NORTHERN MONTENEGRO
We were accosted by a clean-limbed, joyous youth, who bore on his cap
the outstretched winged badge of the police. He said--
"Mister Sirdar, he tell me take you alon' o' Nickshitch."
Sure enough the next morning there he was, with three horses, which if
not the identical animals of our Chainitza trip were sisters or brothers
to them. It was a wretched day, gusty, and the rain sweeping round the
corners of the old streets. Early as was the hour, the wretched
prisoners were peering through the lattice windows of their prison,
which evidently once had been the harem of some wealthy Turk; where
beauties had once lain on voluptuous couches, wretched criminals now
crouched half-starved, racked with disease, and as we passed held out
skinny arms. All Montenegrin saddles are bound on with string, even
those of the highest in the land; indeed, one cannot imagine how the
people did before string was invented, and ours began to slip before we
were well clear of the town. Necessary adjustments were made, and on
once more.
Our guide was well armed--he carried two murderous-looking pistols, and
a long rifle slung over his back. He was in high spirits and showed us
that the proper way to ride Montenegrin horses was to drop the reins on
to the animal's neck, kick it in the stomach with both feet, elevating
your arms and uttering the most unearthly yells. Thus terrified, the
unfortunate wreck would canter a few yards, and our cicerone would turn
in his saddle and grin back at us, who were humanely contented with the
solemn jog-trot of our aged steeds along the well-worn horse-track--for
there was no road.
We crawled along, wretched in the downpour, the scenery completely
hidden by the clouds; but towards midday, as we climbed ever higher and
higher, we plunged into pine forests where the rain began to thin to
mist, veiling the trees with layers of drifting fog. Out of the forests
we came--the rain having ceased--into a strange-looking landscape, whose
japanesiness is equalled possibly only by Japan itself. There were the
queer rounded hills, the gnarled and twisted little pines and dim
fir-clad slopes cutting the sky with sharp grey silhouettes.
Here we stopped to eat. We opened a tin of meat and made rough
sandwiches with the coarse brown or black bread which is the staple food
of Serbian nations. When we were satisfied there was meat left in the
tin. Two wretched, ragged children came on the road singing some
half-Eastern chant, and we hailed them. They refused the food with
dignity, and marched on offended.
We came to the Grand Canyon of Colorado--we beg its pardon--of
Montenegro, The Tara. Great cliffs towered high on either side, great
grey, rugged cliffs topped with pine and scrub oak. Down, down, down to
the river, an hour, and we crossed the bridge out of Novi Bazar into
Montenegro--thirty years free from the Turk. We halted at a little
coffee stall made of boughs. Jan wanted to get a photo, but the women
were so shy that Jo had to push them out into the open.
On the way up the other cliff our guide became communicative. He had
been in America, in the mining camps, and spoke fair American.
"In ole days, dese was de borders," he said; "'ere de Serb, 'n dere de
Turk. Natchurally dey 'ate each oder. Dey waz two fellers 'ad fair cold
feet, one 'ere, one over dere, Turk 'n our chapy. Every day dey come
down to de ribber 'n dey plug't de odder chap wid dere ole pistols what
filled at de nose. But dey neber hit nuttin. One day de Serb 'e got mad
and avade in de ribber, but 'e did'n 'it de Turk. Nex' day dey hot'
avade in 'arf way across. Dey miss again. De tird day dey avades in rite
ter de middle, 'n each shoots up de odder dead. Yessir, 'n dere bodies
float down ter 'ere."
He looked up and pointed.
"Dey was a gooman up dere," he said.
"A gooman?"
"Yes, a man wat 'ad a gooman all to 'isself."
"!!!!"
"Dey was an ole town all made o' stones," our guide explained, "where
dis man made 'is gooman. You know wat a gooman is?--kill all de fellers
what pass 'n do wat you likes."
We understood suddenly that "Government" was indicated.
"Dat's wat I say," he answered, "gooman--'e was killed by a Montenegrin
chap wat throwed 'im orf de cliffs, 'n a Turk gets all 'is land. Dat's
'ow dey was done dose days. Dere ain't much 'o de ole town lef now."
"We 'ad to chase de Turk outer 'ere," he went on; "lots 'o fighting, but
we 'ad luck. You see, dey 'ad two lines, 'an we got de first line before
'e was ready, 'n wiped 'im out, so de secon' line did'n know if it was
'im retreatin' or us advancin', and we was into 'em before dey 'ad made
up dere minds. Yessir."
The ascent was terribly laborious. Our animals were sweating, though
they were carrying nothing but the knapsacks.
"Ye see dat flat stone?" said the guide. "Dat's were de gooman feller
'ide 'is gold. Dey was tree Italians chaps 'ere 'n dey turn ober dat
stone ter roll it downill. 'N underneat was all dat feller's gold. Dat
madum larf, I tell yer."
We climbed higher and yet higher; we thought we would never reach the
crest. The sweat poured from us, and we were drenched.
On the top there were but few stones of the old castle, and we rode over
the ruins. We passed into a queer pallid country, pale grey houses, pale
yellow or pale green fields, grey sky and stones, a violently rolling
plain where our guide lost his way, and we became increasingly aware of
the discomfort of our saddles, and prayed for the journey to end.
We refound the route, and asked a peasant, "How far to Jabliak?"
"Bogami, quarter of an hour."
We cheered.
At the end of twenty minutes we asked once more.
"Bogami, quarter of an hour."
At the end of twenty minutes more we asked again, our spirits were
falling.
"Bogami, quarter of an hour."
"* * *!"
We then asked a peasant and his wife. The woman considered for a moment.
"About an hour," she said.
Her husband turned and swore at her.
"Bogami, don't believe her, gentlemen," he cried, "it's only a quarter
of an hour."
We left them quarrelling.
It grew dark, and we grew miserable. Jabliak seemed like a dream, and we
like poor wandering Jews, cursed ever to roam on detestable saddles in
this queer pallid country.
At last a peasant said it was five minutes off, and then it really was a
quarter of an hour distant.
We came down from the hills to find the whole aristocracy--one
captain--not to say all their populace, out on the green to do us
honour. They had been informed by telegraph of our august decision to
sleep in their wooden village. When we got off our horses our knees were
so cramped that we could scarcely stand, and we hobbled after the
captain into a bitterly cold room without furniture. Various
Montenegrins came and looked at us, and an old veterinary surgeon, also
_en route_, but in the opposite direction, conversed in bad German. The
old vet. was a Roumanian, and the only animal doctor in all Montenegro.
To their great surprise we demanded something to eat.
"Supper is at nine," they said severely.
"But we have had nothing since ten this morning," we protested.
"But supper will be ready at nine," they said again.
After a lot of trouble we got some scrambled eggs, but nothing would
persuade our guide, whose name, by the way, was "Mike," to have
anything. It almost seemed improper to eat at the wrong hours, even if
one was hungry.
After supper we sat growing colder and colder. At last, in desperation,
we asked if there were no place in the village which had a fire.
"Oh yes, there is a fire in the other café," and thither we were
conducted.
We were in a jolly wooden room, with a blazing stove and a most welcome
fugginess. The hostess brought us rakia, coffee and walnuts, and did her
utmost to make us comfortable. Montenegrins crowded in, and discussed
the probable end of the war. There was little enthusiasm shown, most of
the talk was of the hardships, and a little grumbling that the farms
were going to pieces because of the lack of men.
Before leaving Plevlie, Dr. Clemow had presented Jan with a box of Red
Cross cigars, and he handed one to the captain. The official received it
gratefully.
"Ah!" he said. "Cigars, eh! One does not often see those nowadays."
