We too, as a preparation for our weary pilgrimage across the Karst deserts of the lower Narenta to the Dalmatian frontier, took with us a generous basket of the fruits of Mostar.

The day was terribly hot, and a suffocating miasmatic vapour[312] (such as we had not met with since we left the valley of the Save) brooded over the city, which, according to our Consul, possesses a climate decidedly hotter than that of Constantinople, so that we were naturally desirous of lightening our day’s journey to the frontier by obtaining horses. These, however, it was extremely hard to obtain; but the Pashà, to whom we mentioned our difficulty, generously placed a couple of horses at our disposal, and told us that if we would start this afternoon we should have the advantage of a guard that was to accompany a caravan of Herzegovinians to Metcović, our Dalmatian destination. We being anxious to push on, as we were really afraid of this climate, took advantage of the proposal, and about five in the afternoon started with our cavalcade on the most terrible journey I ever remember.

Our caravan, consisting of sixty horses and men, slowly mustered together, and having defiled out of Mostar over the steep Narenta bridge, we jogged for hours along tedious dusty plains, leaving on our left the ruins of the feudal stronghold of Blagaj, once the treasury, as its name implies, and castle of the Duke of St. Sava. About sunset we heard many muttered prayers, and an ‘Ave Maria’ continually repeated by a rayah who was riding near; then it grew dark, so that my brother and myself, who both of us suffer from night-blindness, could not see an inch; but still the whole caravan jogged on, and though the stars, shining with a reddish, lurid light, looked more like ‘lamps of heaven’ than the pale stars of old acquaintance, they did not aid our purblind vision in the least, and we felt particularly helpless when we perceived by the noise of water running a good way immediately below us that we were riding along the brink of a precipitous steep. However, our beasts followed their leaders, till suddenly there was an universal stampede—my horse rushed down a steep bank, nearly throwing me off, and then plunged into a stream to drink, and after some more stumbling and climbing we found ourselves in a struggling crowd of men and horses, and were told to dismount. Then our steeds disappeared, and we found ourselves together wedged into a trampling throng in what to us was pitch darkness. Happily, a Zaptieh, who had been ordered by the Pashà to attend on us, rescued us from this plight, and we discovered that we had arrived at a Han called Buna, where we obtained coffee and a room to ourselves over a stable, and rested three hours.

This Han was erected here by our old friend Ali Pashà, who was something more than an impaler of rayahs, and did many things to improve the means of communication and the material well-being of his Pashalik. To him Herzegovina owes the introduction of rice culture, and also of silk-worms; and it was here, at Buna, that he planted, with this object, the first mulberry-trees in the country. The Vizier built a favourite summer residence here, of which and its grounds the Mostar historian gives a curious description. The little river Buna, which, issuing from a cavern in the rock below the castle of Blagai, here pours into the Narenta, is, like it, according to our monk, ‘rich in innumerable fish,’ while the Pashà’s grounds abounded in ‘all the fruits of the South.’ ‘Ali Pashà laid down pipes in which he conducted water from the Buna, and he brought hither a dragon’s head of lead which poured forth the water from its throat into a stone basin, wherein rare fishes played. Here the Satrap was wont to tarry for his pleasure; and when his bloodthirsty servants brought him the heads of Christian Serbs, he bade them to be stuck on the poles of a palisade that stood opposite, and in gazing on them had his chiefest delight.’

