Vacation days in Greece

by Rufus B. Richardson

Of third-class passengers we had a plenty, and a nondescript crowd they were; in other words, they beggared description. Some were magnificently dressed; but even those who were in rags were picturesque. If a painter had been present he would have been troubled by an embarras de richesse. Red and yellow were the prevailing colors in that motley crowd; gold embroidery was abundant. The few women present kept pretty well in the background, and took little or no part in the exuberant jollity of the men, who sang and danced in true Oriental style, keeping for the most part a somewhat monotonous droning, but rising sometimes into frenzy. This, continued far on into the evening hours, was bewitching. The situation was, or at least seemed to be, made for my special benefit. I seemed to have a private steamer, with the captain and crew working for me, and these fantastic and jolly people amusing me, who had promised not even “to middle.”

But the next day I was brought from reverie to my senses by the coming of first-class passengers. At Dulcino, the first of the two harbors recently gained by Montenegro, which thus became a maritime state, the Mayor of the town came on board to travel via Cattaro up to Cettinje, the capital, a long way around, but the way of least resistance. He did not break the charm, for a more gorgeously dressed and finer-shaped man one seldom sees. Scores of Montenegrins of the singers and dancers of the preceding evening, cooks and gardeners returning to their homes from Constantinople, where they are in great demand, crowded around this magnate and kissed his hand in true Oriental style, which he took in patriarchal fashion. This was in keeping with the scenes of the day before; but this giant’s wife and children were nothing but ordinary, plain people. At the next port, Antivari, a regular European lady, the wife of the Lloyd agent, came on board with the whole population of the village to give her a send-off; and we at once stepped out of dream-land.

I now fell into another mood. The whole voyage, with its long and frequent stops, began to seem a regular lark, and I so entered into the spirit of the thing that I determined at the next stop to get my bicycle up out of the hold and get a little acquaintance with the country which lay back of the long mountain line of coast. As we were booked to stop at Cattaro forty-four and a half hours, that seemed a good place to begin. The big Montenegrins had interested me so much I would go up and see where such fellows grew.

Who can describe the Gulf, or, as they call it there, the Bocche di Cattaro? It enjoys the distinction of being “perhaps the finest harbor in the world.” There is a break in the coast line; as you go in you find yourself in a broad bay; but that is not all; you pass through another opening, into another bay, and so on, the mountains growing higher all the time until, by passing five channels, one so narrow that it used to be stopped by a chain, and so is called to-day Catena, you reach the fifth bay, on the east shore of which, nestled up against the base of a high dark mountain, one of those from which the region Montenegro got its name, lies Cattaro, a town of five or six thousand inhabitants, the outpost of Austria to the south. For a brief period at about the end of the Napoleonic wars, Montenegro held this place and the Bocche. No doubt all Montenegrins long to possess it again; for it is their natural outlet to the sea, from which the thin line of Austria here shuts them out, except for the poor harbors farther south.

Much history has been enacted around this gulf, which was a prize too valuable not to be striven for. In fact, it is a paradise like few on earth. All the way through the devious passages one is reminded of Lake Lucerne by the mountain banks and of Como by the tropical vegetation. Many of the officers of the Austrian Lloyd have their homes on these shores. Our captain and at least one of the other officers spent two days here with their families. The latter brought back word that an American king named Morgan had just visited the Bocche on his yacht.

CATTARO

We arrived shortly after noon; but it took me just an hour and a half to get my bicycle through the custom-house. The officials hardly knew what to do with it. Probably no bicycle had ever entered that port, and it may be a long time before another enters. I have no doubt that they thought me a fool for bringing mine in; and one could hardly blame them for the thought. The Austrian officials, however, are so affable—I have never met an exception—that one cannot think of losing his own patience. In the cool of the day, in order to test the road, I walked, with a very little riding, up the zigzag road, getting a little taste of what awaited one who would go to Cettinje, and then dropped down again in twenty minutes after the sun had gone down. I had had enjoyment enough to pay for the experiment, and had come to the conclusion, on perhaps rather insufficient data, that on the next day, with good weather, I could get to Cettinje and back if I girded myself to it, so slight is the lateral distance on the map.

To make sure of the case, I rose early and left the ship at half-past four, with a cake of chocolate in my pocket, for the rest trusting to living on the country. Not until seven o’clock did the country offer anything. Then I got coffee from a Highland girl at a very primitive inn at the point of one of the zigzags. She had not “a very shower of beauty”; but she did have “the freedom of a mountaineer,” and a kindly twinkle in her eye. A man takes kindly to the hand and face that signify refreshment in time of need. When I asked how far it was to Cettinje the mountain maid said “tetre ore,” which, though it was a rather bad mixture of Italian and something else, probably Slavic, was extremely encouraging. Even if the climb continued for two hours more I ought to reduce her “four hours” to three. In fact, at eight o’clock, at the end of three and a half hours of steady toiling climb, I found myself at an altitude of nearly three thousand feet, almost perpendicularly above Cattaro, with the Galatea so near that it seemed as if I could drop a stone upon her deck; but I thought it best not to try; I was in a hurry. In a few minutes more I broke through the mountain which had given me so much trouble, and I was in Montenegro. I soon passed the frontier town of Njegus, in the bed of a dried-up lake, the birthplace of Prince Nicholas, the ruling sovereign, who has a country house there of such modest appearance that one could hardly believe it to belong to a prince.