A JOURNEY INTO THE BERDAS
Pending the arrival of the guns, I explored the more remote and by
no traveler hitherto visited section of the Berdas, charged by the
Russian Red Cross and the English committees with the distribution of
a considerable sum of gold amongst the wounded and families of the
killed in that section. With a single _perianik_ (one of the Prince's
bodyguard) and my horse boy, who served as interpreter, I set out for
the great plains of the northeastern provinces, then menaced by an
invasion of a strong division from Kolashin, intended to effect a
diversion for the relief of Niksich. Climbing the heights which make a
rim like the wall of a crater round the plain of Niksich, I reached
a table-land _(planina)_ which rolls away to the frontier. I made my
first halt at the monastery of Zupa, situated in a lovely valley where
the fertility of the land supports a considerable population, and
where the Russians had established a hospital. Nothing could exceed
the kindness and humanity of those Russian surgeons. There was one
poor patient who had received a ball in the mouth, which lodged in the
neck and caused a suppuration, involving an artery, which burst into
the wound. The carotid was tied, but the operation failed to stop
the hemorrhage, and I found the surgeons relieving each other every
quarter of an hour in holding a pledget of lint on the wound, in
a determined effort to save the man's life if it were physically
possible. The hospital was admirably conducted.
In this beautiful valley I waited several days, wandering amongst
the hills. There were flocks of wild pigeons and other game in the
vicinity, and one morning of summer weather I took my gun and strolled
out alone, having no apprehension of personal danger where there was
no fighting population. Approaching a village curiously intent, I
discovered an old woman, who, on seeing this unexplained stranger,
armed, and with no company of her kin, set up a terrible hullabaloo,
shouting, "The Turks! The Turks!" and calling the boys to the defense,
and in a jiffy the whole village was up in alarm. I ran as fast as I
could in the direction of the monastery, conscious that every boy in
the valley had some old pistol, and would not even ask the questions I
could not answer before immolating me in the defense of his village.
Life is of no account in such circumstances, and the explanation would
have been made too late to do me any good, but I never walked out
again without my interpreter while in that country.
The object of my excursion was the ancient convent of Dobrilovina,
then the advanced post towards Kolashin, the Turkish station in Old
Servia, and the point from which all invasions from the east entered
Montenegro; and the ride was by far the most interesting of all that I
made in the two principalities. From the valley of Zupa we rose on a
plateau known as the Lola Planina, on which the watershed is to
the north and east and into the Danube. We rode through Drobniak a
province the right to which was still theoretically disputed between
Turk and Christian, the fruition of peace belonging to the latter;
that of war to the former, for it always fights with Montenegro, and
is periodically ravaged by the Turks. We were on the watershed between
the Adriatic and the Euxine, and the brooks were tributary to the
Danube through the Tara. The land is an immense upland, rolling
slightly, and the finest grass land I ever saw; it is an immense
prairie, with the horizon unbroken, except by the picturesque peak
of Dormitor at the north, the summit peak of the mountains of upper
Herzegovina, and the centre of the glacial system of the lands between
the Adriatic and the great Rascian valley which divides Servia and the
lower Danube from Montenegro. The flora was entirely new to me. I rode
through a thicket of marguerites so tall that the flowers came up to
my face, while the grass came up to my horse's belly. This is a great
hayfield, and the people come from far to cut and store the hay for
the winter, when they harness the stacks and drag them bodily to their
villages on the snow, which sometimes falls, they told me, to the
depth of fifteen or more feet. To the east stretched the rolling
prairie without a house or a village to the Signavina (desolate land)
Planina, solitary as the Sahara, for no man would build where a
Turkish raid on this disputed land might sweep him and his into one
destruction.