Aug. 30th.—During our midnight halt at Buna we were not in a position to examine the Vizier’s villa, nor had we long given us even for repose, for at 2.30 we were roused once more by our Zaptieh, and having been guided to our horses in the dark, were again jogging on our way, and ascending a range of high limestone hills by a rough winding road, without the slightest aid from vision. As morning gradually revealed to us our surroundings, we found that we were crossing a rock-strewn table-land almost bereft of trees, except a few olives, and some fine old oaks shading an ancient solitary graveyard The motion was most fatiguing, as our horses were anything but sure-footed; and the saddle was simply excruciating. The saddle of these countries is simply formed of two hurdle-like frames of wood joined together in the middle at an angle of over fifty degrees, and padded underneath, to protect the horse. We had to sit astride on the sharp upper keel, and had nothing but our sleeping-gear to mitigate its hardness. Add to this the perpetual jolting and stumbling, and the fact that the stirrups were simply loops of cord, which twisted our toes under our horses’ bellies, and our discomfort may be imagined. The dust kicked up by our caravan was terrible, so that to avoid it we wished to ride in front; but our horses, who knew their place in the ranks, could not be induced to stir from it till we dismounted and literally dragged them in front. The pace was provokingly slow, and the Herzegovinian drivers were perpetually reminding their beasts of the duty of sloth by shouts of Polacko! polacko![313] My beast didn’t need any reminder of this kind, and nothing on earth would induce him to put on a spurt so as to distance our dusty train, till by some happy inspiration I whistled to him ‘Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green.’ Then, at last, the intelligent animal pricked up its ears and broke into a lively trot!

For many hours we had been riding through a wilderness, but as we approached the southern edge of our plateau a prospect of desolation broke upon us such as those who have not seen it can scarcely imagine. In every direction rose low mountains, mere heaps of disintegrated limestone rock, bare of vegetation as a shingly sea-beach—a cruel southern Karst, aptly compared to a petrified glacier or a moon-landscape, the creation—as the old Bogomiles of these parts would have supposed it—of some Evil Spirit. Yet, like most things in nature, this desert prospect is not without its redeeming specialities of beauty. Where the colours of earth are so faint there is nothing to interfere with the most perfect development of atmospheric effects. Nature has, as it were, provided a white sheet for the grandest of all illuminators, and I have seen these pale rock skeletons tinged by morning and evening suns with more delicate saffron and peach-blossom than the green hills of more fertile lands are susceptible of taking. Even as seen by the light of common day, this barren panorama was well worth an artist’s study. We were among mountain-tops without the climbing; and though the languor of the colours spoke too evidently of the universal waterlessness, their delicacy was novel and not without a subtle fascination. The sky above was of a pale hazy azure; the sterile hill-sides a thin ashy grey, stained here and there with a soupçon of sand colour or faint iron brown; the plain below was the palest and most languid of greens.

About 9 in the morning we stopped at a hamlet called Tassorić, where the caravan made their next halt; but though we tried here and at other hovels on the road to obtain some food, we met with one universal response: ‘Nima chlébba! nima jaje!’—‘We have no bread! we have no eggs!’ And the only refreshment we could obtain in this terrible waste was the never-failing coffee; so that had it not been for the figs and grapes we had brought with us from Mostar, we might have fainted by the way. The Herzegovinian peasants who travelled with us had brought their food with them.

The seat on which we quaffed our mocha here was supported by two fragmentary bases of Roman columns; but in a graveyard hard by, which we had leisure to examine, were modern monuments of still greater interest. These were the gravestones of the Roman Catholic inhabitants of Tassorić, which were ornamented with incised crosses and floral devices of an elegance indeed surprising when it is remembered that these were the work of rude peasants, unable to write even the names of the departed kinsmen whom they wished to honour.

The whole appearance of this graveyard was indeed one of the most curious sights that we observed in our Bosnian-Herzegovinian experiences. Here, in one God’s acre, alike the Infidel and Christian inhabitants of the hamlet had found their last resting-place, and the crosses of the departed rayahs were only separated by a narrow, and in places almost indistinguishable pathway from the turbaned columns of the Moslem. It was a striking proof that even in this land of bigotry and persecution both sectaries can live together in peace; and it afforded a melancholy contrast to the burnt villages whose ruins we descried a few miles further on the road.

The fact is, that the animosity of the rayahs of the Herzegovina has not been directed so much against their Moslem fellow-villagers as against the Begs, the scions of the renegade feudal nobility, who, besides exacting their own dues with the rigour that I have described, often—in the Herzegovina especially, where at present they seem to have retained more of their old power than in Bosnia—farm the government taxes. The tithe-farmers here are still called by the old ominous name of Spahi. These oppress the Moslem peasant almost as grievously as the rayah, and there have been instances during the present outbreak in which the Moslems of the country villages have made common cause with the rayah. It was primarily against the Begs that the Roman Catholic population of this part of the Narenta valley[314] took up arms last June.

