backwards through the little door with simple dignity, his tall lean form slightly bent by age—a splendid type of the Montenegrin of the old regime. I had a strange feeling of having known him years ago. As he passed from the room I recognised, with a sudden illuminating flash, Chaucer's

"A knyghte there was and that a worthy man
That from the time that he first began
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Truth and honoure, freedom and courtesie.
Full worthie was he in his lordes warre....
He was a very perfect gentle knyghte," etc.

And had he not too "fought often for his faith" against "a hethen in Turkeye"? The truth of the mediæval picture charmed me, and the knight armed with a white cotton umbrella went off in a shandrydan to pay his respects at the Palace on the beach.

The weather never cleared, so we saw no more of Antivari that time. Blinding torrential rain and fierce blasts of wind crashed on the cottage walls. The fat frogs in the pond sat up, and their hoarse shouts, "brek-kek-kek-kek-koax-koax," resounded in every lull of the storm. We waited for the only diligence, and returned by it to Virbazar, and had as travelling companion our old friend of the inn, who, to our distress, would persist in occupying the small seat back to the horses, and was miserably uncomfortable in consequence. At last neither of us dared stir, as the slightest movement on our part brought an apology for the inconvenience he was sure he was causing us. To make up for this, he tried to tell us all about the road as we went along, though speaking Italian was a great labour to him. He had taken part in the siege of Antivari. "Ah!" he said, "that was terrible. All those weeks. And in the winter. They are brave men, the Turks." He pointed down the valley where, through rifts in the mist, we could see the stream. "The Austrian frontier," he said sadly. "Austrian. And we gave our blood for that land. It was ours. And they took it from us. They gave it to Austria. I do not understand it." I do not think that the affairs of the outer world entered into his head at all. Montenegro and abstract justice were all he wanted. Russia was a distant Providence who would assist the right to prevail. But the wheels within wheels and the shuffling of international politics were a mystery to his primitive, honest soul.

There were many things that puzzled him. We passed a village. "This is all Mohammedan," he said. "There is a mosque below. We have built them a school. It is a good school, but they will not go to it. They say they do not care for education! They are strange people, these Albanians!" He sighed and shook his head. He looked on the village school as the first step on the path of sweetness and light. I had a vision of the Board School child, the "penny dreadful," and the novelette with a paper pattern of the last new sleeve included. I think he was double my age, but he made me feel very old. We passed a school; the sun had come out at last, and the playground was full of sturdy young Montenegrins. He smiled at them with pleasure, and I was glad to think that he cannot survive long enough to have his dream of enlightened Montenegro shattered. He said good-bye to us not long after, and we saw the last of him as he entered his modest little house on the mountain side.

The remainder of the drive did not take long. We were soon in Virbazar, and once again a cause of local excitement. By the help of a man who spoke a little German, we were made to understand that we could go for nothing in the common boat to the steamer, but that for a florin we could have a very good one all to ourselves. It would have been too unkind to disappoint them, and we were such rare birds! We delighted every one by accepting the offer of a private boat.

When the boat was ready, we did not feel quite so pleased. It was a canoe with two bent-wood chairs arranged in it as a sort of throne at one end, and looked remarkably topheavy. The crew, two tall youths and a boy, were in great glee at having secured such a job, and conducted us to our seats with much ceremony before a large crowd. Off we pushed, and made a lordly, if somewhat wobbly progress down stream. All went well till we were suddenly aroused by the steamers hooter. Then our crew were seized with a wild and irresistible desire to make a rapid, showy finish to the voyage. "Really," said my friend, "it requires all my faith in Montenegrins to feel safe." The words were scarcely out of her mouth when round swung the canoe in response to a violent stroke of the paddle, and out she shot, chair and all, as if from a catapult. I hadn't even time to grab at her. A vision of grey skirts, a splash, and she was gone! "Well, never mind; she can swim," thought I, as the waters closed over her. The next instant I had to hurl myself almost over the other side, to right the boat, as the two men, completely scared, both leaned out at once, and as nearly as possible capsized the whole thing. The boy came to my side, the men perceived that the foreign lady was not going to drown, and the panic passed over. Their idea of helping her in was remarkable—they grasped large handfuls and tugged. I believe they pulled her in by one leg. The misery and dismay on their faces when she at last stood up in the boat dripping and streaming were so unutterably funny that we both roared with laughter. They were greatly relieved at this, but most anxious to make her look respectable before going on board the steamer, and wrung her out with such vigour and muscle that I thought she would come to pieces. Then having picked up the chair and hat, they paddled in a subdued and gingerly manner to the steamboat, were shy about accepting the florin, and thanked for it repeatedly. The captain, when he learned our plight, laughed as though he would never stop, and put the one cabin and a bucket at our disposal. We improvised a costume out of two nightgowns, a waterproof, and a brush-and-comb bag, poured olive oil into her watch and brandy into her, and although it rained all the rest of the way back to Cetinje no evil results ensued to either of them. But the episode has become a legend of the lake, and two years after I heard an Albanian retailing it to an interested audience. The point of the story was the extreme cold-bloodedness of the English, as shown by the heartless way I laughed at my friend's misfortune!

CHAPTER VII

OF THE NORTH ALBANIAN

"The wild ass, whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the crying of the driver."

The difficulty of the "Eastern Question," as it is called, lies in the fact that it is not "a" question at all but a mass of questions, the answering of any one of which makes all the others harder of solution. Of all these, the Albanian question is the hardest to solve, and has not as yet received the attention that it calls for and will shortly compel. Few people in the West—none, I might almost say, who have not been to Albania—can realise that to-day in Europe there lives a whole race, a primeval lot of raw human beings, in a land that is not only almost entirely without carriageable roads, but in which in many cases the only tracks are even too bad for riding, the conditions of life are those of prehistoric barbarism, and the mass of the people have barely even attained a mediæval stage of civilisation.

When the Albanian arrived in Europe none knows, and authorities differ as to his possible relationships with other people, but there is no I manner of doubt that he is the direct descendant of the wild tribes that were in the Balkan peninsula before the Greeks and before the Romans, and have been variously described as Thracians, Macedonians, and Illyrians, according to the part they inhabited. They are described as having been fierce fighters and very wild, and they furnished Rome with some of her best soldiers. Nor were they lacking in brain power; men of barbarian Balkan blood arose who ruled their conquerors and provided the Roman empire with a list of emperors that includes Diocletian and Constantine the Great.

Empires have risen and empires have passed away, and the Albanian has remained the same wild thing. The might of Rome waned; the Servian, the Venetian, and the Ottoman have followed in turn. "Annexed" but never subdued, the Albanian merely retired to the fastnesses of the mountains and followed the devices of his own heart, regardless of his so-called ruler. The Albanian of to-day is nominally under Turkish rule, but nominally only.

The Albanian's position with regard to Turkey is a very peculiar one. The Turk, so his friends tell us, has many admirable qualities, but even those who love him best do not pretend that he has ever attempted to civilise, cultivate, or in any way improve the condition of, his subject races. Under the Turk all development is arrested, and nothing ripens. The Albanian, for the most part, remains at the point where he had arrived when the Turk found him, and except that he has adopted the revolver and breechloading rifle, he has not advanced an inch. He is the survival of a past that is dead and forgotten in West Europe.

His language has troubled philologists considerably. It is a soft, not unpleasant-sounding tongue, full of double "shshshes" and queer consonant sounds; such queer ones that it fits no known alphabet, and he has never found out how to write it down. Quite recently several attempts have been made, mostly by foreigners, to tame this wild language to an alphabet, and three or four different systems have been evolved, all more or less unsatisfactory, as no alphabet unaided can cope with its peculiar sounds. One in which Roman letters are used and plentifully strewn with accents, both above and below, is the most favoured in North Albania, but the Turk does not allow Albanian as a school language, the mass of the people speak nothing else, and Albania remains a land without a literature, without a history, without even a daily paper. To possess and use an unwritten language in Europe in the twentieth century is no mean feat It carries one back to remote prehistoric times, confronts one with blank unwritten days, and suggests forcibly that the Albanian is probably possessed of raw primeval and perhaps better-left-unwritten ideas. Our search for the live antique cannot take us much further. But the Albanians, in spite of their antiquity, are incredibly young as a people, and blankly ignorant of the outer world. They are still in the earliest stage of a nation's life history, and have not yet advanced beyond the tribal form of life.

At an early date—some say as early as the fourth century, but this seems doubtful—the Albanians became Christian. I have failed to discover what man or men succeeded in thus powerfully influencing this very conservative people. It is a remarkable fact that, though all the other Christians of the Balkans early declared for the Eastern Church and all the Pope's efforts to reclaim them failed, the Christian Albanians of the North have remained faithfully Roman Catholic.

The mountains of Albania, like those of Montenegro, are a series of natural fastnesses, among which a small army of attack is massacred and a large one starves. Moreover, a large part of the land was not worth the expense of taking. The tribes were exceedingly ferocious, and would have taken a great deal of conquering, but as they had no leader under whom they could combine and make organised attacks, they were not the danger to the Turks that the Montenegrins were. Moreover, the fact that they belonged to the Western and not to the Eastern Church prevented them from making common cause with the other Christian peoples. Once and once only were they on the point of obtaining recognised national existence, and this was under the leadership of the great Skender Beg. But Skender Beg died in 1467, and as yet no one has arisen capable of welding the semi-independent tribes into a solid whole. The Turks purchase peace from them by leaving them to do as they please among their mountains. The Albanians purchase privileges from the Turks by fighting for them and supplying the Turkish army, as they did formerly the Roman, with some of its best soldiers. And Albania to-day remains separated into a number of distinct tribes, which are governed by their own chieftains according to unwritten laws which have been handed down orally from a very remote past. The Turkish "Government" has practically no say in the matter. At any rate, what it says it has not the power to enforce.

The Albanian is ignorant and untrained, but he is no fool. His one ruling idea has been to go on being Albanian in the manner of his fathers. He perceived quickly all the points that would enable him to do so, and he seized upon them. The mountain people in the more inaccessible parts retained their Christianity. The Albanians who swooped upon the plains vacated by the Serbs found it greatly to their advantage to profess Mohammedanism, and both Mohammedan and Roman Catholic were ready to make common cause against the Christians of the Eastern Church. So indispensable have the Albanians made themselves to the Turkish Government that it has been forced to concede to them every license, lest it should lose their support. Far from making any attempt at civilising them, it has never scrupled to make use of their savagery in warfare, and in warfare the Albanian can be exceedingly savage. Never from the beginning of time has he been taught anything that the Western world thinks necessary; never in the majority of cases has the most rudimentary education come his way. His Mohammedanism and his Christianity he practises in an original and Albanian manner, and in his heart he is influenced mainly by traditional beliefs and superstitions which are probably far older than either. He purchased his freedom by making himself useful to the Turk, and the Turk has left him in the lowest depths of barbarism. The only schools that exist in the land are those of the Italian and Austrian Frati, and such civilisation as the Albanian possesses he owes to the labours of these devoted men. As for travelling and means of communication, it seems probable that the roads to-day are far inferior to what they were in the time of the Romans. And this is the land of the only one of her subject races with which Turkey has been "friends." The deplorable state of Albania is an even stronger indictment against Turkish "government" than that of Macedonia. To-day the country is practically in a state of anarchy. Little or nothing is done in the way of cultivation; blood-feuds rage, and men are shot for quarrels that are family inheritances and originated for long-forgotten reasons in the dark ages.

Human life is cheap, very cheap. An ordinary Englishman has more scruples about killing a cat than an Albanian has about shooting a man. Indeed, the Albanian has many of the physical attributes of a beast of prey. A lean, wiry thing, all tough sinew and as supple as a panther, he moves with a long, easy stride, quite silently, for his feet are shod with pliant leathern sandals with which he grips the rock as he climbs. He is heavily armed, and as he goes his keen eyes watch ceaselessly for the foe he is always expecting to meet. There is nothing more characteristic of the up-country tribesman than those ever-searching eyes. I have met him many a time in the Montenegrin markets, in the weekly bazaar in his capital, and on the prowl with his rifle far in the country. Up hill or down hill, over paths that are more like dry torrent beds, it is all the same to him; he keeps an even, swift pace, and he watches all the time. Dressed as he is, in tightly-fitting striped leg-gear and in a short black cape, his appearance is extraordinarily mediæval, and he seems to have stepped straight out of a Florentine fresco. His sash is full of silver-mounted weapons, he twists his tawny-moustache, and he admires himself exceedingly. He walks with a long rolling stride, planting his feet quite flat like a camel or an elephant—a gait which gives him an oddly animal appearance. His boldly striped garments, with their lines and zigzags of black embroidery, recall the markings of the tiger, the zebra, and sundry venomous snakes and insects. He seems to obey the laws that govern the markings of ferocious beasts; his swift, silent footsteps enhance the resemblance, and his colouring is protective; he disappears completely into a rocky background. The black patterns vary according to the tribe he hails from. If you ask his name, he generally gives you his tribal one as well, and points over the mountains towards his district. He is So-and-So, for instance, of the Hotti or the Shoshi. Most men, whether Christian or Mohammedan, have their heads shaven; sometimes on the temples only, the rest of the hair standing out in a great bush; sometimes the entire head, with the exception of one long lock that dangles down the back. There are two distinct types of Albanians—a dark type with black hair, brown eyes, and clean-cut features, and a very fair type, grey or blue-eyed, taller and more powerfully built. To this class belong almost all the shaven-headed men with the dangling locks, a row of whom, squatting on their heels, look remarkably like a lot of half-moulted vultures. According to popular belief, the long lock is to serve as a handle to carry home the head when severed. A head, it seems, can be carried only by the ear, or by inserting a finger in the mouth, and this latter practice the owner of the head, when alive, objects to!