That there had been a great population once on these plains was
evident from ancient cemeteries with elaborate monuments of an early
but unknown people, of whom they are the only remains. The tombs were
rudely worked and decorated in prehistoric manner with devices of war
or the chase; one device, which I copied, being of an archer shooting
a wild goat, another of a warrior with a long broadsword and large
square shield. On some tombs were a crescent and star, the emblem of
Constantinople; on a few a cross; but there was no attempt at a letter
or other sign of language. The entire absence of any ruins within the
distance of our journeys (and by the report of the natives there were
none in the country round about) made the presence of these cemeteries
an archaeological problem to which I obtained no clue until some time
later, on the surrender of Niksich. We then discovered that a
large part of the town was formed of houses--huts would be more
correct--constructed on sledges, huge runners of timber, into which
had been driven stakes, forming the frame of the house. The stakes
were filled in with willow branches, and the walls were completed
with mud, the whole being roofed with thatch. The forward end of the
runners was perforated for a bar, to which oxen could be attached, and
the house was evidently to be drawn from place to place, as the herds
and flocks found food. Of this nature had probably been the towns or
villages to which the cemeteries belonged, and their existence still
on the plain of Niksich, where they must have been built without any
possibility of removal beyond the limits of the plain (which is only
about ten miles in its greatest extent, and bounded by abrupt hills),
was a curious evidence of the intensely conservative character of the
population which had established itself there at a remote epoch.
The sledge houses at Niksich had never been moved, nor would there
have been any object in moving them, for the remotest part of the
plain was to be reached in a long hour's walk, and the rocky setting
of its grassy luxuriance, rising into higher land all round, by steep
ridges, would have shown the builders that where the house was built,
there it would stand. On these great planinas there might have been a
range far greater, but the presence of the cemeteries, which must have
been the result of a considerable duration of residence, proved that
the planinas now deserted, save for the summer haymakers, had once
been held by a considerable population. I desired to open one of the
graves, but the superstition of the people, whom no inducement could
prevail on to meddle with the dead, made it impossible to find workers
to aid me. I can only conjecture, therefore, from the emblems on the
tombs and the rudeness of the reliefs, that they must date from early
Christian times, probably the so-called Gallic (really Slavonic)
invasions prior to Diocletian; and two or three huge and elaborate
roadside crosses, cut from single stones and minutely decorated in
relief, found nearer Cettinje, added to the conjectural evidence, for
the origin of these was equally unknown to the present inhabitants.
We passed caves known immemorially as places of refuge and admirably
placed and prepared for defense. There is a great and untouched field
there for prehistoric research.
We stopped to pass the night at Shawnik, a village in one of the most
picturesque ravines I ever saw. There runs the Bukovitza, a tributary
of the Drina, a wild and bold trout stream, abounding also in
grayling, the trout being unaccustomed to the fly, as they are in
most of the streams hereabout. Shawnik lies in the gate to the open
country, the gateposts being two huge bastions of rock from which a
few riflemen could defy an army until they found a way around through
the rough country of Voinik, the chain which lay between us and
Niksich. I slept at the house of an Albanian tailor (all the tailors
in Montenegro and the Berdas are Albanians) and was made comfortable.
We found the voivode of the province, Peiovich, at Aluga, with his
headquarters in the schoolhouse, and keeping a lookout for the Turks,
who menaced an invasion from Kolashin, a band of them having just
attempted to pass the Tara, which bounds the plain on the north, but
being driven back with loss. I found Aluga a noble subalpine country,
a rolling plateau with here and there a little lake; to the northwest
the grand mass of Dormitor, and to the northeast the range of the
highlands which border the valleys of Old Servia, while to the east
and south the horizon was like that of the sea, an undulating plain
rolling far away out of the range of vision. Scattered houses dotted
the plain of Aluga, and the children came to stare, and brought us,
with the shyness of wild deer, little baskets of strawberries, which
in some places in the fir forests almost reddened the ground, and,
having pushed the offerings in at the door, ran like wild creatures,
as if to escape being noticed. Huge haystacks dotted the plain, and
the population seemed prosperous. We pushed on to the frontier post at
Dobrilovina through glades of fir-trees with pasture intervening, as
the soil was rocky or fertile, and reached the margin of the Tara late
in the afternoon, a good day's ride from Aluga.
The Tara has cut itself a cañon like those of the Yellowstone, and
on a little space of alluvial land at the bottom lies the convent,
a building of the Servian Empire, curiously spared by the Turkish
invasions. We descended 2500 feet, measured by my aneroid, to the
flat, where the monks made us most welcome. We walked along the river,
a rapid and shallow stream filled with trout, which refused to take
any lure I could show them,--and the monks said that they ate only the
crayfish which abounded in the river.
