About 1 P.M. we started on our mountain-crossing expedition towards Travnik; first descending from our altitude towards the Franciscan monastery of Comušina, which we found to consist of an unpretending house and a bare, pewless church standing in the middle of a wretched little village. The door of the monastery was fastened, and a woman who parleyed with us from an upper window said that all the ‘brothers’ were up at the shrine. On our way we had passed through the Christian cemetery—a wilderness so deep in bracken that it seemed to have been purposely left to the charitable clothing of Nature, as if they feared that even their graves, if seen, might be insulted by the passing Zaptieh. The memorials here were rude stones, sometimes scarcely touched by art, sometimes rudely graven with a Latin cross like one of the ‘Hadjuks’ graves’ already described. But we groped among the fern-leaves in vain for an inscription.

Beyond this we descended by a path to the Ussora, and finding that our attendant Zaptieh’s scansorial powers were small, and that, not having on his shoulders a heavy knapsack like ourselves, he was yet inclined to lag hopelessly, there was nothing for it but to dismiss him, after first inditing under a walnut-tree beside the waters of Ussora a letter in our choicest French to the Kaïmakàm, in which we gave our escort a good character, only expressing our regret that his inability to climb mountains à l’Anglaise deprived us of the further pleasure of his company. We afterwards had reason to regret that besides the backshish or largess which was his due we gave him too large a proportion of our remaining store of bread, not sufficiently realising the slow progress which we should make between this and Travnik.

We now followed the river bed, every now and then wading from one side to the other of the shallow stream in a vain search for a forest-path which should lead in the right direction. We found Major Roskiević’s[182] map so completely out, that we really suspected that he had been the victim of the Vila’s enchantments—and who, conversant with the history of the building of Scodra, does not know that it is her practice to thwart engineers who presumptuously invade her precincts? And I would urge in proof of this hypothesis that her sacred mount, the Vila Gora of the peasants hereabouts, under whose brows we are now passing, is conspicuous by its absence on the Major’s chart. Before we had concluded our itinerary of Bosnia we had further proofs that the Vila or some other freakish sprite had possessed that unfortunate officer. Often has the Major played the part of a will-o’-the-wisp for our especial misguidance! At times he would display such extraordinary capacities of faith as to remove mountains. He would evolve streams which existed not, out of his inner consciousness, and when he conceived that this pleasantry had gone far enough he would swallow them up in the earth. He would transport villages bodily. He would run a broad valley through a mountain mass from which Xerxes would have recoiled, and bridge over chasms at which Stephenson would have shuddered. Not that his humour is always of this ponderous turn; oh no! he has his lighter veins, too, in which he will draw you a zigzagging road straight as a line, or pop the only path on the wrong side of the stream!

At about 5 P.M. we found ourselves at the junction of the Ziraja and the Blatnica, as we learnt from some peasants—for they never meet according to the Major. The peasants, who were dressed in the heavily ornamented quasi-Dalmatian costume of these mountains, and were of the type which it has pleased me to call Hunnish, were much delighted at a present of English needles from the ‘consuls.’

We now began ascending the Troghìr Planina by a faintly indicated woodman’s path, overshadowed by a beech-forest of finer growth than any we had yet seen, interspersed with equally majestic pines. Amongst these mysterious labyrinths we lost our path, and coming towards dusk on an inviting glade commanding a lovely mountain panorama, pitched on it as our place of bivouac for the night. Here we found no difficulty in collecting firewood for a cheery fire, and bracken enough to form a springy mattress; and having cooked our frugal supper, we submitted to be lulled to sleep by the chorus of tree-crickets above. The night was again fine; so that, except for the cold, which in the small hours of the morning was bitter—as it generally is when the camp fire has burnt down beyond recovery!—we passed a fairly comfortable night, till we were aroused by the droning of gnats in our ears, and were again on our way, before the sun.

But now we began to be beset by a difficulty which while in the forest zone of the mountains we had not anticipated—namely, the absence of water, caused by the porous character of the limestone rock; and though we succeeded in finding our path again, all the runnels we passed were dried by summer drought. The woods were very silent, and there was no morning song of birds beyond the cooing of a dove; but while we were resting we heard a deep musical hum among the tree-tops, proceeding from myriads of gnats, some of which were droning below. We kept gradually ascending the back of the Planina, our path continually disappearing or losing itself in a maze of lesser tracks, which might have been made as much by animals as by man; and every now and then we had to scramble on as best we could over tree-trunks of monstrous girth that barred our path. But still no water to make breakfast palatable! till about two hours after starting we came to a stagnant pool or puddle about the size of an ordinary washing-basin, which, as necessity knows no law, we were driven to make use of, and to pick the tadpoles out of our tea as best we might!