The cigar was a Trichinopoli. Jan said nothing, but watched. The captain
lit the cigar manfully, and for some minutes puffed, looking the
apotheosis of aristocracy. Presently his puffing ceased, he looked
thoughtful, and then saying that he had forgotten an important paper
which he had not signed, he fled. We found the cigars most useful
afterwards, as a sort of spiritual disinfector, infallible against
bores.
Into the cracks of the ceiling were stuck white and yellow flowers,
thyme and other plants, till the roof looked like an inverted
flower-bed. We had noticed this custom before, and asked Mike if it had
any significance.
"Oh yes," he answered, "all dose tings, dey stuck up dere 'gainst de
fleas 'n bugs."
This was translated into Serbian, and the woman boxed his ears.
We supped on meat--three courses--meat, meat, meat, and so tough that
our teeth bounced off, and we were compelled to bolt the morsels whole.
One course tired us out, weary as we already were with our journey, but
Mike, making up for his former abstinence, wolfed all his own share and
what remained over from ours.
The night was so cold that we went to bed in our clothes, and even then
could not sleep for hours.
We woke with difficulty to a glorious day, and found that what we had
thought yesterday to be a plain was in truth a great plateau surrounded
by towering grey mountains on which were gulfs and gullies filled with
eternal snow. Jabliak is a queer village, fifty or sixty weathered
wooden houses--with the high-peaked roof of Northern Serbia--flung down
into this wilderness, where the grass and crops fight for existence with
the pushing stones, and where the summer is so short that the captain's
plum tree--the only one--will not ripen save in exceptional years. Never
a wheel comes to Jabliak, and so it is a village without streets.
Everything which passes here is horse-or woman-borne, and for hay they
use long narrow sledges which slide over the stones and slippery grass
as though it were snow.
"Urrgh," said a man, "you should see this in winter. Snow ten and twelve
feet deep, and only just the roofs and the tops of the telegraph-poles
emerging."
The village escorted us to see the famous Black Lake below the peaks of
Dormitor.
The lake is beautiful enough, but too big for mystery, too small to be
impressive. One had imagined it twinkling like the wicked pupil of a
witch's eye, with cornea of white stones and eye-lashes of pine trees,
and we desecrated even its stillness by shooting at wild duck with a
rifle.
Jan had been describing to the villagers how well Jo rode; they now
think he is a liar. Her horse took an unexpected jump at a small
obstacle; the huge hump at the back of the saddle rose suddenly, threw
her forward, and before she had realized anything, she was hanging
almost upside down about the horse's neck, helpless because of the
enormous steeple in front. This horse, as though quite used to similar
occurrences, stood quietly contemplative, till Mike had restored her to
a perpendicular.
Then on again. At times the tracks grew very muddy, and the horses
side-slipped a good deal. At the top of a pass we halted to get coffee
from a leafy hut. Before us were the mountains of Voynik, a blue ridge
with shadowy, strange crevasses and cliffs; behind us Dormitor was still
visible, a faint stain on the sky, as though that great canopy had been
dragging edges in the dew.
Four women clambered up towards us. When they had reached the top they
flung down their enormous knapsacks and sat down. They were a cheery,
pretty set, and we asked them where they were going.
"To the front," they said.
"What for?"
"Those are for our husbands and brothers," answered they, patting the
huge coloured knapsacks.
"How far have you to walk?" we asked.
"Four more days."
"And how far have you walked?"
"Four days."
No complaining, no repining, just a statement of fact, these women were
cheerfully tramping eight days with bundles weighing from 45 to 50
pounds upon their backs, to take a few luxuries, or necessities, to
their fighting kin.
We bade them a jolly farewell, wished them luck, and started downhill.
The track became so steep that we had to descend from our horses and
walk, and so we came to Shavnik.
Shavnik is not of wood; it is stone, and as we came into its little
square--with the white river-bed on one side--we realized that no
welcome attended us. To our indignant dismay the inn was full, and no
telegram from the "State" had arrived.
[Illustration: PEASANT WOMEN OF THE MOUNTAINS.]