A little further on we passed the Roman Catholic village of Draševo, whose inhabitants, with those of another village called Rasno, were the first to take up arms in this part of the Herzegovina. These assembled with arms in their hands at a bridge just beyond, where the high road crosses the little river Kruppa, and which, though the only means of transit for any stores and cannon that the Turks may land at their port of Klek on the other side of the hills, we found in a condition so dilapidated that we had to dismount from our horses and lead them carefully over the broken woodwork—the whole fabric being so cranky that it would only bear one man and beast at a time. At this bridge the assembled rayahs kept watch and ward, allowing travellers, and even Zaptiehs, to pass (for it was no part of the design of the insurgents at first to war against the Sultan), but declaring that they were keeping watch against the Begs alone.

But it was at a mill called Struge, which we left to the right on the further bank of the Narenta, that the first actual outbreak of hostilities took place. The miller here was a Mussulman, who, offended at the spirited attitude taken up by the neighbouring rayah villages, refused to grind the corn which the Christians, who depended on his grindstone for this part of their breadmaking, brought him for that purpose. Thereupon the Christians of the neighbouring village of Gorica resolved to take vengeance on the unbelieving miller. The miller, on his part, was aided by a division of Zaptiehs; and here the first shots were fired. The Turks were victorious, and the Zaptiehs signalized their victory by entering Gorica the following night, and burning, after first sacking, the houses of the rayahs, who had themselves escaped. They then defiled the church, and as a further insult dug up some dead bodies and left the naked corpses of a man and a child exposed in the churchyard. The insurgents of the Narenta valley and the country to the right of it were thus unfortunate from the beginning, so that when the Turks, by the murder of the prior of the Franciscan monastery at Livno, had terrified the Roman Catholic hierarchy of this part into submission, the Catholic Bishop Kraljević found no difficulty in persuading the Latin peasantry to follow the example of their spiritual governors.

A little way beyond the bridge where the rayahs first set their armed watch against the Begs, we came to the ruins of the village of Doliane, burnt, as we heard, by the Turks at a very early period of the insurrection. It was a miserable sight, the blackened shells of these little stone hovels—piteous at any time—clinging to the bare hill-side. The Turks were utilizing the ruins to build a guard-house, and were pulling down for that purpose the few homestead walls which had still been left standing. Yet this is but a single sample of the devastation which extends along the whole Dalmatian and Montenegrine borders of Herzegovina, over an area embracing many hundreds of square miles.

A mile more of jolting brought us to the Dalmatian frontier, and at Metcović we found ourselves once more within the limits of Christendom with whole skins, but quite worn out after (deducting rests) fifteen hours of excruciation on Bosnian saddles. Of this future emporium of Narentan trade there is little to record, except the filth of the inhabitants. The cleanliness of the Turks and Herzegovinians contrasts most strongly with the South-Italian squalor of the citizens of Metcović, which culminated in the family circle of the Bezirkshauptmann—an interview with whom was forced on us for the examination of passports. The Bezirkshauptmann’s table-cloth was so filthy that there was not a spot of anything approaching whiteness on its whole superficies!

Aug. 31st.—Next morning, after considerable bargaining, we engaged a flat beetle-like craft to convey ourselves and our fortunes to Stagno, viâ the left arm of the Narenta. The landscape now afforded most startling contrasts of fertility and barrenness. The heights that overhung the Narenta, or stretched away to environ its broad alluvial plains, were mere rock heaps, of that lunar desolation already described; so bare that the mountain goat can scarce glean a pittance on their bony terraces. But the broad delta below, formed by the double-armed Narenta, is the richest land in all Dalmatia; the maize by the river-side attains a gigantic stature; on other places the soil is covered by a luxuriant network of vines, which, without any training or apparent cultivation, yield grapes as fine as those of Mostar; and there are mulberry-trees at Fort Opus fifteen feet in circumference. But how little of this marvellous rich soil is even culturable now-a-days! To the right of us, what was once a blooming champaign, covered with tilled fields, and dowering a city wealthy and refined, is now a stretch of fever-breeding marshes which it would cost millions to drain. The wretched inhabitants of the few villages that now remain, are, during the summer months, never free from intermittent fever, and the stranger who values his life must not tarry at this season even to explore the interesting relics of antiquity that we are now passing on our right.