We went to sleep, to be awakened at midnight by the scouts who came
in to tell us that the Turks were out from Kolashin, and that some
thousands of Albanians of the Rascian country were raiding in advance,
and had already thrown their left far beyond us. Had they known we
were there, we might have been taken in a trap from which only fleet
fugitives would have escaped. With the dawn we were in our saddles
again, and, by the urgent advice of Peiovich, I took the back track,
while the battalion threw itself across the country to skirmish, and
retard the advance of the Turks while reinforcements could be brought
up. "Ride hard," said the voivode, "and keep ahead of the Albanians,
for when it comes to fighting we shall probably have to disperse and
every man provide for himself, and you do not know the country. Tell
the Prince to hurry up reinforcements." I lunched in the schoolhouse
of Aluga, and pushed on for Bukowitza and Shawnik, where the invasion
would be stopped with certainty. Half way to Bukowitza there burst on
us a terrific thunderstorm, with torrents of rain. One bolt struck so
near us that the concussion knocked my _perianik_ down, and my horse
jumped up on all fours as I never saw a horse do before, but neither
was touched by the lightning, and we arrived at the first house of
Bukowitza drenched and tired, having knocked the two days' march into
one.
The owner of the house at which we asked for shelter said: "What I
have you are welcome to, but I have only two rooms, that in which the
family sleeps, and the kitchen. You are welcome to the bedroom, but
I fear there are too many fleas for you to sleep, and you had better
stay in the kitchen." I accepted the kitchen, and after a supper of
hot maize bread and trout fresh caught from the nearest brook, the
whole flooded with cream, I spread my cork mattress on a long bench
which served as chairs for the household, and, covering myself with
my waterproof, the only bedding attainable, I went to sleep. I was
awakened by the sound of something falling on the waterproof, which
I took to be bits of plaster from overhead, but, as it persisted, I
struck a light and discovered that it was caused by bugs which, not
finding a direct way to me from their nests in the wall, had climbed
up and dropped from the ceiling down on me. What with the insects
and the chance of being aroused at dawn by an attack of the raiding
Albanians, I did not sleep again, and was up at dawn preparing to
continue the journey to Shawnik, where alone we could count on being
safe from the swarms of bashi-bazouks, whose movements we could
already follow in the air by the smoke ascending from house and
haystack over the plains we had traversed the day before.
The day had broken fine, and after stopping long enough to make a
sketch of the house where I had passed the night, destined like all
others in the open country to be burned in the course of the day, I
pushed on to the fastness of Shawnik. The advance of the Turks was
practically unopposed, for there was only a battalion of Montenegrins
against thousands of irregulars and a strong division of regulars, and
the Prince, never much troubled about the odds except where he was
personally responsible, had not sent a man of the reinforcements which
Peiovich had urgently begged for by courier after courier, so he fell
back skirmishing until Socica from Piva joined him, when he made a
stand.
For several days the two armies watched each other, each waiting for
the offensive of the other, until one morning found the plain covered
with a fog so dense that the combatants could not see each other one
hundred yards away, when the Montenegrins made an attack so furious
that the Turks retreated and took refuge across the Tara and withdrew
to Kolashin, abandoning the movement and the attempt to relieve
Niksich. But the beautiful schoolhouse at Aluga and all the houses and
churches on the planina and at Bukowitza, the haystacks which had so
picturesquely dotted the plain, and which were to have furnished the
winter subsistence of all the flocks of the region, were ashes.
The night at Shawnik had proved as sleepless from fleas as that of
Bukowitza from bugs, and, what with the fatigue of the race against
time and the lack of any sleep for forty-eight hours, the next day
found me laboring under an attack of illness which left me absolutely
helpless, with a raging headache and cholera morbus. I dragged myself
out into the sun and ordered my horse boy to bring me a bucket of
water as hot as I could bear my feet in, and then made him keep it
hot with ashes until my feet were almost parboiled, when the headache
gradually subsided, leaving me a wilted, helpless being, hardly able
to sit in the saddle. I waited another day to recruit, and hoping to
hear from Peiovich the result of the invasion; but, hearing that the
deadlock might last for days, I returned to Niksich and found the
siege still going on as if it were the work of the generation.