THE MAIN STREET, CETTINJE.
The body of Peter I reposes peacefully, after his many years of active leadership, in its sarcophagus in the little chapel of the monastery, while at the opposite end of the village a small arsenal contains the sum total of Montenegrin pieces of ordnance. One room is devoted to the trophies of war taken from the Turks, including swords, bullet-riddled flags and standards, Turkish field pieces and personal insignia.
A prolonged stay is not necessary to see all there is to be seen in the miniature capital, three or four days being quite sufficient. On the height of the first ascent after leaving the town a glorious view of the valley below, all divided off into the little stone-encircled fields, may be had. As you journey on, you may pass a group or two of gypsies or a hermit-peasant who hobbles out of his thatched hut to beg a handful of tobacco. At last you break through the pass at the top of the mountains in full view of the Bocche di Cattaro.
A diminutive white steamer leaving the molo of the town almost directly under you, moves slowly toward the narrow exit to the Adriatic, its propellers churning a fan-shaped wake of foam which loses itself finally in the broad expanse of placid water.
The sunset from the heights, as it illumines the lower mountain ranges with an old-rose sheen and diffuses its tinted rays across the Bocche and the broad Adriatic beyond, is gorgeous enough to baffle description. A painter who could picture truthfully that evening panorama might well consider it his masterpiece. The silence of the mountains is unbroken, save for the melancholy pipings of a lone shepherd boy hidden somewhere among the rocks in the distance. The silence of the sky and the silence of the rock-walled Bocche “mingle in an awful spell that falls upon the soul like the lonesomeness of the grave. There is something of death in life and of life in death in the grim inevitableness of this silence, so changeless and yet so vital.” The sunset above and the yawning cañon-like pit below “grip the soul and draw it to a communion with something strong outside itself—something that escapes definition and analysis; something that the ancient people meant when they said that they walked with God.”
For a long time you will stop and drink in eagerly the splendour of the scene, and then, reluctantly, yet as if influenced by the magnetism of the abyss, commence to descend the windings, one after another, back to the quaint little Dalmatian port of Cattaro.
A TURN OF THE ROAD ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS.