He thereupon brought macaroni soup, boiled meat, roast meat, fried potatoes, cheese, grapes, and coffee.
We never found out why in Montenegro they should make it a point of honour to say they have nothing. It resembles the Chinese habit of alluding to a "loathsome" wife and a "disgusting" daughter.
After lunch we visited our own hotel and found mine hostess waiting for us with her short arms akimbo. She wanted the "beautiful large bedroom" to which we had moved in the morning, finding it the same size as the one below, but rather lighter. Its former occupant had arrived, and we were to go back to the dungeon.
"That is not good," said Jo, and we flatly refused to go downstairs.
"If we leave this room we go altogether."
She again patted us and begged us to consider the matter closed. We could stick to the room.
Certainly that dog fancier was right.
There was a very old monastery which we had passed as we rode into Ipek.
Although we are more interested in the people of the present than in ruins of the past, these old Serbian monuments leave so strange a memory of a civilization suddenly cut off at its zenith that they have an emotional appeal far apart from that of archæology. These little oases of culture preserved amongst a wilderness of Turk tempt the traveller with a romance which is now vanishing from Roman and Greek ruins.