But how describe this forest scenery! how paint, so that others may see as we saw them, the golden rays of the rising sun slanting between the leafy tiers of the beeches, intersecting their shady trunks with pillars of light, shimmering beyond against the dark mountain flank; not dappling it in round noon-day patches, but streaking it horizontally with golden ripples, comparable to nothing but mackerel clouds glorified by the sunset, trailing across some darker tract of sky. Now and then the mighty trunks and branches frame vistas of mountain and valley, flooded still by a forest sea unflecked by habitation—an enamel of quiet blue. Then the luminous foliage of the beeches gives place for a while to more sombre pines, whose turpentiny fragrance floats like morning incense down the forest aisles. Hour after hour, as we ascend, the forest still looms around us, but the scenery is perpetually changing.

At one point we reached a mountain bluff more open to the wind, and found ourselves in a clearing not made by man. From the rocky summit an awful scene of ruin burst upon us. That soft blue heaven—azure and cloudless as a tranquil sea—it, too, has its storms and windy Scyllas to play havoc among these aërial masts. This was one universal wreck—the wreck of an Armada. Far and wide every tree had been struck down like Canaanitic walls. The very current of the tornado was marked by the lie of the prostrate trunks. At times a confused medley—piles of scarce distinguishable spars and giant hulks—jumbled together as if they had been nine-pins!—showed the eddy of a whirlwind; but generally the trunks were strewn pointing from the north-east like so many magnets: one vast torrent track of destruction marking the course of the Bora, the irresistible storm-wind of Illyria. In places we have found the periodic force of this wind utilized by the Bosniacs, who cut the trees a quarter through on the leeward side and leave the rest to the woodcraft of Boreas.

But once more we plunge into the primeval shadows to find ourselves among more isolated monuments of ruin. Here it is the artillery of heaven that has been playing on the masted swell of the green Planina. Now we have reached the very focus of an electric storm. The trunks of beech and fir sometimes riven asunder, more generally erect but decapitated, stripped of bark and branches; sometimes shattered columns charred by the aërial explosion, sometimes splintered up into trophies of white spears. Here is one of the most striking witnesses to the stupendous power of lightning that I have ever seen. A beech about eighty feet in height was snapped in two, the upper part hurled on to the slope below, the lower still rooted to the ground, but the hard wood splashed by the thunderer’s bolt—as when a bomb-shell strikes the sea—into gigantic splinters: keen, shapely blades, as much as twenty feet in length.[183]

Then, again, we passed through a region of pines, grim, time-stained—scarred and bereft of limbs in many a battle with the elements—with bare long arms and patriarchal beards of hoary lichen; an older generation of trees, waiting in vain for kindly axe or levelling blast; and awakening, in their Arctic desolation, memories of a Lapland forest-scene. And now once more a charming transformation takes place. Cheerful beech avenues again overarch us, or open out in sunny glades, where butterflies—commas, whites, clouded yellows—are fluttering and settling about yellow salvias and a flower which looked like a rosy phlox with a single blossom. Now we found, to our great relief, an icy-cold stream, and prepared our noon-day repast in a beechwood glen that carried us back to the chalk hills of old England. Here we recognized around us those old familiar ferns, the prickly and the maiden-hair[184]—polypody, flouncing the old stumps with charitable raiment—rarer tufts of blechnum; and, prying curiously among the beech-roots for another of our chalk-hill favourites, we found—sure enough!—that spiky shell[185] which seems to imitate the form and colour of the sheathed buds of the beech-leaves.

The track we now followed began to descend rapidly, and we discovered, after climbing down a considerable way, that we were on the wrong side of the watershed, so that there was nothing for it but to reascend as nearly as possible two thousand feet towards the main ridge of Troghìr which we had left.

A comparatively bare steep tempted us to make straight for our object; but having with difficulty fought our way upwards through a jungle of fern and dwarf elder, we presently found ourselves entangled among the débris of a not very ancient forest fire. The ground was toothed with sharp splinters of burnt rock, and strewn with a network of branches, too rotten to bear our weight, but quite strong enough to trap our feet and tumble us over—all which gins and snares were treacherously concealed by a forest of bracken which rose above our heads. Add to this, that at every few yards we had to scale high barricades of sooty timber, and at the time were at a loss to conceive why Providence should have made fir-trees so confoundedly spiky! When it is remembered that we had about five-and-twenty pounds on our backs, and that the sun was broiling hot, it may be imagined that our progress was slow, and in fact we were forced to win every inch as much with our hands as our feet. However, as we gradually stormed our citadel, we were rewarded for our bumps and lacerations by a view as strange as it was picturesque. In these upper regions it was only the smaller trees that had been actually burnt down, the larger had been simply killed and left standing. The sight as we looked down had a savage fascination quite unique; the colours were so varied, so striking, so bizarre, that they deserved to have been perpetuated by a great painter. Here and there were the charred funereal skeletons of forest giants, with jagged stumps of branches in harsh relief against a distant background of green valley and blue undulating mountain, almost voluptuous in its softness of tint and contour. In some trunks the blackness was chequered, where the bark had peeled off, by broad scars, taking every tint of amber; in others, it was draped in ashy festoons of lichen, or swathed in verdant folds of moss. Some trees, already roasted to death by fire, had at a later period been shivered by the lightning, and the whiteness of their splinters showed that little but their bark had been charred by the previous conflagration. Some indeed had actually survived it, and on one side a small island of still flourishing trees—a dark yew-green fir, an emerald and a golden beech—stood out against the sootiest thicket.

But we gradually left this funereal waste beneath us, and groping upwards once more through virgin forest, at last succeeded in regaining the ridge of Troghìr. We even hit on our lost path, but it soon eluded us again and disappeared beneath the wrecks of tall pine-trees, which seemed to have buried all traces of it. For here, if a fallen tree bars the path, the Bosniac woodman does not cut it away, but either climbs over it, or, if the obstacle is too high for man or beast to surmount, he deserts the track altogether and makes another elsewhere. Thus the forest barricades are gradually allowed to accumulate till they reach dimensions simply stupendous, and the path which originally swerved a few yards out of its course may eventually be turned as much as a mile. But we had learnt a lesson about trusting to paths which, while still smarting from the effects of our second ascent of Troghìr, we were not likely to neglect; so this time we followed the guidance of our compass as literally as we could, scaling barrier after barrier till we were well nigh worn out. No one, I think, who has not himself tried to penetrate a primeval forest on a windy mountain ridge, can realize what these obstacles really are! It was late in the afternoon when we conquered our last barricade, and to our delight beheld before us the smooth lawny swell which forms the summit of the Vučia Planina, from which the Troghìr is an offshoot.

An easy ascent brought us to the top, where we rested awhile to enjoy the glorious mountain panorama that opened out all round. We are now in the very heart of Alpine Bosnia, ‘each one of whose lofty mountains,’ to quote the words of her native historian,[186] ‘exalted to Ayuk, the fiery star, is an eyesore to the foe.’ But the traveller must make allowance for Oriental hyperbole. Here, at least, the mountains were contented with a less sidereal stature; nor was there much that could even be called rocky or precipitous except the head of Vlašić to the south, which peered over lower mountain shoulders and conical peaks, shrouded, as the long neck of Troghìr below us, as all the other Goras and Planinas round, with dense forest growth. To call the scenery Swiss would be mere flattery; indeed, its whole character, the small height of the mountains, the want of boldness, the down-like swell of their contours, recalls rather the Carpathians than any part of the Alps that I have seen. The summit of Vučia, on which we now are, is inconsiderable as regards altitude, not being more than 4,300 feet, according to our aneroid, though, to be sure, the Major makes it 5,000—for the sake of round numbers. There is something Carpathian, too, about the forests, the gigantic pines and beeches, and—as might be expected from the commonly calcareous nature of the soil—in the flora generally. Here, as in the ranges that border Roumania, the drooping gentian, the sweet-william, and the sunflower are among the most noticeable flowers.

But the sun is sinking low in the heavens, and it is high time for us to be again on our legs. We now made our way across the southern slopes of the summit, or rather table-land, of Vučia, which forms a lovely Alp or mountain pasture. At intervals we came upon peasants of the type we had seen the evening before (we had met with no human being in the intervening day) tending kine, or mowing hay. When, however, we approached some women—who, being unveiled, we assumed to be Latin Christians—to ask the bearings of Travnik, they rushed away into a thicket screeching, ‘Hai ’ti! hai ’ti!’ ‘Off! off!’ so Moslemized—if indeed they were rayahs, as we think certain—were their ideas of propriety! One of them had made a sign which we mistook for an answer to our enquiry, and against our better judgment we followed the direction indicated, and which afterwards turned out to be hopelessly wrong.

Meanwhile, our lines had fallen in pleasant places. The fresh scent of hay was delicious; the soft undulating mountain lawn, dotted with magnificent beeches, kept perpetually recalling a fine English park; on one side, too, it was appropriately fringed by a fir-plantation of Nature. It was quite hard to realize that we were far from any town or even shelter. In the midst of these loneliest of mountains one kept half expecting to catch sight of the cosy red gables and mullioned windows of some old Elizabethan mansion. The beeches seemed to have caught the inspiration of the landscape. In the freer atmosphere of these glades they had lost the almost poplar-like procerity of their forest-growth, and expanded into that more pear-shaped outline which is so congenial to genteel precincts. Over those forest depths through which we had been diving all the day had reigned the ‘silence of the central sea,’ but these woodland coasts and islands were alive with garden songsters—tits and wrens and blackbirds—fluttering about in the golden sunshine of evening, and filling our ears with familiar home melodies.