[Illustration: A VILLAGE OF NORTH MONTENEGRO.]
We learned that in Montenegro are two kinds of travellers--royalties
and nobodies. Royalties are done for, nobodies do the best they can. We
found a not overclean room over a shop--there was nothing better--we had
already experienced worse: so we ordered supper, and went off to the
telegraph station, to make sure that we arrived as "Royalty" at the next
stop.
A man suddenly burst into the office, crying, "Sirdar! Sirdar!"
Jo and Jan made their way through the darkness to the inn, squeezed
between sweating horses to the door. We were admitted.
The Sirdar received us kindly, but was dreadfully tired, and looked
years older than he had two days before. He had ridden some 150
kilometres in sixteen hours, had left Chainitza at two o'clock in the
morning, and had been in the saddle ever since. He is a famous horseman,
but is no longer young. Almost all his escort had succumbed to the
speed, and he was full of the story of his orderly's horse which had
done 300 kilometres in four days, and was the only animal which had come
through with him, he having changed mounts at Plevlie. We left him and
went straight to bed.
Just as we were comfortably dozing off, a man burst into the room and
demanded "Mike," and said something about a horse. Jan dressed hurriedly
and clattered downstairs. It was pitch dark. He ran to the stable, felt
his way in, and struck a match. There were two horses, one was lying on
its side, evidently foundered and dying but Jan felt that they would not
have disturbed him for that. By matchlight again he found that his own
horses had been turned out by the Sirdar's orderly, and that one was
missing. Mike was not to be found, but the missing horse was discovered
by a small boy in the dry river-bed apparently in search of water. Jan
retired to his bedroom to find that in his absence two more strangers
had burst in, to Jo's indignation. He pushed them out and locked the
door.
When we awoke the Sirdar had already retaken his whirlwind
course--evidently grave news called him to Cettinje--leaving the
orderly's gallant horse dead behind him.
"He kills many horses," said a peasant, shaking his head; "he rides
fast--always."
We crossed the dry bed of the river and prepared for the hill in front
of us. Suddenly Mike's horse plunged into a bog. The poor beast sprawled
in the treacherous green up to its stomach, and, thinking its last hour
had come, groaned loudly. Mike threw himself from the saddle, and with
great effort at last extracted his horse, which emerged trembling and
dripping with slime. Mike grinned ruefully.
"I orter remembered," he admitted. "Sirdar, 'e get in dere one day
'imself."
This day's riding was the worst we had yet experienced. Our horses were
fagged, the road abominable, great stones everywhere on the degenerated
Turkish roads.
The Turkish road is a narrowish path of flat paving-stones laid directly
upon mother earth: but that is the first stage. In the second stage the
paving-stones have begun to turn and lie like slates on a roof; in the
third they have turned completely on edge, like a row of dominoes, and
the horses, stepping delicately between the obstacles, pound the exposed
earth to deep trenches of semi-liquid mud. In the fourth stage the
stones have entirely disappeared, leaving only the trenches which the
horses have formed, so that the path is like a sheet of violently
corrugated iron. Most of the tracks are now between the third and fourth
stages of degeneration. One never knows how far the horse will plunge
his legs into the trenches, for sometimes they are very shallow, and
sometimes the leg is engulfed to the shoulder.
Jan's horse slipped over one domino, went up to the shoulder into a
trench, and off came the rider. Luckily he fell upon a heap of stones,
and not into the mud, but he decided for all that to walk for a bit.
Every now and then one came across traces of the construction of a great
road--white new stone embankments that started out of nothing, and went
to nowhere, and Mike confessed that he had lost the path once more--
"When I come out of dat confounded mod!"
After a hustle across country we found the road, and wished that we had
not, for it was a Turkish track in its most belligerent form.
At last we reached the top and rested awhile. Mike showed us his
revolver.
"He good revolver," he said. "De las' man I shoot he killin' a vooman. I
come. He run away. I tell 'im to stop, but he no stop, so I shoot 'im
leg. 'E try to 'it me wi' a gon."