But in spite of his wild-beast appearance and his many obvious faults, the Albanian is by no means all bad. I will almost say that he possesses the instincts of a gentleman. At any rate, he "plays fair," according to his own very peculiar creed. He boasts that he has never betrayed a friend nor spared a foe. It is true that "not sparing" includes torture and various and most horrible atrocities, but it is a great mistake in considering any of the Balkan peoples to make too much capital out of "atrocities." A century ago every race, including our own, considered the infliction of hideous suffering the legitimate way of punishing comparatively small crimes. At the risk of being laughed at, I will say that I do not believe the Albanian is by nature cruel. The life of the poor up-country peasant is hard and rough beyond what anyone who has only lived in a civilised country can realise, and the life of such a man's beasts is of necessity a hard one also. But though I have met him with his flocks on the hillsides and have watched him carefully in street and market, I have never seen the Albanian torturing an animal for the fun of the thing, as does the Neapolitan, the Provençal, and the Spaniard. The revolting "jokes" with lame and helpless animals which can be seen any day in the streets of Naples are not to be met with in the capital of the bloodthirsty Albanian.

MOUNTAIN ALBANIANS IN MARKET, PODGORITZA.

I have trusted the Albanian somewhat recklessly, I have been told; I have given him plenty of chances of robbing me, and several of making away with me altogether; but he has always treated me with a fine courtesy, and has never taken a mean advantage. He is a brave man, and he is an intelligent man. When he gets the chance, he learns quickly and picks up foreign languages speedily. And when he succeeds in leaving his native land and escaping the awful blight of the Ottoman, he often shows great business capacity, and a surprising power of adapting himself to circumstances.

The ordinary Christian Albanian of the town is very different from the up-country savage, and is a pathetically childish person. He tries very hard to be civilised, but his ideas on the subject are vague. How far he is from understanding the prejudices of the twentieth century the following conversation will show. It is one of many similar. I was walking up the steep, cobble-stony bazaar-street of Antivari late one afternoon in the summer of 1902. The shop owners stood at their doors to see me pass. Presently a man came forward, a tall, fair, grey-eyed fellow. He spoke very politely in a mishmash of Servian and Italian. "I have never seen a foreign woman before," he said, "will you come into my shop and talk to me?" I followed him into his shop. As I was unmistakably from the West, he gave me a tiny box to sit on, and then squatted neatly on the ground himself, called for coffee, and started conversation. He was amazed at my nationality, and showed me some cotton labelled "Best hard yarn" among his goods. Otherwise "England" conveyed no idea to him. England, having no designs on Albania, does not count much as a Power with the ordinary Albanian, but is merely something distant and harmless that does not matter, whereas an eye is kept on Austria and on Italy, and Russia is regarded with extreme suspicion.

"And you have come all this journey to see us!" he cried. "It is wonderful! I am a Christian Albanian. I am Catholic." Here he crossed himself vigorously to show that he really was, for in these lands your position in this world and the next depends mainly upon how this is done. "Ah, but you should see Skodra!" I told him I knew it well, and he beamed with pleasure. We discussed its charms and the unsurpassed magnificence of its shops. "And it is in the hands of those devils the Turks. Ah, the devils! I came here eighteen years ago with my father, because this is a free land. Here all is safe, but it is a poor country. When I was a boy I was bad. I went to the school of the Frati, but I would not learn. Now I know nothing, and I speak Italian, oh, so badly!" He rocked himself sadly to and fro with his big account-book on his knees. Son of the race with the worst reputation in Europe and born in one of Europe's worst governed corners, he lamented (as which of us has not done?) the lost chances of his youth and his lack of book-learning. To comfort him, I told him his people in Skodra had been very good to me. He cheered up. "Why do you come here?" he asked. "Why do you not travel in my country?" I said that I was told that it was a bad time and the country very dangerous. He considered the question earnestly, and looked me all over. Then he said seriously, "No; my people are very good to women, they will not hurt you. But there is no government, so the bad people do what they like. There are some bad people; Turks, all Turks. But there is no fear. Truly they will take all your money, but they will not hurt you. That," he said simply, "would not be honest. My people are all honest. You must not shoot a woman, for she cannot shoot you. Now with a man it is different; you must shoot him, or he will shoot you first. Also you cannot take his money if you do not shoot him first." To all of which points I agreed.

"Truly it is a misfortune," he continued, "that there is no government. If we had only a king!" "Do you think you will have one?" I asked. He chuckled mysteriously. The air just then was thick with rumours of a Castriot descendant of the Skender Beg family who at that very moment was reported to be awaiting an opportunity for landing in Albania. Reports of his fabulous wealth were arousing much excitement in the breasts of his prospective subjects, but I fancy a rumour of their custom of "shooting first" must have reached his ears; for, so far, this middle-aged gentleman, whose life has been passed in Italian palazzos, has shown no hurry to take up his inheritance. My friend's ideas were vague and formless, and he could get no farther than "a king for Albania and death to those devils the Turks." After a little more talk, I got up to say good-bye. But he insisted upon my having more coffee first. "It is true that I am poor," he said, "but I am not too poor to give two cups of coffee to one who has come so far to see us. Some day in your country you will see some poor devil from Skodra, and you will be good to him because his people are your friends." Nothing could exceed the grace with which he proffered hospitality to a stranger guest, but he saw no objection to robbery with murder if committed according to rule; and he prided himself on his Christianity. He shook hands with me very heartily. "A pleasant journey," he said. "Remember me when you meet a Skodra-Albanian in London. I shall never see you again—never, never." The sun was setting rather dismally, and with "nikad, nikad" (never) ringing in my ears and the gaunt ruins of the dead city before me, I felt quite as depressed as the Albanian. Truly the Albanian outlook is not a cheerful one.

In the larger towns, where Turkish troops are quartered and there are plenty of Mohammedan officials, the Christians are in the minority, and their cowed manner makes it fairly obvious that they have a poor time. But the Christians of the mountains very much hold their own. The Mirdite tribe in the heights between the Drin and the coast is entirely Christian and one of the most fiercely independent. The town Christian who has picked up a smattering of education from the foreign Frati, has had a peep at the outside world and vaguely realises the blessings of life in a well-ordered land, sighs for some form of civilised government. Some have even told me that they wish to be "taken" by somebody—"by Austria, or Italy, or you, or anybody. It could not be worse than it is now." But the mass of the people resent most fiercely the idea of any foreign interference, and cling fast to their wild and traditional manner of life. Whether Christian or Mussulman, the Albanian is intensely Albanian. A Christian will introduce you to a Mohammedan and say, "He is a Turk, but not a bad Turk; he is good like me; he is Albanian." The Christian that the Albanian Mussulman persecutes is, as a rule, the Christian of another race. Between Christian and Mohammedan Albanian there is plenty of quarrelling, but then so there is between Christian and Christian, Mohammedan and Mohammedan. It is of the blood-feud, intertribal kind, played according to rule; for even in Albania it is possible, if the rules be not observed, for killing a man to be murder. When a common enemy threatens, a "bessa" (truce with one another) is proclaimed, and they unite against him. The chief tribes in Northernmost Albania are the Hotti along by the Montenegrin frontier and by the lake; the Shoshi and the men of Shialla and of Skreli in the mountains above the plain of Skodra; the Mirdites in the mountains between the Drin and the coast; and the Klementi on the Montenegrin frontiers by Mokra and Andrijevitza.

The Turks from time to time, when the Albanians have been more than usually lively, by various means (including treachery) have contrived to give the chieftains of one and another "appointments" in remote corners of Asia Minor, but with no results so far, except that the people, deprived of the only man who had any authority over them, became yet more unmanageable. Even the mildest of the town Christians takes a delight in pointing out in the bazaar the tobacco which has paid no duty and saying, "We pay no tax for tobacco; we are Albanian, and we do not like to." The Turks have been unable to enforce this tax, and have to content themselves by searching the baggage that leaves the country and opening the hand-bags of tourists to prevent tobacco from leaving untaxed.

The Albanians seldom do anything they "do not like," and they are quick to object to any interference. Just now they have been objecting to "reformation" on Austro-Russian lines. The so-called reforms were the laughing-stock of everybody—Servian, Montenegrin, and Albanian—when I was out there last summer. For the Albanian's "unreformedness" has always been his chief attraction in Turkish eyes, and in order to give him every opportunity to behave in an "unreformed" manner, when the spirit moved him, the Turk in recognition of his services in the last war supplied the Albanian lavishly with weapons. Christians throughout the Turkish dominions have always been forbidden to carry arms. The Christian Albanian alone has this privilege. Every mountain man has firearms of some sort, many of them fairly modern rifles. It is one thing to give a man a gun and quite another to take it away from him. When the weapons were merely used upon the wretched unarmed Servian peasants in the plains of Old Servia, not a soul in any part of Europe save Russia paid the smallest attention; but when Stcherbina, the Russian Consul, fell a victim, it was a different matter, and the Turks found themselves in the unpleasant position of having either to offend Russia or to quarrel with their best allies. They proceeded to "reform" Albania on truly Turkish lines. They chased the Albanians out of the territory they had had no business to have swooped upon, and they arrested a few leaders as a matter of form. The Albanians were astonished and rather aggrieved, for they had done very little more than they had always been given to understand they might do. Further interference might have alienated the Albanians altogether, but as for the sake of appearances and the "reform scheme" some non-Mohammedan officials had to be appointed, the Turks sent an Armenian and a Jew, called respectively Isaac and Jacob, to Skodra. Isaac and Jacob were shot in the main street in the day-time, and as far as I have heard their situations are still vacant. The affair caused some little amount of excitement, nevertheless the Albanians did not wish to resort to violence so long as the "Government" did not make itself disagreeable. There is an old tomb in Skodra, the last resting-place of some minor Mohammedan saint. Shortly after the deaths of Isaac and Jacob some mysterious writing was found upon the tomb. Though written in very ordinary charcoal, it was obviously of more or less divine origin, and the people anxiously waited the deciphering of the message. It proved to be merely a piece of a verse from the Koran conferring a vague blessing upon somebody. "Allah be praised!" said an old hodja, greatly relieved, "it has not told us to go and shoot any more reformers!"

There were a great many more soldiers in Skodra than before. I asked several people the reason of this, in order to see what they would say. They one and all said, with a smile, "The Turks want to reform Albania, but they are obliged to send the soldiers to the towns, because the people in the country do not like them!" The town swarmed with soldiers. An officer rushed at my old guide, whom I was employing to interpret for me in the bazaar, and abused him in a loud voice till I interfered; a soldier seized and beat very severely a wretched little boy who begged of me, and my efforts on his behalf were of no avail; and these were all the results of the reforms that I saw or heard of in Skodra.

But the idea seems gaining ground that the Albanian in the event of a war may cease to support a dying cause and elect to play a game of his own. When, as must inevitably be shortly the case, Macedonia is under a Christian governor, Albania will be yet more separated from the present seat of government (Constantinople), and the situation will become acute. I heard a good deal about "the king that is to be." Many Serbs even expressed their opinion that the Albanians would be a great deal better if their independence were recognised; saying that at present they are responsible to no one; the Turk incites them to commit atrocities, and washes his hands of all they do; and that left to themselves the Albanians would develop into a fine people. That they have the makings of a fine people is probably true. That they are now capable of self-government is quite another thing. Unlike the other Balkan peoples, they have no past, no former empire. Their history is all "years that the locusts have eaten." What is to become of the Albanians? is one of the hardest of all the Eastern questions. Austria desires to have the answering of it.

CHAPTER VIII

SKODRA

Skodra is the capital of North Albania. In our maps it is usually called Scutari—a name which causes it to be confused with the other and far better known Scutari on the Bosporus. In a French paper I once read an account of "the Prince of Montenegro's palace on the Bosporus" which described the Princes country place at Podgoritza, near the lake of Scutari. But the French seldom shine as geographers.

Skodra can be reached from the port of St. Giovanni di Medua, at which a line of Lloyd steamers calls regularly. From thence a ride of nine hours, if you can find a horse, will take you by a very bad road to the town. But even from the Turks, who take a couleur-de-rose view of the resources of their land, I failed to learn that the route offered any attractions. It can also be reached by a steamer which, when there is enough water in the river, ascends the Bojana as far as Obotti, whence a barge will wobble you up to the town in an hour or thereabouts.

By far the prettiest and pleasantest route is that from Cetinje by the lake. The Danitza, the chief vessel of the Montenegrin squadron according to the engineer, runs twice a week from Rijeka. It is a clean, tidy little boat built in Glasgow, and is very fairly punctual as to time. The sluggish stream meanders slowly in and out the hills; the channel of deep water serpentines through acres of water-lilies, white and yellow, whose leaves form a dense mat on the surface and a happy hunting-ground for the water birds—duck, moorhens, herons, spoonbills, and pelicans. It is a færie river, with the magic of the hills upon it, all silent save for the flap of the herons that rise as the boat glides past. Half choked with reeds and weeds which grow rankly luxuriant and rot in tangles, it tells of the making of the fertile lands of Montenegro, for the plains are all ancient lake beds from which the water has retreated. One hears without surprise that fever haunts the river in autumn, but, judging by the healthy appearance of the folk of the neighbourhood, it cannot be of a very virulent type, and at no time of the year have I met with any mosquitoes.

