Upon leaving Cattaro the road skirts the harbour for a short distance, winds around toward the hills through avenues of stately poplars, crosses a little bridge which spans the Gordicchio, makes several zig-zags, and then sweeps widely toward the south—you really seem to be driving away from the mountain which you must scale later—in full view of the Adriatic, while the bay, or Bocche di Cattaro, is lost to view behind you. At the top of the pass leading to the town of Budua, the outlook over the broad, fertile plain of Garbalj, with the sea in the distance, is very impressive. For a short distance the highway, as it winds around the face of the cliff, literally overhangs the plain and then turns abruptly toward the Black Mountain. In the distance the white, zig-zagging road, surmounting the almost perpendicular wall of rock ahead, looks like a thread on the shoulder of a giant, and causes you to wonder that it took no more than twenty years to build.
A SECTION OF THE ROAD ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS.
This being the shortest and easiest route for trade between the outside world and the Montenegrin capital, quantities of provisions, household furniture, lumber and other materials for building purposes, and what not are freighted by four, five and six-horse teams over these twenty-eight miles of mountains, from Cattaro to Cettinje. There is also a passenger stage that operates daily between the two towns.
We had passed the little stone half-way house, which is stuck on the face of the rock at one of the very acute angles of the winding road overlooking the Bocche, when we came upon one of these freight caravans plugging laboriously along, with the hope of making Cettinje sometime the following day. One of the wagons was loaded with kegs of beer, and it was all too evident that the several treacherous looking drivers in the party had been indulging their thirst from time to time, to the appreciable loss to the person to whom the kegs were consigned. As we approached, our driver stopped his nondescript team and had a few confiding words with the freighters. Together they succeeded in puncturing one of the kegs with a long wire nail; then a horse bucket was cut from its swinging position under one of the wagons. This was rinsed out with a goodly supply of beer tapped from the punctured cask, and refilled, to moisten the already well-lubricated throats of all concerned. How many full casks reached their destination after several days spent on the road would make a nice problem for a class in algebra. If the freighters met many drivers as thirsty as ours it is a question whether or not it would have been best for them to have appeared in Cettinje at all.
At each successive turn of the road a more wonderful panorama of the Bocche stretches out before you, and, after more than three hours of steady climbing, the pass at the top of the mountains is reached, and you cross the frontier, marked by a single stone post at the side of the roadway.
THE PASS AT THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAINS.
The view of the Montenegrin side of the mountains can only be described as purely “Montenegrin.” The Bocche is, of course, lost to view and you have before you nothing but what seems to be a gigantic upheaval of rocks. Not a tree, not a shrub, not even a dust-covered sprout at the side of the road, relieves the sameness of this picture of gray desolation. Perhaps, if you look closely, you will partly be able to distinguish, less than a hundred yards away, a native mountaineer whose very garb is of protective colouring, concealing him almost entirely from your notice against the background of bare stones.
From the top of the mountain the road descends to the village of Njegushi, the birthplace of His Ferocity, Prince Nikola. But were it not for the red-tiled roofs there would be, from a distance, no circumstantial evidence whatever that the town exists, for the houses are all of stone of the same hue as the surrounding mountains.