Here, too, we saw a most beautiful sight—a fine convolvulus hawk-moth (we had made acquaintance with another the evening before), up and dissipating at an hour when all well-regulated moths should be wrapped in downy slumbers, and making, as we thought, a most unfair use of a proboscis full two inches long to drain the nectar from a whole spike of yellow salvia, before any of its fellows should be awake to cry halves. It was a pert fly, and seemed quite to revel in the sunlight—a ‘fast’ trait, it is to be feared in a nocturnal insect. Such airs, too, as it gave itself!—flouting here, flirting there; flitting on from conquest to conquest. As if the gorgeous creature did not know that it was irresistible! As if the very sunbeams did not lackey it—showering gold-dust over that expanse of delicately-mottled grey! What Danae sprite, never so pent up in perfumed cell, could resist such courtship? What flowery elf be proof against the superb obeisance of that taper body, tricked out in all its tiger livery of rose and sable? To see it dawdle round a bevy of fair blossoms, in lazy eddies, drifting rather than flying, with a blasé air of languid inspection; to see it, in more light fantastic vein, dance off to the flower of its capricious choice, and bob airily up and down, coquetting with those saffron lips, ere it poised—how daintily!—to steal their sweetness. It was decidedly livelier than our friend of yestereen, and so intent upon its nectar as to let us gaze within a foot of it; it seemed to have a keener, a more epicurean, enjoyment of life, and gave itself all the airs of a bon-vivant. Indeed it showed its good taste in its preference for salvia; for the scent of these flowers is exquisite, and I have sometimes stopped wonderingly to look for musk, so like is the smell at a little distance off.

On this side of the mountains the flowers and foliage are more luxuriant. Glade and woodland are sprinkled with kinds we have not yet met with, a large rosy cranesbill, a yellow labiate, with a peak of the most gorgeous purple leaves—if indeed they were not petals—tremulous little hare-bells, lastræa and delicate varieties of ferns, while here and there bright scarlet strawberries gemmed the ground. The trees grow to an even more gigantic stature than those we saw before. We measured beeches fifteen feet in circumference, at about three feet from the ground; and many—as on the Mazulia Planina opposite, where some of the finest timber in Bosnia is said to grow—rise to a height of a hundred and twenty feet. A pine-tree measured fourteen feet and a half in girth.

For we are again immersed in the primeval forest—and night seems nearer and shelter further. The sun was already setting, when a gap in the trees revealed to us a mountain vista, which showed that we were on the wrong side of the ridge. A woodman whom we presently met told us that we were going towards Zenica instead of Travnik, and we discovered that we were on the debatable mountain neck, between the Vučia and Gorcevica Planinas. The woodman intimated to us that to strike across and attempt to regain the Travnik path was hopeless, and that we had better follow the ridge in the direction of Zenica. But we made up our minds to cut across and follow the valley of a stream which led in our direction. Accordingly we crossed over to the western side of our ridge, and found ourselves on the brink of an almost precipitous steep, descending to the Jasenica, our desired stream, heard but not seen, thirteen hundred feet below.

The mean angle at which this slope descended was, as nearly as we could calculate, 60°. Had it been bare, we could not possibly have descended it, laden as we were; but it was covered with beech-trees, which might stop us if we fell; so we resolved to attempt a descent.

It was certainly very difficult work; the beech-leaves made it slippery, and concealed rocks and boughs would trip us up, or a piece of soil give way. We were perpetually dislodging fragments of rock, which rolled and leapt down, quicker and quicker, crash after crash, cannoning against the trunks, taking bigger and bigger bounds, till a final plunge told us that they had reached the stream. They never lodged half way. Every now and then we seemed likely to follow them, but we always succeeded in arresting our fall by clutching at a passing trunk. It grew darker and darker; but we still kept on at our painful task, till, about six hundred feet down, I broke one of my knapsack straps in a tumble, and it being impossible in such a position either to mend it or to carry it, we were lucky in discovering, close by, a hollow—formed by the uprooting of a forest giant—to serve as sleeping-quarters for our third night running, sub Jove frigido, and where we literally lodged till peep-o’-day. The worst was that we were unable to collect fuel for a fire, and before morning a chill breeze sprang up, and the thermometer sank almost to freezing point; for, in less mountainous localities than this, August frosts are by no means rare in Bosnia. For nocturnal visitors we might take our choice—as the wind invented footsteps—of the wild swine, bears, and wolves, that inhabit these mountains; but none of these fourfooted gentry molested us; and, except that once or twice we woke with the cold, or by reason of sundry stones and awkward tags of root, which would keep running into us, we slept soundly enough.

Aug. 17.—Having executed the needful repairs, we continued our descent before sunrise, and finally found ourselves at the bottom of the gorge—the opposite steep of Mazulia frowning over us as precipitously as that which we had descended, and the whole ravine being so narrow that there was room for nothing but the Jasenica torrent below, over arched by the stupendous beeches which clung to both steeps.

In a dry part of its bed we demolished our last scrap of bread, and reviewed our position, which was not favourable. The gorge in which we found ourselves was from all points so inaccessible that we doubted whether it had ever been trodden by foot of man before. To make our way along the valley seemed well nigh impossible, so vast were the rock and timber barricades with which the torrent had piled its course. On the other hand, to reascend either steep was tantamount to a defeat, and in either case would bring us no forwarder. But it was becoming painfully evident that we must get somewhere, and quickly—as the day before, owing to our ill-judged liberality to our Zaptieh, we had had to stint ourselves of food, and now the last scrap of solid nutriment was gone—there could be no doubt about that! So, all things considered, there was nothing for it but to fight our way down the gorge as best we might, and trust that as the stream got lower its valley would widen. We found that the best way was to plunge bodily through the water, now and then jumping from rock to rock, or slipping into deep pools, and every few yards having to scale dams of trunks and branches, whose hugeness showed the force of the torrent in the rainy season. The want of an axe made a good deal of this work more difficult than it otherwise would have been, so that it sometimes took an hour to make a few score yards of way.