Among the swamps that lie two or three miles to the north of Metcović are still to be seen the foundations of many of the houses of the Illyrian Narbonne,[315] further remains of which, including many inscriptions, are scattered on the hill above, which takes its name from the modern village of Viddo. Here stood the old Narbona, or as it was called in the later days of Rome, Narona; a city so ancient that it was already of renown five centuries before our era, and which lost none of its eminence when, in B.C. 168, Lucius Annius added it to the possessions of Rome. At Narbona, now known as Narona, the Romans planted a colony, and among the many inscriptions that have been discovered, we find ample witness to its municipal liberties; while from others we learn that temples of Jove, Diana of the woods, and Father Liber, once graced this spot. Another inscription on the tomb of a Naronan lapidary, to which I shall have occasion to refer, may, perhaps, bear witness to an art which attained considerable perfection in the cities of Roman Illyria, and of which many traces, in the shape of beautifully engraved gems, are still discovered on this site.

Yet it was not under the Romans that Narona and the rich alluvial plains of the Narenta, amidst which our boat is meandering, attained that importance which makes the name of the Narentines familiar to the student of European history.

In the year 639 A.D. Narona, which till then had remained a flourishing Roman city, was reduced to ashes by a mingled horde of Avars and Sclaves, and a few years later the Serbian Sclaves called in by the Emperor Heraclius took possession of the vacant sites of the lower Narenta. Out of the ruins of the Roman Narona they built a new town, and here, on the site of classic temples, reared a fane to a Sclavonic god, whose name, Viddo,[316] is still perpetuated in that of the modern village. The site of this Illyrian Narbonne thus became a stronghold of heathendom in these parts, just as with the Sclavonians of the Baltic shores Paganism found its last defenders among those staunch Rügen islanders who guarded the precincts of the sacred city of Arkona. It was not till the year 873 that Nicetas, the Admiral of the Byzantine Emperor Basil, prevailed on the Narentines to accept baptism; the temple of their country’s god underwent a strange conversion, and Viddo lived again in a Christian guise as St. Vitus![317]

In the next century the country of the Narentines is still known as Pagania, the land of the Pagans, by which name Constantine Porphyrogenitus mentions it in his account of the Serbians; and it was during the ninth and tenth centuries that these barbarous Sclaves, yet untamed by a civilized religion, issued forth from the swamps and inlets of the Narenta, to ravage the coasts of the Adriatic, and to rival their heathen counterparts and contemporaries, the Sea-kings of the North. As early as 827 their ‘Archons,’ as the Byzantine Emperor calls the Starosts of their Republic, refused to pay the customary tribute to Eastern Rome; and soon after this date we find them in possession of Curzola, Lagosta, Meleda, Lesina, Brazza, and other islands of the Adriatic. But it is their rivalry with Venice which exalts the history of the Narentines into world importance. The rising city of the lagoons saw her commerce cut off by these hardy corsairs, and was at last actually forced to pay them an ignominious tribute. It was not till 997 that the Doge Pietro Orseolo II. succeeded in throwing off the yoke and attacking the pirates in their Narentan fastnesses. After three centuries of piratic domination, the Narentines saw all their island empire taken from them, and themselves not only forced to disgorge their plunder, but to swear allegiance to their rival. The power of the Pirate State was broken for ever; but the fate of Venice had trembled in the balance, and for a moment the whole current of European civilization seemed destined to be perverted from its channel by the inhabitants of the now obscure valley through which we are passing. It were perhaps as idle to speculate what might have been the history of Europe, had the Queen of the Adriatic been smothered in her cradle, as to discuss the fates of Lerna or Nemea, had infant Heracles perished in the coils of the serpent which he strangled; but the most casual student of Venetian annals must perceive that the final triumph of Venice over the Narentines is the great climacteric in the history of her rise.