At the rivers mouth stand wretched shanties of rock and brushwood, the dwellings of the fisher-folk who reap, in the late autumn, a plenteous harvest. Vast shoals of small fish called "scoranze" rush up the lake from the sea, and are netted in such thousands that, dried and salted, they form one of Montenegro's chief exports.

STREET IN BAZAAR SKODRA.

We pass the island of Vranina and glide out into the great green lake, leave the heights of Montenegro behind us, and see at the farther end the "Accursed Mountains" of Albania purple in the distance. The waters of the lake, according to the Albanians, are endowed with marvellous curative properties. You must drink of them for a month, and then, no matter what is your disease, you "throw it all up," or else you die!—a severe kill—or—cure remedy upon which I have never experimented. We stop at Plavnitza and at Virbazar to pick up passengers, who come out in big canoes with long, upturned, pointed prows, and the deck is soon crowded with gay baggage and its strange owners, all of whom are usually anxious to make friends. You have only to show an interest in the women's babies and the men's weapons to secure entertainment for the rest of the voyage. "Show the lady your new gun," said a tall Albanian to a youth. He passed over a Russian repeating rifle. A woman who was standing near hastily got out of the way. The Albanian expressed contempt. "It might go off," said the woman. "Well, what if it did?" laughed the Albanian. "Look at me. I've been shot twice. It's nothing. Once I was hit here," he touched his shoulder; "and the doctor cut out the ball with a knife," he added with great satisfaction. "My brother died," said the woman briefly.

So on, in leisurely fashion, till at the end of the lake we see the Crescent flying from an antiquated warship—the red flag and the dying moon that we falsely call the "crescent," for it will never wax again. I confess that I never see it on the borders without a curious thrill. I was brought up to consider the Turk a virtuous and much injured individual. Now I never cross his frontier without hoping soon to be able to witness his departure from Europe.

A shattered fortress frowns on the hill, a row of ramshackle buildings lines the shore, a filthy crowd fills the custom-house steps. Scutari—Albanese, Skodra at last. Time rolls back from the invisible boundary against which the centuries have beaten in vain, and before us lies the land of a prehistoric people and the life of past ages. Canoes big and little come paddling out in a scrambling hugger-mugger; Montenegro becomes, for the time being, a type of all that is most civilised in West Europe, and we leave it behind us on the steamboat.

The custom-house is a dark den, in which everyone shouts at once and tumbles over everyone else. Smuggle your dictionary, if you have one, in an under pocket; there is no knowing, says the Turk, what a book in a foreign language may contain, so away with them all. There are few things more deadly. Passports are, or are not, asked for according to the amount of political tension. I have heard of two individuals who "rushed" that frontier by the aid of receipted bills, the stamps on which gave them a pleasingly official air, and have twice myself crossed the Turkish frontier "when I hadn't ought." Anyone with an ounce of wits can, I believe. And really there is something to be said for a passport system that is warranted to exclude no one but the fools. The Persian who inspects the passports, on this occasion, merely asked for our names, which were too much for him. We gave him our visiting cards; he copied our Christian names letter by letter, then, exhausted by the effort, he added London as sufficient address, and the ceremony was complete. He is a humble youth, will accept twopence as bakshish, and be your dog for a florin. Like most Turkish officials, he exists, I presume, on the pickings of his office. And the nation he loves the best in all Europe varies according to the nationality of the individual he is addressing.

One gets used to arriving at Skodra as one does to most other things, but the first visit is an amazement. It will be some time before I forget that day when we emerged for the first time from that custom-house. The captain of the steamer ruthlessly whacked off all the would-be porters except one small boy, and bade him take us to the carriage stand. Off sped the boy like a hare, threading the mazes of the bazaar, dodging round corners and plunging down dark airless passages, his bare feet gripping the pavement, we following hard on his heels, dazzled by sun-spots, blinded in the darkness, confused by the unwonted sights, and slithering on the slippery cobblestones which slope down to the gutter in the middle where the pack-asses walk and the muck accumulates. Finally, after a ten minutes' chase, he halted us breathless on an open space on the farther side of the bazaar, stowed us into the remains of a peagreen fly, and accepted sixpence with gratitude. Off we rumbled down a lane that, but for its wayfarers, might be English, so familiar are its hedges, ditches, bramble and clematis, and we reached the residential part of the town and a decent hostelry in about twenty minutes.

Skodra is not merely an interesting spot to visit from Cetinje; it also belongs rightly and properly to Servian history. From a very early period (it is said the seventh century) it formed part of the Servian territories, and it remained unconquered after the fatal battle of Kosovo. It was the capital of George Balsha, Prince of the Zeta, and was resigned by him into the hands not of the Turks, but the Venetians, traces of whose architecture yet remain in the town. Though more than once attacked, it was not taken by the Turks until 1479, and then only after a siege of six months. Now the Turk holds Skodra, the Albanian calls it his, and the Montenegrin has never forgotten that it once formed part of the great Servian Empire. According to the Albanian, it is the finest city in Europe, and when he tells you so he is proudly speaking what he believes to be the literal truth. To him it is an ideal spot, the model of what a capital should be, and the centre of his universe.

The Albanian may be caught young, and tamed; he may wander into far countries; he does a good trade in Rome; he may even live years in England; but for him a glory always hangs over the capital of his country. He is rare in London; there are only two or three of him, and he was hard to find. I tracked him to a far suburb, and when he learnt whence I had come his enthusiasm was unbounded. The greatness and magnificence of his country made it not at all surprising that the whole of Europe coveted it, and he gloried in the fact. "Not that Russia, nor them Austria, nor nobody," he said, "was going to have it! English mans silly mans; no understand my people. My people all one week like that"; here he whirled his arms wildly round his head; "next week go back work. Olright. War with Turks? No, ain't going to be none." "Isn't the Turkish government a hard one?" I asked. "There ain't no government," said he gleefully. "What about the taxes?" "Oo pay?" said the Tame Albanian; "you tell me that." Money, he admitted, had to be raised at intervals, but you always lived in hope that it would be raised in some other district, and if you displayed a proper amount of spirit it was. In the days of his youth he had fought for the Turks. "I Bashi-bazouk," he said with pride; "reg'lar army all them Mohammedans. I Catholic. I good Christian. I Bashi-bazouk." To us Bashi-bazoukdom and Christianity are odd yoke-fellows. To him, quite right and proper.

Head of a flourishing business in London, and clad in a smart overcoat and a billycock hat, he sat down cross-legged on the floor, and his eyes sparkled as he thought of the good old Bashi-bazouk days. To London he came because, as everyone knows, "there is lot of money in London." He knew no word of English and but little Italian; had scarcely any money; his entire stock in trade consisted of some native costumes and some silver filigree work. Failure would seem to have been inevitable, but the pluck and enterprise of the ex-Bashi-bazouk overcame all difficulties. "You think my country wild country," said he; "now I tell you—London; it big bad place. Five million peoples in London. My God, what a lot of criminals! In my country no man starve. He knock at door. 'What you want?' 'I hungry.' 'Olright, you come in.' He give him bread, he give him wine. In London you say, 'You git 'long, or I call a p'leece.'" Wherever a Christian Albanian requires help, he has but to knock at the door of another Christian Albanian and say so. No payment is ever thought of. "How should we live," said a man to me, "if we did not help one another?" Compared with Albania, London, even now in the eyes of the ex-Bashi-bazouk, is a vast and uncivilised wilderness. Perhaps he is right. Nevertheless, he has found it an excellent place to get on in. His wife—"my Albanian missus," as he called her—had, he confessed, a very poor time. Knowing no language but Albanian, and sighing always for the sun and the shores of the lake of Skodra, she was near weeping when she heard that I had just come from the beloved spot. She wore a red cap with coins round it, and a medal dangled in the centre of her forehead. She seemed singularly out of place in a London back-shop. "By God," said her husband casually, "I'm sorry for that pore fem'le!" And he had a certain sympathy for her, in spite of his cheerful tone.

"Earth hunger," the fierce desire for a particular plot of ground, a plot which reason may point out to be barren, arid, lonesome, and in every way unlovable, but which is the cradle of the race, is and perhaps will always be one of the most unconquerable of human passions. The Tame Albanian says he means to end his days in "the finest city in Europe, Skodra."

It is not a salubrious spot. It is suffocating in summer and flooded in winter. It suffers from heavy rains, and lies low. Its one virtue is that it does not possess mosquitoes, but it makes up for this by being full of tuberculosis. Nevertheless, it grips one's imagination, it arouses the sleeping spirit of first one and then another long dead ancestor who lived in the squalid, glittering Middle Ages and before, and they point the way and they whisper, "Such and such we did, and this also—do you not remember?" and strange things that one has not seen before seem oddly familiar; three or four hundred years ago, they or something very like them were part of one's daily life.

In the bazaar down by the river, with its maze of narrow crooked streets, its crazy wooden booths and its vile pavement, life goes on much as it did with us ages ago. Each trade has its own quarter, as in all Eastern bazaars. And narrow ways, called Mercery Street, Butchers' Row, Goldsmiths' Alley, in many an English town, still tell of the time when so it was in England, in days when timber was as cheap, streets as crooked and narrow, and pavement as bad as they are now in Skodra. And then in England, as now in Skodra, people wore colours—red, blue, green, yellow—and those that could afford it were brave with embroideries. Their wants were few, luxuries there were few to be purchased, and they showed all their worldly goods upon their persons in a blaze of gold and finery on high days and holidays. Skodra does so still, and so does every peasant and many a nobleman in the old-world Balkan peninsula of to-day. Gorgeous garments solidly made they are, for they will not go out of fashion next season, nor the season after, never indeed until Albania is "civilised," and when will that be? So the finery is made to last, and is worn and worn till it descends to "Petticoat Lane" and is bought by the very poor. And when the stitchery is all rubbed off by the friction of years, still the garment hangs together, and is worn until it finally drops off piecemeal in squalid rags. All these garments, however gorgeous without, are lined with coarse materials, often pieces that do not match patched together, for the Albanian ideas of dressmaking are old-world. The modern modiste has invented cotton and linen costumes lined with silk or satin. Her ancestress, however, acted on the Albanian plan, and the beautiful silk and brocade costumes that have come down to us from Elizabeths and Charles I.'s time are finished within with coarse and unsightly canvas.

Near the entrance of the bazaar are the workshops of the carpenters, who make and carve great chests to hold the clothes, gaudy things painted peagreen and picked out with scarlet and gold, degenerate descendants of the beautifully carved and coloured chests in which all Europe kept its clothing in Gothic and Renaissance days. The makers of the chests fashion, too, wonderful cradles, coloured in the same gay manner, and in them the babies are packed and slung on pack-saddles or on women's backs. In a land of rough travelling, a strong box in which to pack the baby is a necessity, and doubtless our ancestors used the solid oak cradles we know so well in a like manner. Any day in the bazaar is interesting, for the shopmen nearly all make their own goods. The gunsmiths fill cartridges all day long, for they are an article much in demand, repair rifles and revolvers, and fit fine old silver butts, gorgeous with turquoise or cornelian, on to modern weapons. The silversmith squats cross-legged on the floor with a tray of burning charcoal, some tweezers, a roll of silver wire, and a little box full of silver globules. He works silently, deliberately, with long, nimble fingers picking up the tiny globules and arranging them, snipping and twisting the little bits of wire, building up and soldering with great dexterity the most effective designs—designs with sides that match, but are never quite symmetrical, like Natures own work, satisfying the eye in a way that no machine-made article ever will. However rough his workmanship, his idea is almost always good, and he produces daring effects with glass rubies and emeralds of the largest size. In work of this sort the Albanian excels. When he comes to larger constructions, his trick of working by eye and getting balance by instinct is not so successful; his rooms are all crooked, his houses out of the square. Perhaps this is the inevitable out-come of his odd-shaped mind. It is rumoured that three-sided rooms may be found in Skodra, for the simple reason that somehow the builders, owing to a nice confusion of angles, could not squeeze in a fourth wall.

They are an honest, civil lot, these Skodra tradesmen; and though your money will probably fly from hand to hand and disappear round the corner, the change always comes back correctly in the end, and you pass the interval drinking coffee with the shop owner. If your purchases are many, he will kindly send out to buy a piece of common muslin in which to wrap them; for Skodra does not supply paper, and when you have bought a thing, conveying it away is your own affair. We in London are used to having paper included lavishly with the goods, but an old lady once told me that in her young days the fashionable drapers of London would lend linen wrappers to those who bought largely, and the said wrappers had to be returned next day. In this particular Skodra is not more than eighty or ninety years behind London.