And yet the guerdon of our struggle was rich indeed. An hour or so from our starting-point the sides of our ravine became more rocky, and started up sheerly on either side of the stream, which, dashing between these ‘iron gates,’ leapt from a rocky platform, and plunged some sixty feet below in a magnificent cascade. We were forced to make a tedious détour by climbing up the steep; but the rocky walls, the overhanging beeches, the snow-white foam veiling the abysmal gloom, gave us glimpses of a beautiful picture. The vegetation, too, of our valley was marvellous in its luxuriance. Here, where the rays of the meridian sun scarcely pierce, stately sunflowers would raise their great flaming crowns as if to light up the shades of fell and forest. Drooping gentians—those weeping willows among flowers!—hung lovingly over the stream: methought they were its guardian nymphs, swelling its waters with tributary dew from a myriad azure urns! The dimensions taken by some of the ferns were certainly extraordinary; the lady-fern waved feather-like sprays near five feet in length, the hart’s tongue put forth fronds like small palm-leaves, three feet long and about three inches broad. Even the tree-like moss[187] that cushioned the damp crevices between the rocks rose to an abnormal stature.

After many weary hours the valley began to open out a little, and the stream allowed us room for passage on its margin. Further on we came to little patches of meadow land by its side, and even, here and there, to traces of a path, and another sign of man, the ashes of an old camp-fire. Beyond this, again, the mountains grew more rocky, the trees smaller and more scanty, and scenery of a bolder kind broke upon us. First, as if to prepare us for what was to follow, a tall obelisk of rock started up in the middle of the gorge; and having passed, as it were, Cleopatra’s Needle, the rock-architecture took an appropriately Egyptian character, and we found ourselves among what it only required a slight exercise of imagination to transform into the ruins of the Pharaohs. Colossal walls and columns towered on each side of the torrent, and scarcely allowed it a passage; and, looking through these antique portals, the top of a pyramid appeared in the distance—the limestone peak or Vlašić.

We made our way with some difficulty through the precipitous defile, and were rewarded by a cheerful prospect of a maize-covered height beyond, surmounted by wooden huts and the minaret of a mosque. A short climb brought us to the village, called Zagredzi, hanging on the slope of Mt. Mazulia. Here we thought to get something to eat, for we were half famished; but we certainly were not prepared for the inhospitality of the villagers, who apparently were all Mahometans. As we passed along the street every door was slammed. The women scurried away and hid themselves; even the men fled at our approach; and though we succeeded so far as to parley with one, no entreaties or offers of money could induce him to procure us bread or milk. So there was nothing for it but to proceed on our way and shake the dust of this churlish village from our feet. Just outside we passed what we take to have been an old karaula or watch-tower, of rough masonry, square in shape, with barred windows and an old circular arch now half buried in the ground, surmounted by a plain round moulding. Happily, beyond this we came upon an apple-tree, and, as the ground was strewn with apples, considered ourselves justified in anticipating the vagrant swine.

We presently met a party of countrymen, and persuaded one, in return for coin of the realm, to put us into the way to the village of Podove, there to strike the path for the Franciscan monastery of Gučiagora, where we purposed to throw ourselves on monkish hospitality. At Podove we found for the first time some monuments of a kind which we were to meet with again in other parts of Bosnia, and which are scattered over the whole country.

These are large tombstones, some as much as six feet long by three in height, of a tea-caddy shape, resting on a broader stone platform. The impression they give you is that they are descendants of Roman sarcophagi, and indeed their upper part is exactly similar to some Roman monuments.[188] There is, so far as I have seen, no inscription on them; but occasionally, as on some of those at Podove, they are ornamented with incised arches at the end and side of a quasi-Gothic form, which may be useful in determining their date. The erosion of the stone and mutilated condition of many probably point to considerable antiquity, as also does the fact that I have twice noticed them overturned and blocking up the channel of streams which had undermined their original standing ground. They certainly bear no resemblance to the turbaned columns of Turkish cemeteries, and indeed an examination of those at Podove convinced me that many had been purposely mutilated by the unbeliever.

All these facts point to the conclusion that they are, as the Bosniacs express it when they want to indicate a date previous to the Turkish captivity, ‘more than three hundred years old.’ On the other hand, if not Moslem, neither are they like the memorial stone crosses, such as one we were shortly to see at Gučiagora, which are the undoubted work of Christians, and which date back at least to the sixteenth century.

