As we entered the harbour of Gravosa we passed on our left an enticing watery gorge, which I am doubtful whether to call sea or river. This is known as the Valle d’Ombla; and as it presents one of the most extraordinary natural phenomena in the whole of Dalmatia, and is withal a most favourite pleasaunce of Ragusan citizens, I did not omit to pay my devoirs to it during my stay in the city of the Argosies.
For two miles and a half after leaving the harbour of Gravosa our boat (for it is best approached by water) sailed up a broad and winding channel of the most exquisite crystalline blue, reflecting on either side rocky heights, and lower slopes covered with cypresses and olives, and here and there dotted with white villas and cottages. About two miles and a half from the point where this inlet debouches into the harbour of Gravosa, the channel suddenly narrowed, and the boat had to be propelled up the river proper, which is rapid and of considerable volume. Its whole course was not more than a mile.
A little way beyond a church called Rosgiatto, rose before us a precipitous limestone mountain, whose ridge forms the boundary of the Herzegovina, and beyond which we heard distinctly the noise of an engagement then going on between the insurgents and the Turks. At the foot of this mountain the river Ombla springs from the bowels of the earth, with sufficient energy to work a mill at its very source, and in such volume that we may safely echo the words of the Ragusan poet, Elio Cervino:—
Danubio et Nilo non vilior Ombla fuisset
Si modo progressus posset habere suos.
At the mill, which has several large water-wheels, we landed, and from beneath the shadow of a fig-tree, then laden with golden fruit, surveyed this stupendous spring.
The source itself is nearly forty yards in breadth, squaring off against a wall of naked limestone rock which rises above it nearly perpendicularly, some fifteen hundred feet. So untroubled is the pool, so still is all around, that you can hardly realise that a river is welling up from far below. Here and there, however, the glassy surface seems to swell and heave, and in places the waters take a mysterious intensity of sapphire that speaks of unfathomable depths. For centuries indeed the sources remained unfathomed, and it needed a line eighteen hundred feet long before the bottom was reached at last![320] The mystery of the Ombla’s origin has been solved by observing the sympathy in ebb and flow which it shows with an inland river, the Trebinjštica, on which lies the old Herzegovinian city of Trebinje. This river is absorbed by Mother Earth in two several places, and one of its swallow-holes is distant about seven miles, as the crow flies, from the source of the Ombla. Thus the river must pass right under a mountain chain, and accomplish many miles of underground meanderings before it again emerges.
The Ombla appears to have been known to the ancients as the Arion, and Virgil might well have given it a preference of immortality over the Timavus, whose springs are too scattered and of too small a volume to impress the spectator. Doubtless Arion had his nymphs, and certainly in mediæval times they seem to have found their successor, even as the mossy cell of nymph Egeria became the heritage of Santa Rosalia. Just above the source, amidst a shady grove of fig-trees, I came upon the ruins of a chapel with some fair fifteenth-century mouldings, and, carved over a doorway, an angel and St. Mary with the inscription AVE GRACIA PLENA, which would indicate the Christian Nymph of the Source to have been no other than Our Lady.
But let us leave this pleasant resort, and resume our way to Ragusa herself.
As we mounted upwards over the neck of land which separates the modern port of Ragusa from the ancient city, a magnificent view of the land-locked harbour of Ragusa, and the shipping anchored on its tranquil waters, opened out behind us. The stern rocky heights which keep watch and ward over this fiord of Southern sea, and shield it from the fierce blasts of Bora and Scirocco, soften down perforce as they approach that wondrous ultramarine margin. This old historic shore—it too has ‘espoused the everlasting sea,’ and clothes itself in raiment worthy of the consort that slumbers in its ample bosom! Luxuriant vines, pale olive woods, and thickets of stately cypresses overspread the lower slopes; and this Southern vegetation, with its alternating gloom and pallor, embosoms the red-tiled roofs and white walls, of the pretty little villas, perfumed by gardens where roses and verbenas mingle with the citron and myrtle of a more tropical flora. Here and there was a less pleasing spectacle—a foretaste of that melancholy flavour which will assert itself in the Ragusa of to-day. Once or twice we came upon the deserted shell of what had been the country seat of one of the merchant princes of the palmier days of the republic, standing with ruinous walls and charred rafters just as it was left seventy years ago, when the barbarous Black Mountaineers and Russians sacked the suburbs of Ragusa.