We thought we detected something of the old piratic genius of the race in the way in which our boatmen plundered the maize and vine fields as we passed; but there was nothing of Pagan savagery in their demeanour and conversation, which on the contrary formed a marked contrast to the rudeness and asperity of the ordinary Bosniac or Herzegovinian. They spoke indeed a dialect closely akin to the Illyrian of the interior, but they spoke it with energy, vivacity, elegance; with a softness of cadence so thoroughly Italian, that when, as all of them did at times, they changed to that language to address the signori, we hardly detected the change. Their very form is lither, suppler; of lesser mould, but a striking contrast to the overgrown ungraceful Bosniac. The eyebrows of these Narentines are not so arched, the hair is darker; they seemed to be many of them Sclavonized Italians, descendants perhaps of the Roman colonists of Narbona. One of our boatmen was a very interesting type of man. He spoke Dalmatian like the rest, but his face—which, like that of many other Dalmatian faces that I recall, beamed with all the openness of a sea-faring people—was typically Scotch; and, oddly enough, he wore what looked like a Scotch cap, minus the tails. His hair was of a lighter and more reddish hue than that of the others. One almost fancied that we had here before us a waif of that early Celtic population of Illyria already invoked as nomenclators of the Illyrian Narbonne whose ruins we are passing to our right.

Meanwhile we have been making very slow progress, since a fierce scirocco has set dead in the teeth of our small craft; and as we arrive at Fort Opus, an old Venetian station at the apex of the Narentan delta, our boatmen inform us that our two-master is too lubberly for them to hope to take us to Stagno in it while the scirocco continues to blow, in which case the voyage might take two or three days. They professed their willingness to find a smaller vessel which should be able to cope with the elements, and to resign half the wages, for which we had agreed upon, to the new boatmen. ‘You see, Sirs, it is not for want of will—but we cannot struggle against God!’

At Fort Opus, accordingly, we shifted into another smaller craft, pointed at both stern and stem, and beetle-like as the other, and were soon on our way again along a part of the Narenta’s course which might well be the source of weirdest myth and legend. Just beyond Fort Opus, the hills on the left—bonier skeletons, if possible, than before—draw nearer to the river, till they frown over its depths. It is at this point that ever and anon mysterious boomings and bellowings are heard to proceed as from the inmost recesses of the mountain. It is, say those who have heard it, as the bellowing of a bull, sometimes here, sometimes there, and sometimes everywhere at once. At other times it seems to issue from the darkest pools of the Narenta itself. I cannot say that we ourselves heard the ‘hideous hum,’ but these noises cannot be set down as the creatures of superstitious imagination; for a competent observer, Signor Lanza, who was physician in this district, and to whom is due a scientific account of this part of the Narenta valley, has himself borne ample witness of the existence of this phenomenon; nor does it stand alone, for there are equally authentic accounts of similar subterranean murmurs and explosions having been heard in Meleda and other islands of the Dalmatian Littorale. The explanation given by some is that the detonations are due to the pressure of the tide on the air pent up in the subterranean caverns which honeycomb the limestone Karst-formation of these Illyrian coastlands; but Dr. Lanza—who notices that the phenomenon generally takes place either at sunrise or sundown—confesses that ‘a veil of mystery hangs over the whole.’ Meanwhile, nothing but the portent is certain; and fearful as I am of giving publicity to ill-omened words, I cannot refrain from breathing a suspicion that this unhallowed bellowing may proceed from some hideous Minotaur, caverned in his labyrinthine den.

This neighbourhood is also much subject to earthquakes, which generally occur during the winter months; and as our boat toiled heavily past a succession of rocky headlands, we ourselves experienced a natural phenomenon scarcely less awful than these subterranean bellowings and convulsions. The wind rose higher and higher, whistling among the limestone ‘ruins of the older world’ that frowned above us. Our two boatmen knit their brows and muttered ‘la Fortuna!’ Dame Fortune, the old goddess of the way by sea and land, still retains some of her old attributes of wheel and rudder among these Romanized Dalmatian Sclaves; her name[318] is still used on these coastlands as equivalent to a tempest; and even in the interior of Bosnia the Sclaves have so far adopted the idea, that a snow-storm—the kind of storm dreaded most in the Bosnian mountains—is known to the peasants as ‘Fortunja.’