There are, however, some modern monuments which we noticed at one place in the Herzegovina which resemble these in outline; these were in a small Jewish graveyard outside Mostar, and had Hebrew inscriptions on them. But the Jews of Bosnia and the Herzegovina are all a Spanish-speaking people, who took refuge from their Christian oppressors within the borders of more tolerant Islâm in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Previous to this settlement there do not seem to have been any Jews in the country, since in early Bosnian history, so occupied with religious struggles, so blood-stained with fanaticism, there is not, so far as I am aware, any mention of them. Even at the present day they are, as regards numbers, an insignificant minority, domiciled almost exclusively in a few of the larger towns.[189] It is hardly conceivable, therefore, that in early times the Hebrews should have occupied the country to such an extent as to have dotted it with these monuments, which are to be found passim throughout Bosnia. On the other hand, the stones that we saw near Mostar were considerably smaller than these ancient examples; and it seems quite possible that the Jews, with their national thriftiness, should have simply used some of these old blocks which they found ready to hand, cutting off the time-worn exterior or exposing a new surface for their inscriptions, but for convenience sake retaining the original form. Whatever the explanation of these Mostar monuments, I feel constrained to give up the hypothesis that these older memorials are of Jewish workmanship.

But to whom, then, are these mysterious blocks to be referred? A better key to the solution of their origin and date is to be obtained by comparing them with some monuments of more finished execution and greater fecundity of ornament described by Sir Gardner Wilkinson,[190] as existing near Imoschi and at other places on the Dalmatian frontier. These, although not exactly answering to the ruder handiwork of the Bosnian midlands, are yet so evidently allied, that what is true of them must to a great extent be true of these before us. On the blocks described by Sir Gardner there occur devices such as huntsmen with bows and spears, knight’s holding sword and shield, and even occasionally rude armorial bearings, all which fix the date of their execution between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.

There were other peculiarities about ‘these unknown sepulchres,’ as Sir Gardner calls even the more storied Dalmatian monuments. On many appeared a crescent moon with star or stars, and on others an arm holding a sword. Now it is a curious fact that, of these two devices, one—the moon and star—is the emblem of Illyria occurring in the middle of the old Bosnian escutcheon;[191] the other—the arm of offence—is the ensign of Primorie, the Serbian coast-land. These sepulchral devices seem, therefore, to have been badges of nationality or clanship; unless, indeed, anyone prefers to suspect that the moon and star possessed a superstitious, before they acquired a heraldic, import.[192]

In the lonely gorge of the Želesnica, to the south-west of Serajevo, we found one of these lunar monuments, which I mention here as it further illustrates the connection between the Bosnian and Dalmatian tombs. It was a sarcophagus of the same kind as those at Podove, but with a crescent rudely engraved at one end. In juxtaposition with this was an upright slab, I can scarcely call it a cross, about six feet high and much mutilated.

But there is another point of resemblance even more important than the half moon, to connect the sepulchres we saw with those described by Sir Gardner.

Out of a large number of these Bosnian monuments which we examined here and elsewhere, there was not one on which we could detect the remotest semblance of a cross. Sir Gardner Wilkinson notices, with reference to the Dalmatian tombs, that ‘it is singular that the cross should occur so rarely,’ and supposes that those few monuments on which he found it belong to a later date, when, owing to the Turkish conquests, there was more reason to introduce the distinguishing emblem of Christianity. For my part I cannot think this account satisfactory; but it seems to me that an explanation lies at hand which will make the absence of the cross on these monuments at once intelligible, and may serve as a clue towards unravelling the mystery of their origin.

The Bogomiles—that strange Manichæan sect whose history has already been touched on, and who appear to have formed the majority of the Bosnian population during the very centuries in which these monuments were erected—shrank with horror from representations of the cross. ‘They abhor the cross as the instrument of Christ’s death,’ says Euthymius,[193] who, from having been commissioned by the Emperor to extract the full tenets of the sect out of its ‘heresiarch’ Basil, is peculiarly qualified to speak on the matter. When pressed by Euthymius as to the reason why the Bogomiles, when vexed with devils, ran to the cross and cried out to it, he made answer that the evil spirits within them loved the cross, for it was their own handiwork. It appeased them, therefore, or enticed them forth. Is not, then, the absence of the cross on these monuments, coupled with the fact of its presence on all undoubtedly orthodox sepulchres throughout these regions, and some of these of considerable antiquity, strong presumptive evidence that they are the work of those old Bosnian puritans?

This reasoning will perhaps appear the more significant when it is added that the modern Bosniacs refer these hoary sepulchres to the Bogomiles.

Thus the voice of tradition, the remarkable conformity of these tombs with a salient peculiarity of the Bogomilian religion, the approximate date of their erection—all point to the same conclusion. Add to these the locality of so many of these ancient graveyards. During the course of our journey through Bosnia we came upon many spots where these interesting monuments existed. They were generally away from towns—in mountain gorges, by unfrequented paths—in the Wilderness, in short, where the Bogomiles took refuge from their Romish oppressors. The secluded position of these tombs recalls the words of Raphael of Volaterra, who speaks of the Manichæan brotherhoods as living in hidden valleys among the mountains of Bosnia.[194] It has already been noticed that the peculiar situation of these sectaries, perhaps too their iconoclastic tenets, made them ready to welcome Mahometan in place of Romish rulers, and favoured that process of renegation which has given us a Sclavonic race of believers in the Prophet. May not this account for the preservation of so many of these monuments, when nearly every other præ-Turkish memorial of Bosnia has been swept away? Is it not conceivable that these renegade Manichees may still have looked with peculiar tenderness on the tombs of their fathers, and have averted the hand of the destroyer? Alas! neither heretic nor infidel has a vates sacer to enlighten us on these sepulchral mysteries; but we at least found it pleasing to believe that the rudely hewn blocks, that we came upon amid primeval forest or solitary mountain glen, were, as the Bosniacs assert, ‘the tombs of the Bogomiles’—the sole material memorials of those staunch upholders of Puritan faith in the days of grosser superstition, whose sweet spiritual influences every reformed church in the world feels still, though it may not acknowledge!