To see the bazaar in all its glory one must go on a Wednesday; that is "bazaar day," and all the folk of the surrounding country flock thither. "Which is bazaar day in London?" I have been asked any number of times by Serb, Montenegrin, and Albanian. And "Every day is bazaar day in London" is the one thing that gives them any idea of London's size. The five million inhabitants, railway trains, electric lights, and so forth, are all quite beyond their ken; but "bazaar every day" stuns and dazzles them, and at once calls up a picture of vast crowds and illimitable wealth. On "bazaar day" Skodra is thronged with strange types—costumes bizarre, grotesque, wild and wonderful, and the road from an early hour is crowded with flocks, pack-animals and their owners. Flocks as strange as their drivers, for the ram of the pattering drove of sheep is often dyed a bright crimson, and his horns instead of curling neatly round by the sides of his head are trained to stand up like those of an antelope with their tight twist pulled out to long spiral His fashion is an even older one than that of his masters, for we find the ram with the same head-dress in early Egyptian frescoes. For some of these people it is three, even four days' tramp down to the market from their mountain homes, and over the rough tracks the women carry incredibly heavy burdens; not only the bundles of faggots or hides that are for sale, but the baby in a big wooden cradle is tied on the top. The men march in front with their rifles and look after the flocks. Firearms have to be left outside the bazaar. It is true that a good number of people are still privileged to carry them, but I have haunted the bazaar quite alone so often that I have ceased to believe in the many blood-curdling tales about its murderous possibilities with which travellers are usually favoured. Nor, when you once know your way, do I think any guide or kavass necessary. It is very dull with a kavass, for no one comes to play with you. I tried it once for an hour or so, and never again. But though you see no murders, you may see cases where apparently vengeance has been satisfied with mutilation, and meet a man whose nose has been cut off so lately that a bloodstained rag covers the vacancy. And the mountain-man swaggers up to the cartridge shop and fills the many spaces that have occurred in his belt since last he came to market.

SKODRA.

I have no space to describe the dresses of the various tribes; the women with stiff, straight, narrow skirts boldly striped with black that recall forcibly the dresses upon the earliest Greek vases; the great leathern iron-studded belts; the women with cowries in their hair; the wild men from the mountains in huge sheepskin coats with the wool outside; town Christian women blazing in scarlet and white, masses of gilt coins, silver buttons and embroidery; Mohammedan ladies shapeless in garments which may be correctly termed "bags," or to be still more accurate, "undivided trousers," of brilliant flowered material, not only thickly veiled but with blue and gold cloth cloaks clasped over the head as well, shrouding the figure and allowing only a tiny peephole through which to see; poor women, veiled down to the knees in white, looking like ghosts in the dark entrances; Turks in turbans, long frock-coats and coloured sashes; little girls their hair dyed a fierce red and their eyebrows blackened. They all unite in one dazzling and confused mass which one only disentangles by degrees, and when I plunged for the first time into that unforgettable picture, saw the blaze of sunlight, the dark rich shadows, the gorgeousness, the squalor, the glitter, the filth, the colour, the new-flayed hides sizzling in the sun and blackened with flies, the thousand and one tawdry twopenny articles for sale on all hands, I thought with a pang of the poor Albanian "fem'le" who was passing weary, colourless hours in a grey London suburb, and understood the sickness of her soul.

Of all the old-world things in the town—older than the neatly cut flints for the flintlocks that are still in use, older than the tight mediæval leg-gear—the loose tunic bound round the waist by a sash and the full drawers tied round the ankle, as worn by the common Mohammedan men and boys of the town (a very ordinary dress throughout the East) is the oldest. It is the dress of the men on the early Greek vases; of the Dacians on Trajan's column; of the captive Gauls in the Louvre; the dress, in short, of all the "barbarians," the "braccati" of the Romans. The Romans and the toga and the chlamys are all gone, and here, in the same old place, the barbarians are cutting their skirts and trousers on the same old pattern, and are very fairly barbarous still. But they have learned to shave their heads and to wear a white fez, and with this modification we at once recognise them as our old friend Pierrot, whose history points to the fact that he really did come from the Near East. Venice held all the Dalmatian coast and part of Albania. Venice was the home of masques and pantomimes, and among the existing prints of the pantomime characters is one "Zanne" in the familiar "Pierrot" dress. What more likely than that the fool of the piece should be represented as a boor from a conquered province? To this day, in so-called civilised towns, an unhappy foreigner is still apt to be considered a fair butt by the lower classes. Zanne came to England, and figures among the sketches for one of Ben Jonson's masques.

Skirts with us are purely feminine garments, but the skirt of the barbarian has grown in Albania into a vast unwieldy kilt, and the Mohammedan Bey swaggers about in a cumbrous fustanella which reaches down to his ankle and sticks out like an old-fashioned ballet-girl's skirt. He cannot work because he wears the fustanella, and it is said that he wears the fustanella in order to be unable to work. Forty 1 metres of material go to this colossal and ridiculous garment. The greater part of the fulness is worn in front, and sways clumsily from side to side as the wearer walks. The Greeks adopted it in a modified form, but it must be seen on an Albanian to realise its possibilities. The Albanians have rarely, as yet, succeeded in doing anything in moderation. After seeing what the men were capable of in the skirt line, I was not surprised that the shepherd-folk out on the plains began by asking my guide with great interest if I were a man or a woman.

But we must leave the bazaar, though many days do not exhaust its interests; leave the butchers' quarter, a harmony in pinks and blood-red, where the dogs lap red puddles, the butcher wipes a wet knife across his thigh, and the people run about with little gobbets of mutton for dinner, a fiercely picturesque place sicklied with the smell of blood; leave the "Petticoat Lane" of Skodra, where the cast-off finery of Albanian ladies and the trappings of beauty are displayed alongside heaps of the most hopeless rags. Aged crones as antique as their wares squat upon the ground. The sunlight blazes on the gold stitchery till it sparkles with its pristine splendour; the hag in charge of it, Atropos-like, points out its beauties with a large pair of shears, while Lachesis spins a woollen thread alongside. I vow they are the Fates themselves selling the garments of their victims.

By the afternoon the crowds of country-folk are already reloading the pack-animals, decked with blue bead headstalls and amulets to keep off the evil eye, that await them at the entrance of the bazaar, where the gipsy smiths and tinkers work, half stripped, a-ripple with tough muscle, under little shanties made of sticks and flattened-out petroleum cans. How the land got on before the petroleum can was introduced it is hard to imagine. In the hands of the gipsies it is the raw material from which almost everything is made.

The peasants load their beasts—they are adepts at pack-saddling and you rarely see a sore back—and trail slowly across the plains towards their mountain homes. The bazaar is shut up, darkness comes on fast, and belated foot passengers pick their way with lanterns.

Night in Skodra is uncanny. The half-dozen tiny oil lamps do not light it at all. When there is no moon, the darkness is impenetrable and absolute, save perhaps for a long streak of light from the door-chink of the next shop and the lighted windows of the mosque opposite. The black silhouettes of praying figures rise and fall within them, but the mosque itself is swallowed up in the surrounding blackness. A spark appears on the roadway, someone passes with a lantern and disappears. The street is dead still till a sword clanks and the patrol marches past. The lights are extinguished in the mosque. The darkness is dense and dead, and there is no sound. It is only nine o'clock, but all Skodra seems asleep.

Skodra the town, as distinguished from the bazaar, has not a great deal to show. It is a big town with some 40,000 inhabitants, and as all houses of any size stand in a large yard or garden, it covers much space. Here every man's house is his castle, and the high walls are not only for seclusion but for defence. Skodra, from time to time, receives a rumour that thousands of armed men are marching upon it. All the shops are shut, the guards are doubled on the bridges, and folk shut themselves in their houses. The phantom army does not appear, and in two or three days things are going on as before. "But it will come some day," said a man, when I laughed about a reported army of forty thousand that had never turned up.

The Mohammedan quarter has the air of being far more wealthy and high-class than the Christian. The houses that one gets a glimpse of through the gateways are large and solid. But the streets are lonesome and deserted. Now and then I met a couple of veiled ladies, who, if no man were in sight, usually strove hard to make my acquaintance, and partially unveiled for the purpose. But as I know neither Turkish nor Albanian, we never got farther than the fact that I was "a Frank" and a deal of smiling and nodding. Two in particular walked a long way with me, chattering all the time, and for the benefit of the inquisitive, I must say that they were both very pretty girls. In Skodra not only the Mohammedan but the town Roman Catholic women go veiled, though the country-folk do not, and until married are often kept in a seclusion which to our ideas is little short of imprisonment—facts which throw a strong light upon the unlovely state of society which has made them necessary; for the etiquettes of society are usually based upon raw and unpleasant truths. It is idle folly to ascribe Western and twentieth-century ideas to these primitive people, but the fact remains that the life of the average Albanian woman is an exceedingly hard one. That of the country-folk is a ceaseless round of excessive physical toil; that of the poorer town woman is, I am told, often spent at the loom from morning till night—labour that only ends when the Black Fate snips her thread.

MOSQUE, SKODRA.

Though the Mohammedans far outnumber the Christians in the town, the mosques are all small plain buildings, only saved from ugliness by the elegance of their tall slim minarets, nor are there many of them. With a grotesque lack of a sense of the fitness of things, the Turkish army, when it has a washing-day, uses the largest graveyard as a drying-ground, and a shirt or a pair of drawers flaps on each tombstone. It was not until I saw this sight that I had any idea that the Turkish soldiers ever had a washing-day. A lean, unkempt, ragged lot of poor dirty devils with scowling faces, they look more as if returning from a disastrous campaign than as if quartered in the barracks of the capital. And the sight of them is enough to make one have no difficulty in believing the tale that they not unfrequently help themselves to mutton from across the frontier when the "Government" is discreetly gazing in another direction. Their powers of endurance in war-time are not surprising when their life during "peace" is taken into consideration. A fight in which you may loot all you want must be a pleasant holiday by comparison.

The Christian quarter of Skodra looks less flourishing, and there are crosses on some of the doors, otherwise the two quarters are much the same. The Roman Catholic townsfolk wear a special costume. That of the men is odd; that of the ladies perhaps the most hideous that has been ever devised. Their gigantic trouser-petticoats of purple-black material, in multitudinous pleats, fall in an enormous bag that sticks out all round the ankles, and impedes the wearer to such an extent that she often has to hold it up with both hands in front in order to get along. With her face veiled and the upper part of her body covered with a scarlet, gold-embroidered cloak with a square flap that serves as a hood, she forms an unwieldy, pear-shaped lump—grotesque and gorgeous. The streets here are apt to be flooded in wet weather, and the side walks are high. Big blocks of stepping-stones, like those at Pompeii, afford a way over the road, nor do carts seem to find any difficulty in passing them.

SHOP IN BAZAAR, SKODRA.

The cathedral of the Roman Catholics is a large brick building, some fifty years old, with a tall campanile, standing in grounds which are surrounded by a high wall. Its great blank interior, owing to lack of funds, has not suffered much from "decoration." At the gateway the women loosen their veils and go into God's house with uncovered faces—beautiful faces, with clean-cut, slightly aquiline noses, clear ivory skins, red lips, and dark eyes with long lashes. There are benches in the nave, but a large proportion of the congregation, especially the country-folk who crowd in on feast days, prefer to sit on the floor; they spread a little rug or handkerchief, kick off their shoes and squat cross-legged on it as in a mosque; women with their breasts covered with coins that glitter as they sway to and fro in prayer; mountain-men with their cartridge belts upon them ready for use against a brother Albanian. A fine barbaric blaze of colour, scarlet and scarlet and scarlet again. The service begins; harshly dissonant voices, loud and piercing, chant the responses; and the deep sonorous voice of the young Italian at the altar rings out like the voice of civilisation over the barbaric yowling of the congregation. As he mounts the scarlet and gold pulpit there is a hush of expectation. The sermon, in Albanian, is a long one, and the crowd hangs breathless on his words. His delivery and his action are simple and dignified, and I watch him sway his congregation with deep interest, though I can understand no word. He is working up to a climax, and he reaches it suddenly in a sentence that ends in the only non-Albanian word in the sermon, "Inferno." The word thunders down the church on a long-rolled "rrrr," and he stands quite silent, grasping the edge of the pulpit and staring over the heads of the people. There is a painful hush, that seems like minutes. Then he suddenly throws himself on his knees in the pulpit and prays. Violently moved, his flock prostrate themselves in a passion of entreaty, and those who sit on the ground bend double and touch the floor with their foreheads.

The barbaric gaudy congregation, the ascetic earnest young teacher, the raucous wailing voices that rang through the great bare church, made up a poignantly impressive, quite inexplicable whole. I gazed upon the praying crowd and wondered vainly what their idea of Christianity may be and what old-world pre-Christian beliefs are entangled with it. The Albanian clings to these through everything, and in spite of all their efforts the Frati have as yet made little or no headway against blood-feuds. The Albanian has never adapted himself to anything; he has adapted the thing to himself. He practises the Christianity upon which he prides himself, with the ferocity with which he does everything else. He fasts with great rigour, wears a cross as a talisman, and is most particular to make the sign of the cross after the Latin and not after the Orthodox manner. But his views are very material. "Have you got the Holy Ghost in your country?" I have been asked more than once. And an affirmative answer brought the enthusiastic remark, "Then England is just like Albania!" The life of Benvenuto Cellini is interesting reading after a tour in Albania, for it represents with remarkable fidelity the stage in religious evolution to which the wild Albanian of to-day has arrived.

Difference of religion is usually given as the reason for the fact that the Albanian has almost invariably sided with the enemies of the other Christian peoples of the Balkans. One suspects, however, that it is rather "the nature of the beast" than the particular form of belief that he has chosen to profess that has cut him off, his fierce independence rather than his religious creed, and the more one sees of him the more probable does this appear.

There are very few Orthodox Albanians in Skodra. Such as there are wear the same dress as the Mohammedans, but the women are not veiled.