At last, on steering between the two rocky hills, whose barren masses rise on either side at the mouth of this arm of the Narenta like twin pillars of Hercules, a tremendous scene burst upon us. Just opposite to where the river widened into the sea, towered before us—its limestone crags and boulders up-piled and jumbled in cataclysmic confusion—a small desolate island, a fit abode for nothing unless it were departed spirits of the evil. The rays of a pale ominous sunset fell upon these cadaverous rocks and flooded them with spectral light. On either side of the island the sea shone with abnormal emerald lustre; but what made the brilliance of the foreground so unearthly, was the unutterable darkness of all behind. The rocky island rose like a phantom against a sky as black as night.

The question for us was whether there would be time to round the nose of rock to the left of the Narenta mouth, and cross a narrow arm of green sea to a promontory where we might obtain shelter, before the impending hurricane came down on us.

The sailors thought it possible, and with set teeth laboured at the oars as for grim life. But the black pall of clouds that darkened the western hemisphere drew nearer and nearer; the white sea-mews swept wildly and more wildly hither and thither against the face of coming night, shrieking weirdly like the Banshees of coming doom. The wind and thunder roared louder in our ears, and a thin snowy line of surf stretching along the emerald horizon, swept like a charge of cavalry across the intervening fields of sea—but now, so treacherously smooth!—and dashed down upon our little craft.

The night was already upon us; the brilliant beams of sunset were suddenly transformed, first into darkness, and then into the lurid twilight of an eclipse which lit up our men’s faces with a pale ashy grey, ghastly to look upon. These hardy descendants of corsairs seemed really cowed, and shouted to us ‘Pray to God, signori! Pray to God! La Fortuna è rotta!’

The storm had burst with a vengeance. The wind rose to a hurricane. The surf and tempest struck our boat and beat her head round. It was in vain that the men struggled at the oars; we were borne back, and swept along helpless as a log in a torrent. We were driven towards the mouth of the Narenta which we had left, and I thought every moment we should have been dashed against the rocks; but Dame Fortune was merciful to us, and notwithstanding that the men lost all command of the vessel, we rounded the rocky headland, and found ourselves in comparatively sheltered waters where oars were again available, so that we were presently anchored near another small Narentan vessel in smoother waters—though even the river was one sheet of foam. It now began to rain in torrents beyond all our experience; so we covered ourselves with our macintoshes, and lay down in the bottom of our boat, resolved not to emerge till the hurricane should have abated somewhat of its fury. But hardly were we settled, when a tremendous clap of thunder rent the air, followed by a series of sharp blows which made us start to our feet, when we found that hailstones varying in size from a bullet to a walnut, and in shape like Tangerine oranges,[319] were rattling about our heads. With our helmet hats on, and under cover of our macintoshes, we avoided being actually bruised, but the thunder and lightning that accompanied the hail were still more terrific. The forked lightning literally played around our craft, and it seemed that it must be struck; the thunder was such as we had neither of us heard the like of before. For a quarter of an hour we endured the full brunt of this celestial cannonade, and then the storm passed away as suddenly as it had come, and rolled on among the more inland ranges of the Dinaric Alps, which the lightning kept throwing into vivid and unexpected reliefs behind us; while in front and overhead, sky and rocks and sea were illumined with the renewed splendour of sunset, and the surface of the troubled Narenta calmed down into its wonted serenity.

But it was a storm such as one does not meet with twice in a life-time; it was a fit initiation into this iron-bound coastland, with its earthquakes and subterranean thunders—the cavernous home of winds and tempests—the last refuge of piratic races.

