CHAPTER XXVIII
A JOURNEY IN MONTENEGRO AND ALBANIA
Utovu was followed by a lull in military operations; but in the latter part of November, as the insurgents had beleaguered all the forts in the upper Herzegovina and the town of Niksich in the debated territory between Montenegro and Herzegovina, Shefket gathered a force of 3000 regulars, with artillery and bashi-bazouks to escort a train of supplies to them. He was met by Lazar Soeica, the chief of that part of the mountain country, and disastrously defeated at Muratovizza, leaving behind him 760 dead, and carrying away about 900 wounded, most of whom died of their wounds, as I learned from one of the European surgeons in the Turkish service who deserted a little later, dismayed by the constant menaces of death to all Christian employees in the camp, uttered by the troops, suffering, angry, and continually worsted in the little fights. Shefket saved himself and his artillery by sending the latter to the rear as soon as the battle was at its height, and then, having posted a strong rear guard,—the insurgents having neglected to close the road behind them,—retreating with all possible speed, leaving the rear guard to be killed or taken, which it was to a man. The insurgents lost fifty-seven killed and ninety-six seriously wounded, but the result was to throw the whole upper Herzegovina into their hands, and they captured and destroyed all the small blockhouses and forts not armed with artillery. The interest now centred on the high mountain district about Niksich, where I determined to go to watch the operations. The winter was well commenced, but only in the higher districts was the snow on the ground. I returned, therefore, to Cettinje, where I was now received as a tried friend.
At the time of which I am now writing there were practically no roads in Montenegro but bridle-paths, over large stretches of which it was unsafe to ride, even the Montenegrins dismounting, whether going up or down. That passage between Cettinje and Rieka, on the Lake of Scutari, was one of the worst I have ever found in the principality. The lower part, nearing Rieka, was simply a Cyclopean stairway, with rocky steps so high that the horses had to jump down from one to another. My cavalcade consisted of a Montenegrin soldier for guide, a Montenegrin student, and the horse-boy, necessary to lead the horses when, as was the case for a large part of the way, we could not ride them; and halfway down to Rieka we were overtaken by a deaf-mute porter, sent as a kind afterthought by the Prince, with a samovar and a provision of tea, sugar, etc., in view of the dearth of comforts beyond. I carried an order for shelter and such fare as was obtainable at Rieka, in the little house of the Prince at that village, and we passed a comfortable night, but found the succeeding day the opening of one of the spells of rainy weather of which only one who has lived in the principality much can know the inconvenience. To wait in the half-furnished house with no resources was worse than going out in the rain, although I had no protection other than a cape of my own manufacture, a circle of the thinnest india-rubber cloth, with a hole cut in the middle for my head, and covering my arms to the wrists.
Hoping for the rain to stop, we waited till nine A.M., when a break in the clouds flattered us into starting for Danilograd, to be caught in another downpour an hour later. The way was down a long slope, part mud and part broken rock, over which in either case we found the traveling easier on foot than on horseback, so that we did most of the way on foot while daylight lasted, the unfortunate porter between the cavalry and the infantry struggling, slipping, and moaning in his inarticulate way in great physical distress. We had continually to stop and wait for the horses to overtake us until the long descent was accomplished, by which time the twilight had come, and we found ourselves in the valley of the Suchitza, a wide waste of clay soil saturated with rain, and two hours' ride in ordinary condition of the roads from any shelter. The steady rain in which we had traveled for eight hours then became a violent thunder-storm; all the brooks and ditches by the way were over their banks, and our horses could hardly flounder under their loads through the heavy going; while we, in the darkness, could not see the road, even where it could he followed, save when the lightning flashes showed it, and so, not being able to walk, rode perforce. My horse refused a ditch a foot wide, and when we came to one I had to get off and drag by the bridle, while the horse-boy pushed from behind, till he yielded to the persuasion and ventured over. The two hours' ride became four, and the way got heavier as we went on, woodland alternating with flooded plain, in the former of which only the experience of the guide could keep the road; while in the latter we could follow it only by the telegraph wires cutting against the sky. We finally saw a light and came to a cabin, where we deposited the poor mute, with all the impedimenta, to follow by daylight; but for us there was no place to sleep, and we gave the reins to the horses, and let them flounder their way into Danilograd, where we arrived at 10 P.M., drenched to the skin and hungry.
