To stop still or to go forward was almost equally difficult, but we struggled on somehow at the rate, I should think, of a mile and a half in the hour. The horses were thoroughly demoralised, as one says of defeated troops, and stumbled recklessly at every obstacle. The driver was a stupid fellow, without an ounce of pluck in his composition, and declared more than once that he would not go on, preferring to stop under such shelter as the trees afforded. We were of another mind, and insisted on his pushing on. One of us walked at the horses' heads, and thus we splashed and blundered on for three mortal hours, wishing all the time that we had slept at Milanovacz. The route became so much worse that I declared we must have missed the track. We were apparently in a deep gully, traversed by a mountain torrent hardly a foot below the level of our road; but the Servian said he knew we were "all right," and that we should come directly to a house where we could get shelter.
He had hardly spoken when H—— descried some lights not very far ahead, and in less than ten minutes we came alongside a good-sized hut, which turned out to be the welcome wine-shop the driver had promised us. Here was a roof anyhow, so we entered, hoping for supper and beds in the wayside inn. All our host could produce was a very good bottle of Servian "black" wine and some coarse bread of the country, so stale that we could hardly break it. This wine, which is almost as black as ink, comes from Negotin, lower down the Danube, and is rather a celebrated vintage I was informed.
It was only in my untravelled mind that the idea of "beds" existed at all. H—— knew better than to expect anything of the kind. All we could do was to examine the place we were in with reference to passing the night. The floor of the room consisted of hard stamped clay, which from the drippings of our garments had become damp and slightly adhesive to the tread. The furniture consisted of a few rough stools and three tables. There was no question of any other apartment, there being only a dark hole in the rear sacred to the family, into which every sense we possessed forbade us to intrude. In peering about with the candles we found that the floor was perfectly alive with insects—such strange forms, awful in their strangeness—interesting, I daresay, to the entomologist, but simply disgusting to one not given to collecting specimens.
If I were dying I could not have laid myself down on that floor, so we dragged the three tables together. They were provokingly uneven, but with the aid of a sheepskin bunda, and our carpet-bags for pillows, we contrived something upon which to rest our tired limbs. I should observe we had partially dried ourselves by a miserable fire fed with wet wood; in fact, everything was wet—our plaids were soaked, and were useless as coverlets.
We had agreed to keep one candle burning, with the further precaution that we should sleep and tie through the night; for it was a cut-throat-looking place, and the countenance of the ordinary Servian is not reassuring. It fell to my lot to have the first watch, and I lay awake staring at the roof, no great height above us. Its dirt-stained rafters were lit up by the candle, and I soon became aware that the mainbody of the insects was performing a strategic movement highly creditable to the attacking party—they dropped down upon us from the beams! I will not pursue the subject farther, but as long as the candle burned I did not sleep a wink. I suppose I must have dozed off towards morning, for H—— roused me from a state of semi-unconsciousness, and "up we got and shook our lugs."
The first thing I saw on pushing open the door was the steaming carcass of a sheep hung just outside, with a pool of blood on the very threshold! In many places in Eastern Europe they have the disgusting habit of slaughtering the animals in the middle of the street.
As soon as we had swallowed a cup of hot coffee, which is always good in this part of the world, we lost no time in clearing out of the wretched hovel where we had passed the night. On every side there were traces of last night's tempest—trees uprooted and lying across the road, walls blown down, and watercourses overflowing. It came to my knowledge later that we got part of the same storm that had fallen with such devastating fury on Buda-Pest just twenty-four hours earlier.[3]
It is a fact worth noting that this storm affected a large area of Europe, travelling north-west to south-east. A friend writing from the neighbourhood of Dresden made mention of a severe storm on the 24th of June; it broke upon Buda on the 26th, reaching us down in Servia on the 27th.