Skodra, except in the way of customs, possesses few antiquities, save the ruins of the old citadel which crown the hill overlooking the town. These are said to be of Venetian origin and to have been fairly perfect till some thirty years ago, when the local Pasha, having heard of lightning conductors, determined to buy one for the better protection of the tower, which was used as a powder magazine. To this end he chose a handsome brass spike, and then found he was expected to pay extra for a lot of wire. Being economical, he took the spike only, had it fixed to the topmost tower, and anxiously awaited a storm. It soon came! The handsome brass spike at once attracted the lightning. Bang went the powder magazine, and the greater part of the citadel was shattered before his astonished gaze. The hill now is crowned with a heap of ruins, but as strangers are strictly forbidden to visit it, I presume the Turks have constructed something that they consider a fortress among them.

At the foot of this hill are the ruins of a small church. Big white crosses are painted upon it, and it is considered a very holy spot. Every Christian peasant stops as he passes it and crosses himself, and though all that is left are fragments of the walls, I have been told that a service is still occasionally held in it. The only other relic of past days in the neighbourhood is the fine stone bridge with pointed arches near Messi, about four and a half miles from Skodra across the plain. This is undoubtedly Venetian work. The stream it spans is a raging torrent in the wet season, and has wrought much damage in the town and devastated a large tract of the plain. The rest of this is covered with short turf and bracken fern, and grazed by flocks of sheep and goats. The herdsmen, shaggy in sheepskins and armed with rifles, the strings of country-people and pack-animals slowly tramping to or from market, and the blue range of rugged mountains make up a strange, wild scene. Nor, if you take an Albanian with you to do the talking,—for everyone "wants to know,"—does there appear to me to be any danger in wandering there.

Skodra is the capital, but it has no decent road to its port. It is situated on the outlet of the lake, but though a little money and work would make the Bojana River navigable for small steamers, and all the shores of the lake would thus be put in direct communication with the sea, nothing is done, and this, which should be the chief trade route for North Albania and a large part of Montenegro, is of little use. Skodras exports are not enough for Skodra to worry about greatly. Hides, tobacco, some sumach root and bark for dyeing and tanning, some maize and fruit, and a number of tortoises, which the Albanian finds ready-made, form the bulk of the exports of the neighbourhood. Skodra is one of the few capitals which you can leave with the certainty of finding it exactly the same next year.

CHAPTER IX

SKODRA TO DULCIGNO

I have on one point, at any rate, a fellow-feeling with the Albanian. Skodra fascinates me. When I am not there—only then, mind you—I am almost prepared to swear with him that it is the finest city in the world, and a year after my first visit I found myself again on the steamer, hastening Skodra-wards, with the intention of riding thence to Dulcigno. Skodra greeted me warmly as an old friend. That exalted official the Persian beamed upon me and said that for Mademoiselle a passport was not necessary, the customs let me straight through, and I was soon settled comfortably in my old quarters. The Persian, because, so he said, of our long friendship, but really because he was aching with curiosity, called upon me at once in the crumpled and unclean white waistcoat in which he fancies himself, and chatted affably.

He comes, so he tells me, of a most exalted family; were he only in Tehran, instead of, unfortunately, in Skodra, he would be regarded with universal respect and veneration. As I have no idea of the standard required by Tehran, I condoled with him gravely, and accepted his statement. It was a great joy to Skodra, he informed me, that I should have come alone. No other lady had ever done so. Only une Anglaise would; for the English alone understand Turkey—are her dear friends. Here his enthusiasm was unbounded. Upon Turkish soil every English person was as safe as in England. This was owing to the excellence of the government. "There is," he said, "no government like ours." I told him the latter statement was universally believed, and pleased him greatly. He soared to higher flights. It was astonishing, he said, and most annoying, that false accounts of Turkey were published by foreign papers. He would go so far as saying that they never told the truth. It was even said that in parts of Turkey there had been considerable disturbances lately. Parole d'honneur, this was quite untrue. Never had the land been in a more tranquil or flourishing condition, and as a proof of his assertion he told me that his information was entirely derived from official sources.

Now at this time, "according to foreign papers," Russia, aided by Turkish troops, was vainly trying to force a Consul into Mitrovitza, encounters between troops and desperate villagers were reported almost daily from Macedonia, trains on the Salonika line had been more than once "held up," and the governor of the very district we were in had been shot at some months before. But he burbled on of the beauty of the British Government and of the support it always afforded in the hour of need. Everything desirable, including liberty and equality, flourished under the Crescent, he said. At this moment a poverty-stricken little gang of ragged men tramped past, bearing in turns upon their shoulders a long battered old coffin, from which the paint was almost worn away.

They stopped to shift it nearly opposite us. It was lidless, and the dead man's white face, his knees, and his great sheepskin stood above its edge. He lay in his clothes just as he died. The Persian, with ill-timed merriment, pointed to the corpse. "A dead sheep, Mademoiselle!" said he contemptuously. He addressed some remark in an unknown tongue to the mourners. The coffin-bearers passed sullenly. "A dead Christian," I said to him sharply. "Yes, yes, a Catholic," he admitted. I stared hard at his shifty eyes; he hastily dropped into politics again, and I thought about equality.

Not being desirous of emulating Miss Stone, and as the Persian for imaginativeness rivalled his fellow-countryman, Omar Khayyam, I collected advice from various quarters. Great as were the joys of Skodra, Dulcigno was my object; but I did not seem to get any nearer arriving there. Everybody combined to try to frighten me off the ride. Having played about Skodra for over a week, however, I persuaded myself that the Albanian was a friendly and much maligned being, took all the responsibility upon myself, and decided to carry out my plan. I fixed the matter up with a rush. Dutsi, the man who was to guide me, turned up early in the morning with a sturdy pony; I said farewell, and started through the town on foot. It was no use my mounting, said Dutsi mournfully, till we had passed the passport place; the Turks were very bad about passports—diavoli, in fact. This with a gentle air of resignation, as if it were highly possible it would not be worth while to mount at all. We walked along the banks of the Bojana till we came to its point of union with the Drin. Over the Drin is a big wooden bridge with a fantastic arch of wood across it, and on the bridge stood soldiers in the dirty rags that the Turks call a uniform. "Your passport," said Dutsi hurriedly. I produced it; but as none of the authorities could read anything but Turkish, it was useless. Dutsi looked anxious. "They want your name," he said, and looking at the passport-case, which is stamped "Mary E. Durham," he read out "Marie" with triumph. Everyone was satisfied. I entered Skodra as "Edith of London"; I left it as no less a person than "Mary of England." Great and obvious are the blessings of the passport system. I gave a twopenny bakshish, and we passed on to the bridge. Dutsi was a changed being; his spirits rose as soon as the Turks were left behind. He told me he was much attached to the English, and that now I might mount.

After an hour or so of enjoyment, the road got worse, and then rapidly worse still, and fuller and fuller of water. The Bojana was in flood, and the waters were out. My beast splashed through water almost up to his belly, and Dutsi took circuits through peoples maize fields. Then it got so bad that we left the track and laboured fetlock—deep through ploughed land, and saw ox-carts bogged to the axle in the sea of mud that was all that was left of the road. And after a little of this, the track was lost altogether, and we wandered round through tracts of mud and streams, forced a passage through an osier bed only to come to a swirling sheet of water, tried back, and finally made for a hovel and hallooed for help. The owner came out, took us over his own grounds, and started us again on something like a path, which soon disappeared. Dutsi, however, now knew the direction, and the pony was extraordinarily clever at climbing greasy banks, boring his way through the willows on top, and scrambling over the ditch the other side without even once "pecking." We came to some low hills, and got on to dry ground at last. Then Dutsi discovered to his distress that my umbrella, which he had tied to the back of the saddle, was gone. This was a sad loss, but it was evidently gone beyond recall. Dutsi in despair laid the blame entirely on those devils the Turks, who made such devils of roads, and were such devils to the good Christians that they were unable to improve the country. "Oh, the devils!" said Dutsi; "they have lost your devil of an umbrella." This relieved his feelings, and when I pointed out the inky clouds that were rapidly rising and said we had better hurry, he remarked piously, that though it looked like rain he believed that, in consideration of the loss of my umbrella, God would not permit it, for He does not like the Turks. Thus comforted, we proceeded, over low ground again, splashing over fields that, properly drained, should be magnificent water meadows, but were liquid slush in which great yellow spearwort flourished. At last we came to the river's edge and the ferryman's hut.

A great barge was dragged alongside the bank and the pony persuaded to enter it. I sat on the edge and curled up my toes, for the bottom was covered with water, and we were soon off. The boat was towed some distance up stream and let loose, and the force of the current combined with skilful steering swept it across. Dutsi was now happy; we should have a "buona strada" all the way! He began telling me of a noble and wealthy Englishman, one X. of the Foreign Office, to whom he had acted as guide in the spring in a shooting expedition, one of the best and kindest signors that existed, and we progressed slowly over the "buona strada," which was like a dry torrent bed, for we were now back among the limestone rocks again. Presently we arrived at a stream with a plank across it. "The frontier, the frontier!" cried Dutsi, and, as we set foot on the other side, he announced that we were in a free and Christian land, Montenegro! Now, he said, we would rest and eat some bread. So we sat down under a tree, and I discovered that the improvident creature had brought nothing more filling with him than a few cigarettes. As my chances of getting to Dulcigno depended entirely on him, I supplied him with two of my three eggs and three-quarters of my loaf, and we were just setting to work when we heard a loud "tom-tom-tomming." Out of the bushes came a gang of seven very black gipsies, four muzzled bears, and a loaded ass. Between them they carried five rifles and seven revolvers, and they certainly looked the "Devils Own." The pony snorted and stamped at the bears, and would have bolted had he not been tied fast; we hadn't a weapon between us, and Dutsi looked so green that I thought "all the fun of the fair" was about to begin. "Dobar dan," said I, through a mouthful of egg, for it is always as well to be civil. They made no answer, but scowled upon us and went surly by, single file, the boy who was in charge of the bears beating his tambourine rhythmically the while. As soon as the last of them had disappeared round the corner, Dutsi announced that they were very, very bad and all Turks (i.e. Moslems), and that now we must have a long rest. He was obviously afraid of catching them up.

Meanwhile the storm clouds were rapidly catching us up. We waited some ten minutes. I insisted upon starting then, and came upon the gipsies almost immediately, for they were making the bears dance in the yard of a lonely cottage on one side of the road. Dutsi caught the pony's head, led him round silently on the grass and behind some bushes, and we passed unseen, to his great relief. As he was very tired, I dismounted and gave him a ride. The free and Christian road was no better than the heathen one, but we got on very cheerfully for some way. Then the floodgates of the heavens opened, and, in spite of the loss of my umbrella, the rain came down in sheets. Dutsi most gallantly offered me his, but as I had a mackintosh I begged him to keep it for himself, and remounted and rode through the worst rain I was ever out in. Luckily we had just arrived at a decent road, and we took shelter under the first large tree. The whole landscape disappeared behind the grey torrent, and out of it suddenly rushed the wildest figure I have ever seen—an old, old woman, tall and lean, clad only in a long pair of cotton drawers tied under her armpits. Her lank wet hair streamed from her head like long black snakes, and she stood out in the rain and waved her arms madly round like mill sails, as she poured out a torrent of Albanian. "She wants us to go to her house," said Dutsi. "It is over there," as she pointed into the rain, "half an hour away! I tell her, 'No, thank you.'" Still the old woman gesticulated and shouted. "Falé miners" (thank you), repeated Dutsi over and over again in a deep sing-song. She made a last effort. "One million times in the name of God, she asks us to come," said Dutsi, with a smile. "She says she can do no more." Nor could she, apparently, for she disappeared again into the rain as suddenly as she had come. "It is better to sit here in the dry," said Dutsi. "How far is it to Dulcigno?" I asked. "Two hours at least," said Dutsi. I wondered miserably whether the saddle-bags were water-tight, and thought of my only change of clothes; and as there was no prospect of food, and I had only had one egg and a little bread since early morning, I attacked my Brand's beef lozenges and blessed the maker.

When the storm lifted, we started again, and through sun and storm arrived in a heavy shower in sight of Dulcigno just as that most melancholy sound, the clink of a loose shoe, caught my ear. I suggested the best inn to Dutsi. He said dismally, "There is only one," and we climbed the hill and entered the town,—a row of houses, a forge, a mosque, and some shops,—and to my dismay pulled up at a tiny Albanian drink-shop. "Ecco l'albergo," said Dutsi. I jumped off the pony and hurried in, out of the downpour. I was streaming, Dutsi was streaming, the pony had cast his shoe, and we had been nearly nine hours instead of five and a half on the way. It was a case of any port in a storm. The stripey-legged owner welcomed me effusively in broken Italian, and led me through into an earth-floored kitchen and up a few wooden steps to a "molto bella camera" over the shop, talking excitedly. It was a minute apartment, quite unfurnished, except that a trouser-legged lady was curled up fast asleep on a heap of mattresses on a sort of divan of packing-cases. "My wife," said he, giving her a poke, whereupon she jumped up like a jack-in-the-box, threw her arms round my neck, and kissed me three times. Dutsi appeared with the saddle-bags. He glanced round the room appreciatively, for it was the sort of place he felt at home in, and said it was "dosta dobra" (pretty good), also that the people were very good and all Christians. Then he very considerately suggested that I had better change my clothes and would perhaps prefer to be alone, and they left me. My "change," wrapped in a sheet of waterproof and in saddle-bags, was quite dry, and my mind relieved on this point was free to contemplate the possibilities of the establishment. One window had once had glass in it, the other never. Except the heap of bedding, there was nothing in the room but a rifle, a cartridge belt, and a picture of St. George. The rain was falling in sheets; seeking for other quarters would result in soaking my only dry clothes; moreover, I was tired. I decided to stay in shelter for the present, and descended to the "kitchen."