There was a light still burning in the house of the village doctor, on whom we had an order from the Prince, and who found us a sleeping-place in the loft of a neighbor, where we got a supper of trout and maize bread, and a bundle of straw to lie on in our wet clothes. The doctor was a German, and, though he was an official, the instinct of hospitality which rules the Montenegrin did not exist in him, so he offered us the house of his neighbor. The day broke fine for our journey to the convent of Ostrog, the only bit of good weather we had until our return to Cettinje, ten days later.
Ostrog is one of the three sanctuaries of Montenegro, the others being Moratcha, on the old Servian frontier, and Piperski Celia, above the fortress of Spuz, where the valley of the Zeta then entered into the Turkish dominions. The convent is on a site of singular beauty and salubrity, on a fertile plateau several hundred feet above the valley of the Zeta, at the foot of a precipice, in the face of which is a cave enlarged into a chapel, where lies the body of St. Basil, a Herzegovinian bishop of the early days of the Turkish conquest, who did his Christian duty by the scattered Orthodox Christians in Herzegovina and Montenegro, visiting stealthily and at the constant risk of his life the little groups of the faithful over a territory vast for the supervision of one man. He died in this refuge, and was buried at the foot of the cliff; but on an attempt being made to remove the body some years later, it was found to be uncorrupted, upon which he was canonized, and the body was placed in a fine coffin and removed to the little chapel, which has a single window also rock-cut and is only to be approached by a narrow stairway of the same structure. Outside, at the foot of the cliff, is the convent, in which reside two or three priests and as many kalogheri, constituting the community, for the convents of the Orthodox church are not communities of idle devotees, but of men who are mostly engaged in the culture of the land belonging to the convent, when not engaged in the performance of the rites of the church. The hegumenos I found to be more a man of war than one of ritual, and really the commander of an outpost of observation on the frontier towards Niksich. He delighted more in arms than in the mass, and I made a firm friend of him by the gift of a small Colt's revolver. I was permitted to see the body of St. Basil in the chapel, which was filled with a fragrance like that of cedar wood, which I naïvely attributed to the wood of the coffin, when the attendant protested with indignation that what I smelled was the odor of sanctity. I was incompetent to distinguish it. St. Basil is held in great reverence for his miracles, and immense numbers of pilgrims come to his annual festa with their sick from all the country round, even Mussulman families from Albania paying their devotions in the hope and faith of cures, and it is said that many miracles take place every year.
In this hermitage Mirko, the father of the Prince, in company with thirty-two of his voivodes, was once besieged by a large body of Turks, but repelled all attacks for nineteen days, with the loss of only two men, killed by shots which passed through the window. One of the garrison descended by a rope to bury one of the dead, and, this accomplished, made his way by night through the Turkish army and carried the news of the siege to Danilo, then the reigning prince, who raised an army and dispersed the Turkish forces. During the siege, two parties of Mussulmans, mistaking each other for relief parties of Christians, attacked each other with great slaughter, an event which was considered to be the effect of the intervention of St. Basil.
The hegumenos strongly opposed my attempt to penetrate to Niksich, assuring me that the plain was so infested by bands of Turks that it was to the last degree unsafe to travel on the road, the truth being that the city was beleaguered by Montenegrin bands, a fact which he desired to conceal. This, I was convinced, was the real reason of his opposition; but, to strengthen his argument, the rain, which had lifted for the one day of the journey from Danilograd, changed into snow in the mountains, and made the attempt impossible. We waited several days at the convent, and, as the rain and snow were insistent, and Niksich too difficult of access, I decided to turn the other way and go to Scutari by land. Returning to Danilograd, I learned that this was practically impossible, the road beyond Podgoritza being not only dangerous for persons, but impracticable for beasts, as the country was under water. No Montenegrin would venture into the Turkish territory with the certainty of incurring decapitation,—if not in my company, at any rate on his return without me; so, on consultation with the sirdar in command at Danilograd, I sent back to Cettinje the horses we had come with, and hired those of a rayah of Podgoritza who had come to market at Danilograd, intending to go to Podgoritza, where we should hire other horses to Plamnitza, on the lake shore, whence we could proceed by water to Scutari. I telegraphed the Prince to send his steam launch to meet me at Plamnitza; and, as my interpreter, the Montenegrin student, determined to run the risks of decapitation and go with me, I imposed on him a European costume, took away his revolver as a safeguard against dangerous excitement, put him under severe charge not to show that he understood the Serb language, and started in a pouring rain.
The road to Spuz was unique. Now that Montenegro has entered into possession of the region, there is a carriage road, but the ancient one was a pavement of the days of Dushan which now ran along the top of a ridge like a hog-back in the middle of the road, on each side of which the track had been worn down by travel until the original road was as high as the backs of our horses above the actual track each side of it. At the gate of Spuz we were stopped and our passports were demanded. Mine had been visaed at Ragusa for Mostar, and Gosdanovich had the Russian passport, which is freely accorded to all Montenegrins. The sentinel could read neither, and sent them to the konak with a demand for instructions. Meanwhile the guard turned out to laugh at us sitting on our market horses in the pouring rain, our saddles being only blankets fastened on the pack saddles, on which we were perched high, the rain pouring off from every extremity of our costumes. The messenger brought word to send us to the police office, and there we went.
A binbashi, grave, polite, and curious, invited us to be seated and ordered coffee. He could speak only Turkish, and I tried English, French, and Italian in vain, when a bright Albanian lieutenant standing by made a remark in Romaic, and for the needs of the case I caught on. He knew much less Romaic than I, but I could make him understand that I was the correspondent of an English journal going to Scutari, etc., etc. Gosdanovich played his part well, and was as stolid as an ox, though the conversation, which he understood, between the Mussulman Serbs present was not at all cheering. "Bah!" said one of the secretaries who sat writing on the mat beside the bimbashi, "I can kill twenty such men as that with a stick, and should like to do it—such rubbish as they are—I should like to send them all to the devil." "So should I," replied the other. Then one of them suggested that, though I was evidently a stranger, he felt sure he had seen Gosdanovich in Cettinje. "Impossible!" replied the other; "no Montenegrin would dare to come here now." Finally came the doctor, an Italian, and we had an excursion into general politics, after which another coffee and cigarette, and then, with the visa of the bimbashi, we were permitted to move on to Podgoritza.
We had no further adventure on the road, and early in the afternoon arrived at Podgoritza, an ancient Servian city, much dilapidated and very picturesque, taking lodgings at an inn kept by a Christian, a rather creditable establishment but absolutely empty of guests. We waited half an hour for the food and fire I ordered (for we were wet and fasting), when my guide returned and said that there were no lodgings there, but that the chief of police would provide us, and that we were to accompany him to the police office. There we were allowed to dry ourselves over a huge brazier full of glowing coals, while the zapties cleaned out the adjoining room, a closet about ten by fourteen feet, in which the dust of years lay accumulated and to all appearance undisturbed. This was simply a cell in the police prison, and there we ate what the miralai saw fit to order for us. Our passports were again examined and discussed, and we were reëxamined as to our whence and whither and wherefore by the aid of two or three Catholic Albanians of the vicinity, who did what they could to find out if we had any secret business, professing to be themselves the victims of the oppression of the Turks, and sympathizing with us. They did not draw me, however, and I professed no anxiety as to my treatment.
The miralai finally gave over his search for hostile motive in our visit, and we discussed the programme for the morrow. I found that there was a healthy fear of the Prince of Montenegro, for, when I told him that the Prince's little steamer would be waiting for me at Plamnitza the next day at noon, the whole circle broke out in wonder if it could be true that the Prince took so much interest in us, for if so, they must be prudent. We had the interesting advantage in that Gosdanovich understood all that they said as they talked Serb to each other, for they were a mixed company, and mostly of that race, and they supposed that he was a Russian and I an Englishman, and that both of us were ignorant of their language. If, they finally agreed, the Prince of Montenegro would send his steamer for me, I must be a person of greater distinction than they thought me, and they must be careful. So the miralai called the chief of the zapties, and in our presence gave him his charge, viz., to escort us to Plamnitza, leaving by early light, and, if the steamer did not come for us, to bring us back to the prison he took us from, and to kill us on the spot if we attempted to escape. And so to sleep, as far as the crowing of many cocks outside and the activity of multitudinous fleas within would permit; and to make sure of us, we were locked in—fairly at last in a Turkish prison.