We now renewed our voyage, and crossing a narrow arm of sea, landed in a sheltered cove, where we took refuge in a spacious stone house, the abode of a Dalmatian Family-community, hoping for the scirocco to subside, in order to be able to pursue our course up the Stagno. We were shown into the common eating and cooking room, a spacious chamber on the ground-floor, where the family gathered round us; and the men, when they heard that we were English, at once claimed us as brothers, and entered into a most friendly conversation. ‘We like the English,’ said one; ‘we know your greatness on the sea, and we too are a nation of seamen; England and Dalmatia!—there are no sailors but in your country and ours!’ Another of the men had been to London and Plymouth, and he and the others aired a string of English phrases with a decidedly nautical flavour, amongst which we detected ‘Or’ right,’ ‘cup o’ tea,’ ‘grog,’ ‘haul up,’ ‘ease her;’ and other expressions proving their entente cordiale with ‘Jack.’ About nine in the evening the woman-kind, the children, and some of the men, betook themselves to sleeping chambers above, and we were shown a bed in the spacious hall below, on whose floor slept our seamen and some of the inmates. But the stuffiness was so suffocating within, that I preferred the gnats and night air without; and finding a convenient rock on which to pillow my head, imitated the example of Jacob.

About midnight the adverse wind fell, and I being, by now, sufficiently disillusioned of patriarchal repose, hastened to rouse L— and our men, and we were again on our way before 1 A.M., the wind shifting enough to enable us every now and then to use our sail. We steered along the Canale di Stagno piccolo, passing in the dark the inlet in which the Turkish harbour of Klek is situate. About 8 A.M. we landed at Luka, on the peninsula of Sabbioncello, and making our way on foot across the isthmus, entered the old town of Stagno by a gateway through its high machicolated Venetian walls. It was a small friendly place with clean narrow streets, and many old stone palaces of the citizen nobility with stone escutcheons over their doors, quaint rope mouldings and carved corbels under the windows, some of which were of Venetian-Gothic style. Other houses, whose owners probably could lay no claim to coats of arms, displayed over their doorways medallions on which I.H.S. was engraved in a variety of ornamental forms. In the Piazza just inside the gate by which we entered lay an old font with many noble shields upon it, and in the city wall opposite was a Renaissance fountain with a sixteenth-century date upon it. Stagno was once a port of the Bosnian kings, till sold by one of them to Ragusa at the end of the fourteenth century.

The peasants in the Piazza were highly picturesque; the men, like the inhabitants of the lower Narenta, strongly resembling the Turks in their attire, except for a yellow sash round their waist, a Dalmatian peaked fez on their head, and an ear-ring—a plain golden circle—in one ear. The women, with their kerchiefs crossed about their bosom, showed more Sclavonic characteristics in their dress, but their straw hats with long streamers gave them a certain Swiss air.

While sketching the little group above, in the Piazza, I was somewhat surprised to hear the inspiriting tune of ‘Men of Harlech’ proceeding from a neighbouring house; but the mystery was cleared up by our shortly receiving a message to the effect that ‘the daughter of the Judge of Stagno’ wished to secure an interview with the Englishmen; and then it was that we found that this amiable young lady, having lived some years in Wales, and looking back with a tender regret to her sojourn in our island, had resorted to the innocent device of playing the national melodies of the Principality in order to attract our attention.... But alas! the boat is starting for Ragusa—the parting has taken place,—we have left our romantic damsel to sigh once more for English society, and stagnate at Stagno.

Our boat—a Trabaccolo, I believe it is called—is equipped with an expansive lateen sail, and as a propitious breeze, the Maestro, has sprung up, we soon leave Stagno, its olives and oleanders and pretty flowering shrubs, its siren music and bright eyes, far in our wake, and scud along between rocky islands to our right, and the bare Karst mountains of the mainland to our left. The desolate, monotonous hills, perpetually repeating themselves, were hardly relieved by a stunted tree—it was the same scenery so well described by Ovid in his Pontic exile:

At one point, indeed, the village of Canosa, there was an oasis of green in the desert landscape; this was the gigantic group of plane trees, which are said to rank among the finest in the world. But we are nearing Ragusa, and after passing a line of jagged scoglie which start up from the deep like the teeth of a gigantic antediluvian, the sea, hitherto hardly recovered from its frenzy of yestereen, becomes tranquil once more, and we glide into the harbour of Gravosa, the port of modern Ragusa, for depth and capacity reckoned the finest in Dalmatia.