The floor was of earth and sloped up, for the house was built on the hillside. In one corner Dutsi, my host, and another striped gentleman were all squatting on their haunches round a splendid wood fire which blazed on a big slab of stone; Madame was making coffee, and Monsieur lemonade. A place was made for me at once, and I joined the squatting circle. They were most anxious about my health, felt me to see if I were really dry; and Madame, as she was unable to make me understand, kissed my hands and face. The fire had been lighted expressly for me, said Monsieur, and now they would all enjoy it. I appealed to Dutsi in an undertone about the possibility of better accommodation, but he was positive about this being the only inn. A room in a private house could be found perhaps by the sea, but that was half an hour away; moreover, these were most excellent people, and had lent him a coat and a pair of shoes. Their hearty friendliness filled me with trust from the first; the extreme primitiveness of the place attracted me. I said to myself, "You wanted to see the Albanians, and the Lord has delivered you into their hands. This is a unique opportunity," and I settled in and tried to behave like one of the family. Dutsi took a tender farewell of me, and begged me to give his love to X. of the Foreign Office, that bravest, noblest, and most admirable signor in the whole world, and to tell him that he (Dutsi) was praying God night and day to protect him and bring him back to Albania. Then the rest of the company, whose curiosity had been aroused, were told of the glories of X., and the fact that I was his compatriot counted greatly in my favour; for in these out-of-the-way corners the reputation of the Empire depends entirely on the conduct of the two or three individuals who happen to have represented it, and the responsibility upon them is heavy indeed.

Dutsi departed, and I felt a bit lonesome; but the company rejoiced over me like children over a new kitten. They patted and stroked me, and broke off little pieces of bread for me, and, as I could not understand Albanian, grunted and burbled over me like friendly guinea-pigs. The place was thick with pungent wood smoke, which escaped from a window near the roof. The rafters overhead were black and smoky, the walls rough stone; there was a heap of logs and brushwood in the farther corner, and a few pots hung on pegs. Otherwise there was nothing. In England, even in Anglo-Saxon times, my ancestors had tables and chairs. I sat cross-legged by the blazing logs with streaming eyes, and wondered which century I was in. And the firelight danced on the only up-to-date thing in the room, the barrels of a rifle and revolver and the brass tops of the cartridges in the belt of the man next me. For living, we can go on as before with the same old things, but when it comes to killing we really require something better. From time to time Monsieur retired to the bar to deal out rakija to customers, and the fame of my arrival soon spread. If the customers were of lowly standing, they were invited in to see me; if, on the contrary, they were great men, Montenegrin captains for instance, Monsieur asked me if I would be so good as to step out and speak to them. These were all huge, all courteous, all friendly, and all unable to speak anything but Servian. Rain still poured, but as everyone who came to see me took a glass of something, trade was good. One gentleman who spoke Italian was such a tremendous swell that I asked him if there were any better hotel in the place. This surprised him, and he replied that there was no other, and the cooking here was excellent. Having interviewed some half-dozen captains and a lot of shaven-headed up-country Albanians, I retired to the kitchen again, and began drying my wet under-garments one by one—an operation that interested Monsieur so deeply that he insisted upon helping, and singed them freely. In came, in a dripping overcoat, a strapping, cheerful, great Montenegrin, who hailed me joyfully in Italian, sat down, and, smiling gleefully, remarked in English, "a cat, a dog, a orse, a and, a man," and some dozen other words. Everyone looked on in admiration. I returned in Servian, to his delight, and he explained to me that he was kavass to the British and Foreign Bible Society in Constantinople, and was home for a holiday. His friendliness was unbounded; he insisted that I was to breakfast with him next morning, and demanded to know what I was going to have for supper. He knew all about the English, he said, and I must have roast beef. Monsieur retired to a corner and came back with the carcase of a lamb and a caldron. The kavass was greatly opposed to this; Monsieur was much excited; anything I required he was willing to try! A great debate ensued. They appealed to me, and I chose the lamb and the pot, for the mere idea of an Albanian culinary experiment alarmed me. So Madame fetched a hatchet, and the lamb was chopped in chunks on the hearthstone and put into the caldron with a sheaf of onions, and I reflected that I had at least secured mutton broth. The kavass was greatly disappointed, as he wished to show them how to make a real English dinner. I thanked him for his trouble, promised to breakfast with him, and he took his leave.

As it had now ceased raining and was still light, Monsieur proposed that we should go for a walk. The town is a large one, the shops built of wood, many in Turkish style. We went into quite a number, not to buy anything, but just so that the people could really have a good look at me, and I shook hands with them all, Monsieur the while swelling with pride. Throughout the walk he expatiated on Montenegro and the joys of living under the government of the Prince; so good, so just. Here a man was free. They were saved from those devils the Turks. He was himself an Albanian of a Skodra family. "You are Catholic?" I said, for nearly all Skodra Christians are Catholics. "Oh no," he said, "now I am a Montenegrin, of the Church of Montenegro. Oh, what good people!" We got under shelter just in time, and he showed me his other means of gaining a living. He was an umbrella-mender, and also he embroidered the gold patterns on the tops of caps. "I am always at work," he said, "and this house is my own." Everything he possessed he admired and valued. As for his wife, he informed me she was one of the best women in the world, and he called upon me to admire everything she did. God had not given him a son, and this was, it was true, a grief to him, but then "I have so much else," he said cheerfully, "a house that is warm and dry, and a good wife and plenty of friends, and a good daughter." The daughter had last year delighted her father by making a most excellent marriage. She had married a Montenegrin, and lived in Podgoritza. His shop was a chilly open shed, his kitchen an English peasant would have considered an inferior coal-hole, and he was so pleased with them that I was ashamed of having doubted whether they were good enough for me.

I returned to Madame and helped stir the pot. Monsieur shut up and barred the outer shop, some other men appeared, and we sat down to supper. We each had a basin, a spoon and a fork, and used our own knives. We all stood up while they crossed themselves; then Madame uncovered the caldron, and we squatted round it and set to work. The broth, being the stewing of a lamb, was excellent, and as my friends greatly preferred the meat with all the goodness boiled out of it, there was plenty for me. On my account there were extra luxuries, and all were pleased. We dipped out of the caldron and offered one another the tit-bits. When the lamb's head was fished up, Monsieur was grieved that I should not have had it, and pulling out the eyes and tongue, offered me them in his hand. In order to make me understand exactly what the morsel was, they put out their own tongues and waggled them about. I said I had had quite enough and thanked him, and they divided the delicacies carefully between them, each taking a bite.

A discussion took place, and then Monsieur produced a little picture, an ordinary, crude colour-print of the Virgin. It seemed to bother them greatly. Monsieur evidently admired it, his friends doubted its orthodoxy. There was something written under it that alarmed them. "Ask the lady," said one of them in Servian. "Do you know Latin?" said Monsieur. "Oh yes," said I, for I am always willing to oblige, if possible. "She knows everything," they said, and the little picture was handed to me. Under it was written "Ave Maria, etc." "What language is that?" said the first man eagerly. "That is Latin," said I. "Latinski!" they cried in horror. Instantly, as though it were infectious, the poor little picture was whipped out of my hand and poked into the fire. Monsieur shoved it down with his foot. The Roman Catholic Madonna flamed up, and everyone breathed freely again. Monsieur made an apologetic explanation, but his friends were obviously shocked at finding such a thing in a respectable house. Oddly enough, in spite of my acquaintance with the wicked language, it did not seem to occur to anyone to doubt my orthodoxy.

Madame, however, had evidently something on her mind which she wanted to tell me, and held an Albanian debate with the company. Unable any longer to bear the cross-legged attitude, I had retreated, when I had eaten enough, to the bottom step of the little ladder that led to the upper room, and watched the strange scene. The smoke eddied in wreaths round the room and drifted out above; the farther corners were quite dark. The bizarre group squatted round the fire; the trouser-legged woman voluble and eager; the sandal-shod, mediævally-clad men, their clean-cut profiles silhouetted against the blaze, or outlined with red light, handed round a tiny pair of tongs with which they picked out fragments of burning wood and lighted their cigarettes. All were interested. I wondered what it was all about. Monsieur turned and explained. His wife, he said, liked me very much; their only daughter was married; they were lonely. Would I stay with them for always and be a daughter to them? Now I had seen what the house was like; they would all be very good to me, and we should all be "molto contento." Everyone waited anxiously for my reply. They were quite serious about it, and I replied in the same spirit, that I had a mother and that, naturally, I must return to her. They inquired her age and where she lived, and then agreed that it would be impossible for her to live alone, and that I was right, though they lamented the fact. Then they told me their ages and asked mine, and we were all equally astounded; for they had regarded me as a very young thing, and I had put them all down as at least twelve years older than they were. I have no doubt that they were speaking the truth, and that it was the roughness of their lives that had so aged them, and Monsieur was really not more than forty, and his wife forty-two.

About nine o'clock the company from outside all left, having first stood up and crossed themselves and wished each other good-night ceremoniously. Monsieur lit a tiny lantern, of which the glass was grimy, and led the way up the steps to the "molto bella camera." Here there were three heaps of bedding in a row. "This," said he cheerfully, "is yours, this is my wife's, and this is mine." I had been quite Albanian for some hours. Now the West arose in me and would not be gainsaid. I murmured something about the other room. It was my host's turn to be scandalised now. Horrified, he exclaimed, "The gentleman in there is not married!" and called for his wife. They talked it over, and then he kindly said that he and his wife could sleep with the other gentleman if I really preferred it; "but," he added, "you are not married, you will be all alone." Then he gathered up the bedding in a bundle, they wished me good-night, and left me with a sackful of dried maize husks on two packing-cases, and a wadded coverlet. He returned almost immediately to ask if I should like a key, which, he said, was quite unnecessary. I reflected that if he meant to burgle me he would do so, key or no key, so I thanked him and said I was sure it was not needed. This gave him great pleasure, and he told me repeatedly that his house and all he possessed were mine. Then he left me, and at once through the thin partition wall I heard three flops as the three lay down on their mattresses. I followed the Albanian plan, curled up on the packing-cases as I was, and slept for nearly nine hours without stirring.

When I woke, quite refreshed, the sun was streaming through the cracked shutters. I heard my neighbours shake themselves and issue forth, so I shook myself and issued forth too. Monsieur, Madame, and the gentleman-who-was-not-married were all flat on the floor blowing up the fire. They were enchanted to see me and hear I had had a good night, and shook hands enthusiastically. Except that their hair was a little rougher, they looked just as they had the night before, but by the bright morning-light I saw that Madame's dirty grey jacket was really purple silk with a silver pattern, and had once been very gorgeous. Washing was my chief idea, and I told Monsieur I should like some water. He replied the coffee would be ready in a minute. I said it was for my hands, so he fetched half a tumblerful and poured it over them. As they had not been washed for twenty-four hours, it made very little difference. I indicated a tiny tin basin. Madame understood at once, and filled it for me. I took it to my room, and she followed. Her delight and astonishment when she found I had taken the precaution of bringing soap with me were really beautiful, and the sponge was an article she had never seen before. She immediately called to her husband, and he and the gentleman-who-was-not-married hurried to see the sight. They danced with glee when they saw how the water ran out of the holes, and were all seized with a wild desire to try it. This I steadily refused to understand in any language. Owing, indeed, to the scarcity of water and the quantity of spectators, the wash was hardly satisfactory. They forgot the sponge in the joys of seeing me brush my teeth. A tooth-brush was a complete novelty. Monsieur, whose teeth were as white as a dog's, begged to be allowed to use it only for a moment, but just then the coffee opportunely boiled over, they rushed to the rescue, and I was saved.

I was then reminded of the invitation to breakfast with the Montenegrin kavass, and was hurried off to his house. In spite of his brave attire of the night before, his top-boots, his green embroidered coat, and his gold waistcoat, his mansion was only one degree more civilised than the Albanian's. The ground floor was used as a shed. We ascended a step-ladder to the floor above, where he stood beaming, and conducted me at once to the bedroom. The outer room, or kitchen, was quite bare, with smoke-grimed rafters, and a heap of firewood and a few pots and pans in it. The fire blazed on the hearthstone in the corner, and his wife was making coffee. He introduced me to her, and told her that I was English and must have a large cup with milk in it. He swelled with pride about his knowledge of the English, and introduced me with ceremony to the company five men and a woman, who had, it seemed, all been invited to meet me. The top-boots, a rifle, a cartridge belt and a revolver hung on the wall, and of course the patron saint of the family. There were two iron bedsteads, a table, a chair or two, and a bench. I sat on the bench, and the Albanian on one of the beds, which he admired very much. He then favoured the company with the details he had learned about me the night before—my age, my brothers and sisters, etc.—all of which appeared to interest them greatly, as did also the plan of adopting me as a daughter, which they strongly urged me to accept. The kavass, however, did not mean him to do all the talking, but fetched a key and unlocked the chest in which he kept his best clothes and other valuables. From this he extracted a good pair of laced-up boots and handed them to me with delight. They were stamped inside with the name of an English maker, and were nearly new. He had scarcely ever worn them, he valued them so—had bought them in Constantinople for two pounds "sterline." They made quite an impression on the company, and I expressed my great joy at beholding them. His wife brought in the coffee, black for everyone but myself. Mine was a large bowl full of boiled milk with a little coffee in it. The kavass showed it to the company and explained that, besides that, the English always ate a little piece of pig with an egg on it. This so fired the Albanian's imagination that he leaped up with the intention of scouring the neighbourhood for fragments of pig, and I had some difficulty in checking the pig-chase. Whatever was cooked for me I knew I should have to eat, and boiled milk and bread were at any rate safe. They all begged me to make a long stay at Dulcigno. I could spend the evenings at their respective houses, and they would all be glad to see me. As, however, it was a fine day and the weather had lately been most unsettled, I determined to take advantage of it and ride to Antivari while it was possible. I therefore thanked everyone, and said I should like a horse and guide that day at eleven o'clock. Then an odd complication ensued, for they only knew Turkish time, and by Turkish time twelve o'clock is sunset, nor could I make them understand. They settled the matter, however, in the simplest way by saying that they would get the horse at once, and let it wait till I was ready. "Two gentlemen," said the Albanian, were also going to Antivari, and as their private affairs were not urgent, they too would wait and accompany me when I pleased. So, everybody being satisfied, I thanked the kavass, shook hands all round, and went off to have a look at Dulcigno by daylight.