The morning broke with the rain pouring in torrents. I had tried to buy a pair of shoes before going to sleep, but they brought me a pair for a boy of twelve and assured me that there were no others in the town, and those I had come with were in tatters which were hardly to be kept on my feet. The mud was indescribable,—the entire country flooded, and all the bridges across a river we must pass carried away, except one over a narrow gorge where the rocks approached so closely that a couple of logs reached from side to side, and over these the horses must be led. To say that I was at ease on this trip would be exaggeration, the more as the zaptie-bimbashi talked freely to his subordinate about us, and vented his rage at being obliged to make such a journey for two beastly infidels, to whom the only grateful service he could render was decapitation. However, we reached the lake, to find the steamer waiting, tied to the top of one of the largest oaks a half mile from the actual shore, for the country was so inundated that we floated over entire villages as we boated out to it. I delighted the heart of the bimbashi by a baksheesh of half a napoleon, which so astonished him that he hardly knew how to express himself, after all his bitter words and unkind intentions. I was later convinced that if the Turkish authorities had known who I was,—their old enemy in Crete,—we should not have come out alive from Podgoritza. In fact, when Danish Effendi at Ragusa heard that I had been put in prison in Albania he exclaimed, "If I had been there it is not only a night in prison he would have had, but a file of soldiers at daylight."
Our steamer had come, however, not to carry me to Scutari, but, and perhaps fortunately, to take me back to Rieka, whence I had to go to Cettinje to get a refit, for I was ragged, bootless as my errand to Scutari, and draggled with mud from head to foot; notwithstanding which, as soon as the Prince had learned of my arrival, though in the midst of a diplomatic dinner, he sent for me to come to the palace, and made me sit down with the company as I was and tell my story. I had to wait a few days for the voyage to Scutari, profiting by the occasion of the return of some engineers and the French consul at that place. We found the town flooded, a fisherman by the side of one of the streets showing us a fine string of fish which he had caught in the roadside ditch. Decay, neglect, and utter demoralization were written large on the general aspect of the capital of one of the most important of the provinces of the Turkish Empire in Europe, i.e. important to Turkey. The magnificent country around Scutari for miles on miles square—most fertile ground, producing, beside wheat, the finest tobacco known for cigarettes generally sold as of Cavalla (and how many nervous hours I have soothed with it during these campaigns), and enormous crops of maize—lies a large part of the time every year under water, as I had found it, for the sole reason that the Drin, which ought to empty into the sea below the Boyana (the outlet of the Lake of Scutari, the Moratcha, etc.), has built a bar by its floods and abandoned its proper course, emptying into the lake a flood which the Boyana is incapable of managing.
The fortress was a relic of Dushan, little mended by the Turk, and had been three times struck by lightning, the magazine each time exploding (once while I was in Montenegro), only because the Turkish government, in putting up the lightning-rod and finding the supply of rod short, had pieced it out with telegraph wire. The body of the rod had fulfilled its destiny in attracting the lightning, while the telegraph wire, not being able to carry the load brought to it, had discharged it into the magazine. And, when I saw it, the wire was still inviting another disaster. I found in Eshref Pasha a most interesting and amiable personage, out of his place completely in the management of a turbulent and really hostile Christian population, with whom his very best qualities were a disqualification. Eshref was a poet, a dreamer, and, I was told, the second man of letters in the empire. He laughingly asked me if I had been at Podgoritza, and I as good-humoredly replied that I had not come to complain of my treatment there, but to pay my compliments to a fellow man of letters. His broad, good-natured face lighted up with pleasure, and, dropping politics and fighting, we talked poetry and letters. Secretaries and messengers were coming and going with papers to be signed, or orders to be given, and we could talk only by interludes. I remarked that he must have little time for letters in all this complication of cares, and he replied that "poetry was his refuge in the night when he was unable to sleep; he had no other time." I tried to get a sample of his verse, and he recited me one, of which I could judge only by the sound, which was very musical; but to my urging for a copy for publication in England he objected that translators were not good for the reputation of a poet, which we all know. I assured him of the entire competence of literary London to render him the completest justice, and he finally yielded in the spirit to my solicitations, but put them to the rout in the letter; for, though he promised the script for the next morning, it never came. It is curious that Eshref fell through his good faith, for when, a few months later, the Porte issued an irade asking for indication of the reforms needed in the provinces, he replied by calling the population to formulate their wants, which they did, asking for the reopening of the Drin so as to facilitate the draining of the Lake of Scutari, the making of roads and a railway from Scutari to Antivari on the seacoast. The Porte, unaccustomed to be taken at its word, recalled the poet, who shared the fate of his great predecessor Ovid.