The dawn of the twentieth century found the principality still Homeric and patriarchal, but the brief years since its opening have been significant ones. During those years her sons for the first time left “their crags and unsealed passes” to go out upon so base an errand as seeking work across the Atlantic, later to return with the booty of a bloodless conquest.
About ten years after my last visit to Montenegro, I was again journeying towards it upon that serpentine road from whose every winding the truly matchless bay can be seen, receding with every turn, hemmed in more and more by the chalk cliffs which look like petrified clouds. Almost barren of verdure they are, but full of an awful majesty; until they blend with the bay, when one can see beyond them the blue Adriatic. The ships upon her bosom are moved by a gentle sirocco, while the islands on the Dalmatian coast, hidden in the shining green of the olive and the yellower tints of fig leaves, make patches of colour which seem to be floating away in the mist rising at noontime from the sea.
Suddenly one turns northward and faces gray stones, walls of stone, fields of stone—nothing but stone—and that is Montenegro. My peasant driver told me that when God made the earth, He saw that He had made it good, with the exception of the stones, of which there were too many. He called His angel Gabriel and told him to take a bag as large as the ends of the four winds and go down to earth, pick up the surplus stones and cast them into the sea.
The devil, who delighted in the stones and the trouble they would give humanity, flew after the busy angel.
When Gabriel had picked up all the superfluous stones on earth, and was about to drop them into the Adriatic, his Satanic Majesty took his pocket knife, cut a hole in the angel’s bag, and all the stones dropped on to that part of the earth where Montenegro is situated.
The peasant’s story accounts for the topsy-turvy position of the stones; now piled high as mountains, then solid walls of stone, and, again, huge boulders scattered about, with plenty of smaller ones between. There are some fertile spots, especially the famous Brda, where flocks find pasture; and there is an occasional field large enough for a horse to turn with its plough. Most of the country, however, is barren, and it is from this bleakest mountain region that the exodus to America has taken place.
At Nyegusi, as usual, there was an hour’s wait, and a chance to refresh the inner man with cheese and coffee. In this primitive hostelry one noticed the first evidences of the changes wrought. Nyegusi, the birthplace of the Prince, under the shadow of the historic Lovczin, has been more drained of its men in these times of peace than ever it was in time of war.