The bay, with the old town on the promontory and its Venetian walls, is very beautiful. The town stretches down the valley and round the bay, and several mosque minarets tell of the Turk. The Mohammedan women here wear an odd and hideous great hooded cloak of coarse brown woollen stuff bound with red. In this they slink about like bogies, and the Moslems, both men and women, have a furtive and rather ashamed appearance, very different from their swagger in Skodra. In the old town, pieces of carving built into walls and well-hewn stones are all that is left of the Venetian occupation: Dulcigno fell into Turkish hands in 1571, and though Venice made two attempts to recapture it, Turkish it remained. It was taken by the Montenegrins in 1877, restored to the Turks by the Berlin Congress, and finally handed over to Montenegro by the Powers in 1880. Dulcigno has a fine bay, but as it is not yet connected with the interior by a decent road, there is not much done in the way of traffic.

When I returned, I found a white pony and three men awaiting me. One was the guide, the others the "two signori" who, I had been told, were going my way; fearsome objects. Both were cartridge-belted and be-weaponed, and looked like two half-moulted birds of prey perched each in a heap on the edge of the doorstep. They fixed me with their grey hawk's eyes and snorted when introduced. I went into the inn and asked for my bill. Monsieur was coy about it. He looked me all over and considered how rich I was. Then he said, would I think three francs too much? He was delighted when I paid it without a murmur, and thanked me repeatedly. I took a tender farewell. Madame embraced me three times, and matters having gone so far, with a final effort at being Albanian, I kissed her three times, shook hands with numerous stripey-legged gentlemen, tied my bags to my saddle, and mounted.

The scenery was magnificent and the path bad. Rock, rock, almost all the way, either very steep up or very steep down. The white pony climbed like a cat; all he bargained for was to have his head loose. I hitched the reins on the saddle peak and let him have his own way. The three Albanians shot ahead, walking swiftly and silently with a long, swinging stride. Neither the quality of the ground nor its steepness made any apparent difference to them, nor did they trouble about me in the least, and I often lost sight of them altogether, for one cannot hustle a horse over wet rock. Nothing, however, bothered the white pony; he was used to heavier weights than myself. When we came to a series of smooth steep inclines, he simply spread out his legs and tobogganed in the neatest manner, gathering his hoofs together at bottom and starting down the next one so easily that I did not think it worth while to dismount. The country was almost uninhabited, though fertile and wooded. Wherever cultivated, it appears to yield well. Olives and figs flourish, and I noticed a few fields of flax. Then below us the Adriatic and the bay of Antivari blazed blue, we zigzagged down a very steep hillside all loose stones, I saw the ruined town up the valley and the Prince's palace upon the shore, and felt at home again. We reached the plain and a good road, and a carriage dashed round the corner at a smart trot with the Archbishop in it. He waved and hailed me at once, and roared with laughter at my turn-out and escort, which would really have done admirably at home on Guy Fawkes Day. The "two gentlemen" disappeared quite suddenly by a short cut to the town, without even a farewell snort, and I never saw them again. Why they accompanied me at all I never fathomed. They may have conversed with my guide when they were ahead, in my presence they scarcely spoke a word even to each other. When we got to the cross roads, I turned the white pony Prstan-wards, and was soon welcomed by Maria in the little cottage on the beach. I had been told the ride was a six hours' one, and we had done it in six and a half, which was not bad.

For the benefit of such travellers as wish to see Dulcigno and who do not crave to understand the domestic arrangements of the Albanians, I ought to add that it is possible to find decent rooms in private houses in the Montenegrin part of the town.

MONTENEGRIN PLOUGH.

PART II

OF SERVIA

"The Standing is slippery and the Regress is either a Downfall or at least an Eclipse; which is a Melancholy Thing."—BACON.

CHAPTER X

BELGRADE

Servia is only some thirty-six hours distant from London by rail, but for England it is an almost undiscovered country. Nor do the other nations flock thither. I gathered this on my journey on the main line from Agram to Belgrade through the crown-lands of Hungary, over endless plains and miles of floods. Guards and ticket-collectors alike agreed in telling me that it was impossible for me to go to Belgrade. "You will require a passport," they said. And when I said that I had one, they replied sadly, "It is probably not good." "Belgrade," said an old lady in the corner, "and you are English! Oh, then you are the new school inspector. You have come, have you not, from an English Society to report on Servian education? Two other ladies have been already." "Perhaps I shall meet them," I suggested. "Oh no," said the old lady cheerfully; "that was when I was a girl. It was about 1864 that I saw them. Naturally I thought you came for the same purpose!" As I had no mission from the Government, she agreed with the guards that the expedition was impossible, and I was soon left alone in the carriage. As Agram had refused to book me farther than Semlin, I did not feel particularly cheery about it myself. Semlin opined I was a governess, and made no difficulty about booking me on! The train crashed across the iron bridge over the Save, and we arrived. It was half-past ten at night when I alighted in Belgrade—alone, friendless, and knowing nothing of either country or people except what I had gathered from a few books, mostly not up to date. Guide-book there is none, and a little of the language was all that I had to rely upon to see me through a strange land.

The first Servians I encountered were the two soldiers who take the passports, which have to be reclaimed next day. I grasped this fact and passed through, with some satisfaction, as I heard behind me the wrathful voices of several Italians and Germans who were fiercely refusing to part with their papers, and were being shouted at in Servian. Thinking it would wound their pride to be offered female British assistance, I left them to fight it out, and was the first, in consequence, to get through the "Customs." Then I rattled uphill through the dark deserted streets, where the night sentries with greatcoats and rifles were already on guard, and arrived at my hotel.

My only letter of introduction was a failure, as the addressee was abroad; the British Consul, whom I had been specially told to inform of my proceedings by the Servian Minister in London, had not yet arrived, and the secretaries at the British Ministry were quite new. This is a fate that pursues me. When I arrive at a place for the first time, the Powers that arrange such things always give the Consul a holiday, or appoint a new one who has not yet learnt the language. But having never yet failed to find friends on my travels, I did not worry about my possible fate up country. Several things began to happen at once. "Where," said I to the waiter, when he brought me my coffee on the very first morning, "where am I likely to see the King and Queen?" He looked at me with a peculiar expression. "You want to see our King?" he said. "You won't see him. He dare not come out of the konak. He is probably drunk," he added contemptuously. I made no remark, for there was none that it seemed expedient to make, and though I haunted the neighbourhood of the konak industriously, each time that I returned to Belgrade, I never saw either King or Queen. This was in the summer of 1902.

Belgrade (Beograd = "The White City") is most beautifully situated. For a capital to be so placed that the enemy can shell it comfortably from his own doorstep is of course ridiculous, but for sheer beauty of outlook Belgrade is not easy to surpass. Perched on a hill, at the foot of which Save joins Danube, it commands westwards a wonderful expanse of sky and stream and willows, with a pale mauve distance of Servian mountains, while opposite lie the rich plains of Hungary and the little town of Semlin. Belgrade is a new town, a quite new town, and no longer deserves the name of "The White City," its general effect from a distance being dark; but the name is an old one, and "white" is a favourite Servian adjective. It is a bright, clean town; the houses, seldom more than two storeys high, look solidly built; there are plenty of good shops, and the streets are wide and cheerful. It looks so prosperous and the inhabitants so very much up to date, its soldiers are so trim, its officers so gorgeous, and the new Government offices are so imposing, that one is surprised to find that the country, owing to mismanagement, is financially in an almost desperate condition.

There is little wheeled traffic in the streets, nor is this a wonder, for the pavement is indescribably vile. "Ah, but you should have seen it in Turkish times," say the Servians, and they do not worry about it; for they have two lines of electric trams, and your Servian is not a pedestrian. Coming as I did, straight from Cetinje, I spent the first few days in wondering whether the very dark, short people who crowded the trams of Belgrade, for lack of energy to walk up the street, were really blood-relations of the long-legged giants who stride tirelessly over the crags of Montenegro with never a sob. I never saw a Servian who looked as if he took exercise because he liked it. Neither did I ever see any attempt at an athletic sport. On the other hand, wherever I went, people expressed amazement that I could find any pleasure in travels that entailed so much exertion. I have never met folk that walked so slowly. I used to try not to pass people in the street, and vow it is as difficult as to win the slow bicycle race. An average Serb seems to think two miles an hour sharp going; his ordinary pace I cannot pretend to estimate, and when he has nothing particular to do, which is often, he sits down and plays cards. In my whole life I do not think I have seen so many cards as I did in Servia. In the cafés, hotels, and restaurants the soft slither and plap-plap of the painted pasteboards and the tap of the chalk as the players write the score goes on from morning till night, and forms a running accompaniment to every meal. When asked what struck me most on arriving in Servia, I often referred to this habit, and astonished my questioners. "We are obliged to play cards," they said; "chess is too difficult, and we cannot afford billiard-tables." In public, very little money changes hands, it is merely a matter of a few coppers, a way of killing the time that hangs so heavily on their hands; for Servia, in spite of the West European look of its capital, has not yet I learned to be in a hurry.

Card-playing has comprehensible attractions, but the Servians are possessed of a quite original vice which is not likely to lead other folk astray. They drink too much cold water, and they drink it till they are pulpy. An average Serb drinks enough cold water for an English cow. I doubt whether the language contains an equivalent for "bad training," for when I tried to explain the idea it created surprise. A doctor told me he had never heard the theory before. To him it seemed a natural and wholesome habit; moreover, he added, "there is plenty," and seemed to think it was rather wasteful to leave any unswallowed. To me it explained the lack of activity; the nation is water-logged. All day long and every day the Serb calls for a glass of cold water, and when he has drunk it he calls for another. Perhaps owing to this he has little space left for alcohol; at any rate, I never saw a drunken man, even amongst the peasants returning from market.

Belgrade, in fine weather, is a very agreeable town to do nothing in for a day or two. But its historic fortress, its beautiful garden, and the woods of Topchider are all too well known to require describing. One mosque only, and that a dilapidated one, tells of the departed Turk. The mass of the inhabitants (60,000) are Orthodox Serbs, and a colony of Spanish-speaking Jews lives in the low-lying quarter called Dorchol. I think I saw the whole colony, from the tiniest beady-eyed baby to the stoutest grand-mamma, for they flocked to see me pass as though I were a coronation procession. Unaware that a foreign woman travelling alone in Servia was a unique event, I wished them "good day" cheerfully, and went my way.

The "old konak," a rather mean-looking building painted a raw cream colour, and standing in a small garden with sentry boxes in front of it, has since acquired hideous fame. For in it, but a year later, did Alexander's ill-starred reign come to its awful end. Belgrade was so civil to me, there was such perfect order in the streets both by day and night, all was outwardly so quiet, that even now I find it hard to realise that that ugly yellow house has been turned into a shambles. That the King would have to leave and at no distant date was obvious, but I believed it would be by the usual route, and as I watched the swirly yellow Save hurrying along below, I murmured, "There's one more river, one more river to cross." It is a marvel that Servian rulers continue to dwell within sight of the Save. It is the most "men-may-come-and-men-may-go" river in all Europe. But in Servia, though you may flee from the Save, you can never lose sight of the political situation, which is a parlous one. Servia is too small to stand quite alone. Without, she is surrounded by Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria. The first is slowly squeezing her, preparatory to swallowing her whole, should a favourable chance arise; the second yet holds the heart of the old Servian Empire; and with the third Servias quarrel dates from the seventh century. Internally Servia is torn by parties who differ as to which of the Powers it is advisable to propitiate, and these parties dance to external wirepulling.