The man got fourteen years.
We pushed on again, and on the road picked up an overcoat, which later
we were able to restore to its owner, a Turk, who was going to
Nickshitch to buy sugar and salt for Plevlie.
Bits of the big white road appeared and reappeared with insistence. We
asked who was responsible for its inception.
"Sirdar," said Mike; "he good boy. Much work."
The country was now like brown velvet spread over heaps of gigantic
potatoes.
Our horses grew slower and slower, and the inn which we were seeking
seemed ever further and further away. We passed many peasants, and had
evidently entered the land of Venus, for each one was more beautiful
than the neighbour. Since Jabliak we had not seen an ugly man or woman,
and the dignity of their carriage was exceeded only by the nobleness of
their features. Ugly women must be valuable in these parts, and probably
marry early; humans ever prize the rare above the beautiful.
Mike spoke to many of the girls, asking them their names and of their
homes. One had his own name--which we forget--and he said that she must
be his cousin, and that if she would wait where she was he would come
back later and give her a lift.
At last we came to the wooden inn.
The better-class inns have dining-room and kitchen separate, the
second-class both are one, but in each case the fire is made on a heap
of earth piled in the centre of the floor; there is no chimney, and the
smoke fills the room with a blue haze, smarting in the eyes; it drifts
up to the roof, where hams are hung, and finds its way out through the
cracks in the wooden roofing slats. This inn was second-class, and along
one wall was a deep trough, in which were four huge lumps of a white
substance which puzzled us. First we thought it was snow, but that
seemed impossible; then we thought it was salt--but why?
It was snow, there being no water fit to drink, so the snow was stored
in the winter in huge underground cellars.
We got coffee and kaimak--a sort of cross between sour milk and cream
cheese--and as a great honour the lady of the house, a villainously
dirty-looking woman, brought us two eggs. Jan's was bad, but he put it
aside, saying nothing, for it is impossible to explain to these people
what is a "bad" egg--all are alike to them.
We took an affectionate leave of Mike, for here we degenerated to a
carriage, which was waiting us, and he rode off, dragging our tired
horses behind him.
As we were getting into the carriage the dirty woman ran up and, before
Jo could ward it off, planted a loving kiss on either cheek.
We flung our weary limbs upon the rusty cushions. Our driver was a
cheery fellow, who only answered "quite" to everything we said. We drove
through miles of country so stony that all the world had turned grey as
though it had remembered how old it was. The road twisted and curled
about the mountains like the flourish of Corporal Trim's stick: below
one could see the road, only half a mile off as the crow flies, but a
good five miles by the curves. We were blocked by a great hay-cart. Our
driver shouted and cursed without effect, so he climbed down from the
box, and, running round the hay, slashed the driver of it with his whip.
We expected a free fight, but nothing occurred. When the hay had
modestly drawn aside, we found "only a girl." Poor thing! she looked
rueful enough.
The road was the best we had seen in all the Balkans, white and
well-surfaced like an English country highway, and at last we clattered
into Nickshitch, the most important town of Northern Montenegro. It was
like a fair-sized Cornish village, with little stone houses and
stone-walled gardens filled with sunflowers.
A charming old major came to the inn to do us the honour we had
telegraphed for, and together we strolled about the streets. There is a
pretty Greek church at one end on a formal mound, and behind the town
runs a sheer fin of rock topped by an old castle where once had lived
another man who "was a gooman all to hisself;" now it is a monastery,
and one of the most picturesque in Montenegro.
We dined upon beautiful trout fresh from the river, and large green
figs. Undressing, Jan found a louse in his shirt--that came from the
dirty bedroom at Shavnik evidently. He went to bed, but his troubles
were not yet over; there was another foreign presence, a presence which
raised large and itching lumps. He hunted without success for some time,
but at last caught and exterminated an enormous bug. After which there
was peace.
[Illustration]