We rowed out through the half-sunken trees. At the end of a spit of land was a man gnawing a piece of raw beef. We shouted to him to ask what he was doing; and he answered that he was curing his malaria. The two women in the bow were very pretty, one was a mere child.
There were wisps of sunset cloud in the sky, and soon night came quite down.
As it grew dark all sense of motion disappeared. The boat shrugged uneasily with the movement of the oars, the rowlocks made of loops of twisted osier creaked, but one could not perceive that one was going forwards. The hills lost their solidity, becoming mere holes in the grey blue of the sky, a bright planet made a light smudge on the ruffled water in which the stars could not reflect. As we crept forwards into the river and the mountains closed in, the water became more calm, and the stars came out one by one beneath us, while in the ripple of our wake the image of the planet ran up continuously in strings of little golden balls like a juggling trick.
The Frenchman turned his head and made a noise like the rowlocks. "Il faut chanter quand même," he explained, "pour encourager les autres." Jo then started "Frère Jacques." Jan and Dr. Ob took it up till the Frenchman burst in with an entirely different time and key. Then one of the oar girls began a queer little melody on four notes only, and all the four women joined, one end of the boat answering the other. They sang through their noses, and high up in the falsetto. By shutting one's eyes one could imagine a great ox waggon drawn uphill by four bullocks and one of the wheels ungreased. Yet it was not unpleasing, this queer shrill, recurrent rhythm, the monotonous creak and splash of the oars, the mystery of feeling one's way in the blue gloom, through reed and water-lily beds, up this cliff-bound river, and far away the faint twitter—also recurrent and monotonous—of some nightjar....
The night grew bitterly cold on the water. One of our passengers, a little Russian dressmaker, had malaria and shivered with ague. Jo gave her her cloak. The Frenchman's cook was unsuitably dressed, for she had on but a thin chiffon blouse. We ourselves had summer clothes, and we were all mightily glad to see the glare of Rieka in the sky.
Our luck be praised, there were two old carriages with older horses, and another for the Frenchman. We supped moderately at a restaurant kept by an Austrian, and still shivering scrambled into the carriages. We had no lights, but the road was visible by the stars.
We went up and up, up the same road down which we had come three days before. Below one could see strange planes of different darknesses, but not any shape, and soon one was too aware of physical discomfort to notice the night. Besides, one had had enough of night. Miss Petrovitch told the boy to hurry up the horses; he beat them; she then rebuked him for beating them. After a while the boy grew tired of her contradictory orders, and lying down on the box fell fast asleep. The poor old horses plodded along. To right and left were immense precipices, but nobody seemed to care.
We reached Cettinje about two a.m., found the hotel open, and a room ready for us, and in spite of our frozen limbs were soon asleep.