Things being as they are, it is small wonder that the Serb suspects everyone that crosses his frontier and believes he has come for obscure political reasons. I entered Servia cheerfully unaware of this, and soon learnt that the police were watching my movements. Belgrade, like Montenegro and Dalmatia, took me for a Russian, otherwise I neither knew nor cared whether Belgrade thought about me at all. Wishful of learning the language and of seeing things Servian, I determined to go to the theatre, and in the old happy days, when I was as yet guileless and unsuspicious, I stopped and began to slowly decipher a playbill at a street corner. I had struggled through but little of it when I was approached by a policeman on duty, a picturesque personage in a brown uniform with red braiding. He touched his cap to me and said most politely in very fair French, "Our language, Mademoiselle, is very difficult for une Anglaise. Permit that I assist you," and proceeded to translate the bill. Surprised and pleased, I asked myself, "Which of our own bobbies could thus assist a foreigner?" and being accustomed to be called Russian, I asked, "How did you know that I am English?" "Oh," he replied cheerfully, "Mademoiselle only arrived here on Monday, and I, you see, am in the police. Naturally I know. Also the officer at the custom-house has stated that Mademoiselle knows some of our language, and that is most unusual in a foreigner." As a freeborn British subject, I was considerably taken aback to find that the police were so well informed about me. Immediately and rashly I said to myself, "When in Rome do as the Romans. I too can ask questions." There was something about the policeman that was oddly familiar; he was a tall fair man, quite unlike the short dark type that I was beginning to recognise as Belgrade-Servian. So I said to him, "Yes, I am English. Where do you come from? You are not a Serb of Servia." "Ah no," he said, with a sigh; "I am far from my people. I come from a quite little place of which Mademoiselle has never heard. I come from the neighbourhood of Kolashin." This at once enlightened me. Foolishly proud of my knowledge, I laughed and replied, "Kolashin? Oh yes, in Montenegro, near the Albanian frontier. You are Crnagorach!"

It was his turn to be astonished now, and he almost leapt with amazement. He broke into his native tongue. "You know my fatherland! You know my fatherland!" he cried in great excitement. "You have been there! Have you seen my Prince, our gospodar Nikola? Have you seen Prince Danilo? Prince Mirko? the Princesses Milena? Militza? Have you been to Podgoritza? to Ostrog?" etc. "Yes, yes," said I to everything. "Bogami! Bogami!" (Oh my God!), he cried. Then he took a long breath, pulled himself together, and started a torrent of the most fluent French. "Mademoiselle," he said, "I will tell you everything. I came from Kolashin twelve years ago with a comrade. He also is a policeman; he is now in the next street. As soon as he arrived here he married a Servian woman, and he has been unhappy ever since. I, Mademoiselle, am unmarried. I detest these Servian women. They are bad, Mademoiselle, they are unfaithful! I would not take one on any account, and I cannot afford to go back to my own country for a wife. But you, Mademoiselle, you are half Montenegrin; you have the heart of a lion; you know my country; you have seen my Prince; you speak my language! Unfortunately, Mademoiselle, I must remain in this street,"—here I mentally offered thanks to the powers that had rooted him to this spot, "but on Sunday afternoon I shall be free. I shall come to take you out to Topchider. We shall have something to eat; soon we shall become good friends; soon we will be married. I am a very good man, Mademoiselle," here he smote his chest. "The British Consul can learn all about me from my captain. You can teach English in Belgrade, and we shall soon be very rich. But," he added very seriously, "you are staying at the Grand Hotel, a most expensive place! You must not stay there. I shall tell you of a much cheaper one, and on Sunday we will go out together!" He paused, rather for want of breath, I fancy, than for a reply, the favourable nature of which he took for granted. I seized the opportunity. "Thank you very much," I said, "but I am leaving Belgrade to-morrow, and I have no time." "Oh, but why, Mademoiselle? You have only been here a week, and it is a so charming town! Restes, je te prie, jusqu'à Dimanche, jusqu'à Dimanche!" "Impossible!" I cried; "adieu, adieu!" and fled round the nearest corner. As I left for Nish early next morning, I saw him no more, and on my subsequent return to Belgrade dodged, with the speed of a pickpocket, whenever I saw a tall policeman looming in the distance.

CHAPTER XI

SMEDEREVO—SHABATZ—VALJEVO—UB—OBRENOVATZ

Smederevo from the Danube is a most impressive sight. A huge brick fortress surrounds the promontory with castellated walls and a long perspective of towers; a grand mediæval building lying grim on the water's edge, a monument of Servias death-struggle with the Turks. Built in 1432 by George Brankovich, son of Vuk the traitor of Kosovo, it was Servia's last stronghold, and its makers, in defiance of the Crescent, built the Cross in red bricks into the wall where, now the tide of invasion has at last ebbed, you may still see it. And all the nineteen towers still stand.

Having landed, and reflected that I could not escape for many hours, I walked up the main street and I prayed that the populace would prove friendly. It was—very. I had not gone far when I was marked by the policeman. He was much perturbed. He walked all round me at a very respectful distance, and discussed with everyone on the way what he had better do. Finally he came up and asked me in Servian, if I spoke it. "Very little," said I, and volunteered that I was English, which caused him to call up reinforcements. By this time a fair audience was collected, for the hope of seeing some one "run in" will gather a crowd anywhere. Having ascertained that I understood German, he called up a man to speak to me. The man, pleased with the importance he was gaining, poured out a long string of mysterious noises which resembled no known tongue. Then he turned to the policeman and said, in Servian, "She doesn't know German." The policeman was in despair, and so was the populace. "Speak Servian slowly," I said. "Where do you come from?" "London." "Where are your friends?" "In England." "What are you doing?" "I have come to see Servia." This pleased him very much. "Have you any brothers?" "Yes." "Where are they?" I supplied the information and other family details. Finally he summed up the evidence, and imparted to the surrounding multitude the information that I had come all alone to see Servia and the Servians. This, he said, was "very good." He touched his cap and smiled affably, and the assembly broke up. All this amused me, but I lived to see the day when these interviews became a weariful burden.

I had luckily hit on the day of a great cattle and pig fair. The open space between town and fortress was filled with peasants and their beasts, great grey draught oxen, sheep, horses, goats, and, above all, the staple product of Servia, pigs. The Servian pig is a great character. He rules indeed large tracts of country. He is cared for, tended, and waited upon. I have seen a large sow walking with dignity down the middle of the road, followed by a number of human retainers, each carrying one of her piglets like a baby in arms, while she set the pace, stopped to grubble at anything that interested her, and looked back from time to time with her beady little eyes to see that her infants were being properly cared for.

Here in the market the pigs were the most important personages present, and knew it. They are great woolly beasts, some of fair complexion, beautifully curly as to their backs. Their snouts are long and unringed. Being of a highly practical nature, the first thing they did on arriving at the market field was to dig themselves cubby-houses. Those that were lucky enough to find a hole full of water sat in it, and were supremely happy. Some quite small mud-holes were packed with pigs lying on the black ooze and crammed together like sardines in oil. All talked incessantly. There were hundreds of tender babes wandering about, but the families never got mixed. The little ones are longitudinally striped, like young wild boars, and very elegant. Their mothers found mud-holes if possible, and the children sank in up to their eyes. All were extremely tame. If the owner of a pig family wished to shift camp, he strewed a few beans to start them with, and the whole lot followed, conversing cheerfully, and rearranged themselves neatly whenever he chose to sit down again. The mud-coated ones lay and baked in the sun, like live pork pies, till their mud casing was hard and bricky.

While I was absorbed in pigs, a gentleman came up, took off his hat, and launched me into the language again. He knew a very little French, and with that and Servian extracted the same information as the policeman had done. But he went farther. "Had I been into the fortress?" was his next. I have a great respect for frontier fortresses in all parts of the world, and it had not occurred to me to do more than examine it from a distance. "It is the only thing to see here; I will take you over it," he said. I gratefully accepted the offer, imagining the place was now public like the fortress of Belgrade, and we approached the gate and were saluted by the sentry, who made no objection. Passing in, I found to my astonishment that it was full of soldiers, and very much the reverse of a public promenade. My friend, who seemed to be a well-known person, asked the first private we met for the Commandant. "The Commandant," he said, "is over there, with the artillery." Off we started in search of him, and were soon hotly pursued by an apologetic soldier, who explained that no foreigners were admitted. I suggested retreating, but my escort would not hear of it, and, quite undaunted, took me over to a party of very smart officers who were sitting at a table under some trees. To them he introduced me with a flourish. They leapt to their feet, made most elegant bows, and were all struck dumb with amazement. My friend then persisted that, as I was English and had come so far, I ought to be shown the fortress. None of them could speak anything but Servian, and were very shy. I said all I could to them in answer to their questions and tried to say good-bye, as it was obvious that their orders did not allow them to take foreigners round. Moreover, it did not seem to me that there was anything of further interest to me to be seen. I was inside and had a good view of the huge walls and towers, the great open space they surrounded, and the rough irregular masonry they were built of. To send for the Commandant, as my friend urged, seemed absurd. I got up to go. However, after a whispered debate, the officers asked me if I would like to see the view from the walls, and one of them volunteered to take me. He hustled me with elaborate care quickly and guiltily past the artillerymen, who were taking a gun to pieces, and must have been inventing horrible secrets. Poor things! they might have explained it all to me without my being any the wiser. I remembered Dreyfus, and could scarcely help laughing at the ridiculous position I had managed to get into. The wall was soon ascended, and the view over the Danube certainly very fine, but I felt sure I ought to depart, so skipped quickly down again; but the poor officer in spurs took a long while arriving at the bottom. We returned to the gate, and I endeavoured to thank him; he shook hands in an elaborate manner, saluted, and I emerged from George Brankovich's great fort, which has been besieged by Servian, Turk, and Hungarian, but never before, I believe, surprised by the English. My friend kept repeating, "You are English, and they ought to have shown it you," and was very much vexed.

Smederevo has no other sights, and Shabatz on the Save was my next experiment in towns. It can be reached by a local boat from Belgrade, also by rail. Let no one, however, be persuaded into taking the train unless he wishes to realise thoroughly, once and for all, the joys of living upon a hostile frontier. The train journey was an hour and a half shorter than that by boat, and I imagined that to book from one town to another in the same country was a simple matter, though I was aware that the frontier had to be crossed, so I walked cheerfully down to the station. I asked for a ticket to Shabatz, and was, as a result, immediately conducted to the station police bureau, where a youth in a light blue coat was busily stamping passports and inquiring into every-one's past and future existence. My advent upset the dull current of everyday routine. I said I wanted to go to Shabatz, thinking to smooth matters down, but it only created more excitement. The pale blue youth put everything aside in order to fathom the mystery of my movements. Servian frontier police are funny and amusing people. They spare no pains to unravel plots; I hope they will find one some day as a reward for their efforts. If, instead of only myself, there had been say forty or fifty tourists in Servia, the entire land would possibly have been disorganised, trains delayed, criminals left unarrested, and burglaries committed, while the police officials were straining every nerve to ascertain the number of brothers and sisters, and past, present, and future actions of the visitors! I did my best to assist their plans, and have in fact provided them with the materials for a fairly accurate biography of myself, should one ever be required. Its excessive dulness went a long way towards soothing their agitated nerves. Pressure of business forced the pale blue youth to stamp my passport and let me go while his appetite for details was yet unsatisfied, and I hastened to buy a ticket for Shabatz. This was impossible. I could only book across the river to Semlin. By this time I was really interested in frontier existence, and began to regard the trip as a sporting event. Feeling righteous and bold as a lion, being armed with a stamped passport and a ticket, I walked down the platform only to be stopped short by sentries. The pale blue youth from the office came flying up. Having hurried up through his business, he intended learning a little more about me while yet there was time. As he spoke nothing but his native tongue and was fluent and excited, we did not get on very well; but I imparted my proposed plan of seeing Servia to him, and he stood on the step of the carriage till the train started. Hardly were we off when another officer turned up. He took the passport and wrote my name in a little book, but had unfortunately no time to ask more than three or four questions.

At Semlin we were quite busy. First we went through the customs, and then we had to go and find our passports. The stout and smiling police official selected mine, and without venturing to pronounce my name cried, "The English one." More conversation, this time in German. I told him that I had made nine journeys with that passport without its ever being looked at, and now it had been stamped twice in an hour. This pleased him, and he pointed out that it showed how superior the Hungarian police are to those of other nations. Then I re-booked, and learned that I had to change trains! My fellow-passengers dazed me with Magyar. They none of them agreed as to where I must change, but were all convinced that I had been wrongly informed by the railway guard, and when I arrived at last on the banks of the Save and saw the ferry-boat, I felt as if I were returning to a well-known and civilised land. Even Servian is better than Magyar.

[I.]	CATTARO—NJEGUSHI—CETINJE
[II.]	PODGORITZA AND RIJEKA
[III.]	OSTROG
[IV.]	NIKSHITJE AND DUKLE
[V.]	OUR LADY AMONG THE ROCKS
[VI.]	ANTIVARI
[VII.]	OF THE NORTH ALBANIAN
[VIII.]	SKODRA
[IX.]	SKODRA TO DULCIGNO

[X.]	BELGRADE
[XI.]	SMEDEREVO—SHABATZ— VALJEVO—UB—OBRENOVATZ
[XII.]	NISH
[XIII.]	PIROT
[XIV.]	EAST SERVIA
[XV.]	THE SHUMADIA AND SOUTH-WEST SERVIA
[XVI.]	KRUSHEVATZ

[XVII.]	KOLASHIN—ANDRIJEVITZA —BERANI—PECH
[XVIII.]	TO DECHANI AND BACK TO PODGORITZA

Through the Land of the Serb

THROUGH THE LANDS OF THE SERB

By

MARY E. DURHAM

LONDON

EDWARD ARNOLD

1904

DEDICATED

TO

MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

PART I

MONTENEGRO AND THE WAY THERE

PART II

OF SERVIA

PART III

MONTENEGRO AND OLD SERVIA

1903

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

PART I

MONTENEGRO AND THE WAY THERE