We now crossed the river Bila, into which the Jasenica had debouched, and, ascending the hills to the south-west, presently came in sight of the lately erected Franciscan monastery of Gučiagora—a large white barrack-like pile with a bulbous church tower, situate at the hollow of the hill, at an altitude of 2,300 feet above the sea, according to our reckoning. On a hillock just outside was a curious Christian monument, of evidently considerable antiquity. On one side was a foliated cross of some merit; on the other a Latin cross, showing that it was the work of Roman Catholics, as indeed one would expect from the denomination of the present inhabitants of this neighbourhood. But it belonged to a period when the Illyrian church did not disdain to make use of the national Serbian alphabet, for it presented an inscription, the Cyrillian characters of which the present monks of Gučiagora were unable to decipher.

Making our way through the entrance arch of the monastery, much as if we were entering an Oxford College, we found ourselves in a quadrangle with cloisters below. There a monk came up to us, and bidding us follow him upstairs, conducted us to the guest-chamber, where others of the fraternity soon made their appearance, and received us with right monkish hospitality. They were not slow in perceiving, from our hungry plight, that we stood in need of something more substantial than ghostly comfort; and while some hurried off to their manciple with orders to provide us speedily with a solid refection, others revived our drooping spirits for the moment with native Bosnian wine—fresh from the goat—happily succeeded by Turkish coffee.

The monks were Minorites, of that order of St. Francis of Assisi whose services in combating Bosnian heresy of old have been already recorded.[195] They were fourteen, all told; and certainly, so far as room was concerned, they had power to add to their numbers, for their church forms only one side of their quadrangle, the other three being intended for occupation; and as there are three storeys, and each side has thirty-nine windows looking into the quadrangle, it may be gathered that the monks are not pinched for room.

The church itself, which completed the quadrangle in most appropriately collegiate fashion, was a painful jumble of paint and stucco with wooden pillars, and a few saintly gimcracks. For musical performances it possessed a harmonium, and, like that at Comušina, it was completely devoid of pews.

The monks were unfeignedly astonished at our appearance, and would hardly believe that we had arrived on foot and without escort. They said that to travel in Bosnia at present without Turkish guards was sheer madness; that the state of the country was becoming more critical every moment; and that the insurrection in the Herzegovina had roused Mahometan fanaticism to such a pitch that all the Christians of the neighbourhood were seriously dreading a massacre. The monks themselves certainly seemed to share in the prevailing panic; for the day before, when the Latins of the district were assembled at the monastery to celebrate the feast of the Assumption, the brothers had sent off to the Mutasarìf, the Turkish governor of Travnik, for protection. The Mutasarìf, recognising, apparently, the legitimacy of their fears, had sent them a guard of soldiers, and the Christian congregation had performed their devotions under the tutelage of Turkish bayonets.

It may at first sight seem strange that people in fear of Turkish violence should have had recourse to Turkish protection, and perhaps stranger still that such protection should have been accorded them. The explanation, in fact, lies at the root of much that is least intelligible to the outsider in the present state of Bosnia.

It has been the policy of the Mahometan conqueror to favour the Roman Church in the province, as a ready counterpoise to the orthodox Serbians, who in numbers far outweigh the Mussulmans,[196] and who, in contradistinction to the Latins, are imbued with national aspirations. On the other hand, the Roman ecclesiastics as a rule entertain a far more wholesome abhorrence of their fellow-Christians than of the infidel, and so the alliance is compacted by mutual benefits. The Turks, from the year 1463, when Sultan Mahomet granted the Franciscan monks their great Charter of Liberties, the ‘Atname,’[197] have been politicly liberal to them, exempting their monasteries and lands from taxation, and freeing the brothers from the capitation tax which weighs on the rayah. In return, the monks have exerted their influence in rendering the Latins submissive to their rulers, and have backed up the Mahometans in their oppression of the Serbs, as the members of the Greek Church are significantly called. When the Latins have been ill used, it has been principally owing to the weakness of the Osmanlì element and the bigotry of the Sclavonic renegades of Bosnia, of whose almost independent rule mention has already been made. When, in 1850, Omer Pashà dealt the death-blow to Mahometan feudalism here, and practically recovered Bosnia for the Sultan, he received support from many of the Latins. At the present moment the danger which the monks were in such dread of, was not from the Turkish authorities, but from the Sclavonic Mussulmans, the representatives of the old provincial Janissarism, the descendants of the Capetans and Begs, who eye the myrmidons of the Stamboul Government with almost as much hostility as they do the rayah, and, true to their conservative bigotry, draw far less subtle distinctions between one Giaour and another.

We were naturally inclined to suppose the fears of the monks exaggerated, and could not help thinking that if their situation were as desperate as they would fain make it out, it would have been better if, instead of praying, they had taken arms and instructed their flock how to defy the Moslem in their mountain fastnesses. As for their lamentations, they smacked of Gildas in their querulousness! The brothers were especially apprehensive of a bloody anti-Christian outbreak in Serajevo, the capital of Bosnia, where they doubted whether the Pashà—himself, in their opinion, a tolerant man enough—could restrain the fanaticism of the Mussulman population, which exceeds that of all other Bosnian Mahometans, as much as the bigotry of Bosnian Mahometans in general exceeds that of all the other followers of the Prophet in Turkey-in-Europe. Of the revolt in the Herzegovina the monks knew but little, except that Mostar had not fallen.

These alarmist outpourings were relieved by a hospitable diversion. The brothers conducted us to the refectory—a spacious chamber, the size of an average college hall—where we met with most sumptuous entertainment—as we thought it at the time—consisting of some lumps of mutton, good brown bread, eggs poached in cheesy milk, vermicelli, and a sweet melon—a sign that we were advancing south.

Seated once more in the guest-room, we exchanged ideas with the monks on a variety of interesting topics, and were much struck with the amount of culture which many of them possessed. They comprised among them a respectable acquaintance with modern languages—one knowing German, another French, another Italian, and most possessed of at least a smattering of Latin—so that we were able to hold a most polyglot conversation. The German-speaking monks told us that they had received their education at the monastery of Diakovar, in Slavonia. This was founded in 1857 by the well-known Bishop Strossmayer, and endowed by the present Emperor of Austria. It was intended as a theological seminary for the brothers of the Bosnian order of Minorites, to whom it was handed over. There is a certain fitness about its locality, as after the Turkish conquest of Bosnia it was at Diakovar that her titular bishops fixed their residence; and it was from there that, for a while, they exercised a nominal control over their diocese, under Cæsarean influence. The sheep among wolves, however, very naturally turned away from absentee shepherds, and sought spiritual, guidance from the Minorites, who lived in their midst and shared their vicissitudes. The establishment of this seminary is therefore a very good move if it was sought to revive the Imperial influence, for the Franciscan organisation in Bosnia, on which the whole Latin population depend for their ghostly needs,[198] is thus placed to a great extent under the tutorship of Austria; and if the monks gain in culture, his Apostolic Majesty gains in goodwill. Add to this that the Roman Church in Bosnia is in one way or another indebted to the Imperial Government for pecuniary contributions, and that the establishment of the Austrian Consulate-General at Serajevo in 1850 has made it possible for Austria to play the part of patroness[199] of the Catholics in Bosnia, and to carry into effect in the most emphatic way in this part of the Sultan’s dominions the right of protecting the Roman Catholic Church in Turkey, which she secured by the Peace of Carlovitz. No one, after this, will be surprised to learn that the Roman Catholic influence in Bosnia is a lever in the hands of Austria; and, to quote the words of an attaché of the Austrian Consulate-General in Serajevo, ‘The Emperor of Austria is, in the eyes of Bosnian Roman Catholics, the Emperor and supreme prince of the Catholic Church, just as in the eyes of the Oriental Greek population the Russian Emperor is the head of the Greek Church.’[200]

So we were not long in discovering the Austrian leanings of the monks while discussing the possible eventualities of Bosnia. They were extremely interested in the attitude of England—complained bitterly of the way in which we had supported the Turk against the rayah, but at the same time professed themselves extremely hostile to Russia. But they betrayed a lively repugnance to the Great Serbian idea in any shape, seeing in Serbian unity the triumph of their Greek rivals, who form the large majority of the population of Bosnia, and who would at once become the ruling caste,[201] if Bosnia were united to Free Serbia, Montenegro, and the other fragments of the old Serbian Empire. As far as we could gather their aspirations, they were willing to see the old kingship of Bosnia restored under the suzerainty of Catholic Austria, thinking that the Latins would thus recover their old dominant position in the country, and the Catholic rulers obtain the same support of Austrian cannon as their forefathers had of Hungarian battleaxes. Failing the erection of a Roman Catholic principality under the wing of the double-eagle, they were willing to see the whole country occupied by Austria, and actually annexed. But rather than see Bosnia in any form a Serbian state, they would accept the continuance of Turkish rule.

These sentiments must not however be looked on as universal among the Roman Catholics of Bosnia. In many parts they are yielding to a generous sympathy with Greek fellow-Christians. Notably in Herzegovina, Roman priests have appeared among the leaders of the insurrection; and Bishop Strossmayer, whose influence among the Roman Catholics is very great, is himself a warm champion of union with free Serbia.[202]