The women looked as a rule pleasanter than the men, whose general appearance, as may perhaps be gathered from the illustration, is anything but prepossessing. The whole crown is shorn of hair, Turkish fashion, but usually, instead of the single pig-tail of the faithful, two long elf-locks are left dangling from the back of the head, and the effect of the bare occiput with these two sickly appendages is little short of disgusting; add to which that the natural length of the neck is exaggerated by this tonsure. From the front the aspect is not more pleasing; the bald pate, combined with the bony attenuated face and round eyebrows, being often in a ghastly manner suggestive of a death’s-head. The long sunken eye-slits, whose outer corners curve down, so as to follow the lines of the brow-arches, give them an air of sleepy cunning, the eyebrows often overhanging as to form a den for the suspicious roving eyes. The lips are thick, broad, and pouting. The whole face seems dazed, and it is almost beyond mortal patience to see the heavy, slow, owlish way in which their head turns on its axis if anything attracts their attention. When you look at them they always seem as if they do not know what expression is expected of them, and their stolidity is enhanced by turbans which make them look top-heavy. It is easy to understand why the quick-witted Greeks of the lower Empire should have nick-named the Sclaves Chondrokephaloi, or ‘block-heads.’
Yet, after all, the hideous tonsure and what is vilest in their demeanour are but accidental badges of servitude and oppression—removable by a few generations of free government. The sluggishness of their deliberation may be quickened by culture; and, the causes of suspicion once removed, the hang-dog look of the Bosniac would disappear as surely as it has ceased among the free Serbians, and as it is disappearing at this day among the liberated Wallachian serfs. The slow, measured utterance of the race, so far from being a proof of inferiority, has been compared by Ami Boué to that of Englishmen, and this keen observer of the Serbs speaks of the people and language as born, if any ever were, for parliamentary government.
The frame of these Bosniac countrymen lacks the elegance and suppleness of the modern Greek, but it is stronger and of larger mould. No stranger who passes through Bosnia can fail to be struck at the exceeding stature of the inhabitants. The fair here is thronged with men six feet high, and over. An English traveller who passed through this country in 1634, and stayed a day or two in ‘Saraih,’ ‘the metropolis of the kingdome of Bosnah,’ says, ‘the most notable things I found was the goodnesse of the water, and vaste, almost gyant-like stature of the men, which with their bordring upon Germany, made mee suppose them to be the offspring of those old Germans noted by Cæsar and Tacitus for their huge size, which in other places is now degenerate into the ordinary proportions of men.’[181] Gaunt they may be, lean and overgrown; but they are sons of Anak; and though they may now seem a cowering rabble, the example of their self-liberated brothers in Montenegro and free Serbia should teach the world that in happier circumstances they too might hold up their heads and display the spirit of heroes. Even in their features, in their broad benevolent forehead and aquiline nose, are disguised the lineaments of grandeur and manly beauty. Despite the ill-favour of their expression, there was generally a lurking geniality to be detected in it, and when among themselves I was struck with their kindly manners and good-fellowship; indeed I suspect that it is generally the stranger’s own fault—probably his want of tact in posing before them as the friend of the Turk—if they do not show themselves friendly to him, and relapse into a bearish reserve. And though the Bosniacs are much accused of that common failing of the Southern Sclaves, intoxication, yet it must be said to their credit that in this large gathering—so large that hardly a spot of standing ground was left unoccupied in the whole mountain neck—we did not notice a single case of drunkenness, and this though there were plenty of booths in the fair for the sale of arrack and Slavonian wine. Indeed the general orderliness, the absence of license of any sort, among the Christian part of the assembly, was beyond all praise.
As to the fair the display of wares was poor enough, there being little exposed for sale beyond the usual crockery, and the cheapest and most gimcrack jewelry, brass rings, and brooches of the very worst Bosniac fabric, and here and there a little fruit—water-melons, and small plums and pears. The only articles worth mentioning were the square, elegantly chipped gun-flints, of a kind which is to be found in all Bosnian markets. These are knapped at Avlona, in Albania, near the old Acroceraunian promontory, from about which the flints are gathered; and they are interesting, as being probably the most perfect representatives in modern Europe of an art which was once the highest among mankind. Our Norfolk flint-knappers, who still export this old-world article of commerce to the savages of Africa, could never compete with the artists who turn out these chefs-d’œuvre of delicate flaking!
Gun-Flint.
About 1 P.M. we started on our mountain-crossing expedition towards Travnik; first descending from our altitude towards the Franciscan monastery of Comušina, which we found to consist of an unpretending house and a bare, pewless church standing in the middle of a wretched little village. The door of the monastery was fastened, and a woman who parleyed with us from an upper window said that all the ‘brothers’ were up at the shrine. On our way we had passed through the Christian cemetery—a wilderness so deep in bracken that it seemed to have been purposely left to the charitable clothing of Nature, as if they feared that even their graves, if seen, might be insulted by the passing Zaptieh. The memorials here were rude stones, sometimes scarcely touched by art, sometimes rudely graven with a Latin cross like one of the ‘Hadjuks’ graves’ already described. But we groped among the fern-leaves in vain for an inscription.
Beyond this we descended by a path to the Ussora, and finding that our attendant Zaptieh’s scansorial powers were small, and that, not having on his shoulders a heavy knapsack like ourselves, he was yet inclined to lag hopelessly, there was nothing for it but to dismiss him, after first inditing under a walnut-tree beside the waters of Ussora a letter in our choicest French to the Kaïmakàm, in which we gave our escort a good character, only expressing our regret that his inability to climb mountains à l’Anglaise deprived us of the further pleasure of his company. We afterwards had reason to regret that besides the backshish or largess which was his due we gave him too large a proportion of our remaining store of bread, not sufficiently realising the slow progress which we should make between this and Travnik.
We now followed the river bed, every now and then wading from one side to the other of the shallow stream in a vain search for a forest-path which should lead in the right direction. We found Major Roskiević’s[182] map so completely out, that we really suspected that he had been the victim of the Vila’s enchantments—and who, conversant with the history of the building of Scodra, does not know that it is her practice to thwart engineers who presumptuously invade her precincts? And I would urge in proof of this hypothesis that her sacred mount, the Vila Gora of the peasants hereabouts, under whose brows we are now passing, is conspicuous by its absence on the Major’s chart. Before we had concluded our itinerary of Bosnia we had further proofs that the Vila or some other freakish sprite had possessed that unfortunate officer. Often has the Major played the part of a will-o’-the-wisp for our especial misguidance! At times he would display such extraordinary capacities of faith as to remove mountains. He would evolve streams which existed not, out of his inner consciousness, and when he conceived that this pleasantry had gone far enough he would swallow them up in the earth. He would transport villages bodily. He would run a broad valley through a mountain mass from which Xerxes would have recoiled, and bridge over chasms at which Stephenson would have shuddered. Not that his humour is always of this ponderous turn; oh no! he has his lighter veins, too, in which he will draw you a zigzagging road straight as a line, or pop the only path on the wrong side of the stream!