A comparatively bare steep tempted us to make straight for our object; but having with difficulty fought our way upwards through a jungle of fern and dwarf elder, we presently found ourselves entangled among the débris of a not very ancient forest fire. The ground was toothed with sharp splinters of burnt rock, and strewn with a network of branches, too rotten to bear our weight, but quite strong enough to trap our feet and tumble us over—all which gins and snares were treacherously concealed by a forest of bracken which rose above our heads. Add to this, that at every few yards we had to scale high barricades of sooty timber, and at the time were at a loss to conceive why Providence should have made fir-trees so confoundedly spiky! When it is remembered that we had about five-and-twenty pounds on our backs, and that the sun was broiling hot, it may be imagined that our progress was slow, and in fact we were forced to win every inch as much with our hands as our feet. However, as we gradually stormed our citadel, we were rewarded for our bumps and lacerations by a view as strange as it was picturesque. In these upper regions it was only the smaller trees that had been actually burnt down, the larger had been simply killed and left standing. The sight as we looked down had a savage fascination quite unique; the colours were so varied, so striking, so bizarre, that they deserved to have been perpetuated by a great painter. Here and there were the charred funereal skeletons of forest giants, with jagged stumps of branches in harsh relief against a distant background of green valley and blue undulating mountain, almost voluptuous in its softness of tint and contour. In some trunks the blackness was chequered, where the bark had peeled off, by broad scars, taking every tint of amber; in others, it was draped in ashy festoons of lichen, or swathed in verdant folds of moss. Some trees, already roasted to death by fire, had at a later period been shivered by the lightning, and the whiteness of their splinters showed that little but their bark had been charred by the previous conflagration. Some indeed had actually survived it, and on one side a small island of still flourishing trees—a dark yew-green fir, an emerald and a golden beech—stood out against the sootiest thicket.
But we gradually left this funereal waste beneath us, and groping upwards once more through virgin forest, at last succeeded in regaining the ridge of Troghìr. We even hit on our lost path, but it soon eluded us again and disappeared beneath the wrecks of tall pine-trees, which seemed to have buried all traces of it. For here, if a fallen tree bars the path, the Bosniac woodman does not cut it away, but either climbs over it, or, if the obstacle is too high for man or beast to surmount, he deserts the track altogether and makes another elsewhere. Thus the forest barricades are gradually allowed to accumulate till they reach dimensions simply stupendous, and the path which originally swerved a few yards out of its course may eventually be turned as much as a mile. But we had learnt a lesson about trusting to paths which, while still smarting from the effects of our second ascent of Troghìr, we were not likely to neglect; so this time we followed the guidance of our compass as literally as we could, scaling barrier after barrier till we were well nigh worn out. No one, I think, who has not himself tried to penetrate a primeval forest on a windy mountain ridge, can realize what these obstacles really are! It was late in the afternoon when we conquered our last barricade, and to our delight beheld before us the smooth lawny swell which forms the summit of the Vučia Planina, from which the Troghìr is an offshoot.
An easy ascent brought us to the top, where we rested awhile to enjoy the glorious mountain panorama that opened out all round. We are now in the very heart of Alpine Bosnia, ‘each one of whose lofty mountains,’ to quote the words of her native historian,[186] ‘exalted to Ayuk, the fiery star, is an eyesore to the foe.’ But the traveller must make allowance for Oriental hyperbole. Here, at least, the mountains were contented with a less sidereal stature; nor was there much that could even be called rocky or precipitous except the head of Vlašić to the south, which peered over lower mountain shoulders and conical peaks, shrouded, as the long neck of Troghìr below us, as all the other Goras and Planinas round, with dense forest growth. To call the scenery Swiss would be mere flattery; indeed, its whole character, the small height of the mountains, the want of boldness, the down-like swell of their contours, recalls rather the Carpathians than any part of the Alps that I have seen. The summit of Vučia, on which we now are, is inconsiderable as regards altitude, not being more than 4,300 feet, according to our aneroid, though, to be sure, the Major makes it 5,000—for the sake of round numbers. There is something Carpathian, too, about the forests, the gigantic pines and beeches, and—as might be expected from the commonly calcareous nature of the soil—in the flora generally. Here, as in the ranges that border Roumania, the drooping gentian, the sweet-william, and the sunflower are among the most noticeable flowers.
But the sun is sinking low in the heavens, and it is high time for us to be again on our legs. We now made our way across the southern slopes of the summit, or rather table-land, of Vučia, which forms a lovely Alp or mountain pasture. At intervals we came upon peasants of the type we had seen the evening before (we had met with no human being in the intervening day) tending kine, or mowing hay. When, however, we approached some women—who, being unveiled, we assumed to be Latin Christians—to ask the bearings of Travnik, they rushed away into a thicket screeching, ‘Hai ’ti! hai ’ti!’ ‘Off! off!’ so Moslemized—if indeed they were rayahs, as we think certain—were their ideas of propriety! One of them had made a sign which we mistook for an answer to our enquiry, and against our better judgment we followed the direction indicated, and which afterwards turned out to be hopelessly wrong.
Meanwhile, our lines had fallen in pleasant places. The fresh scent of hay was delicious; the soft undulating mountain lawn, dotted with magnificent beeches, kept perpetually recalling a fine English park; on one side, too, it was appropriately fringed by a fir-plantation of Nature. It was quite hard to realize that we were far from any town or even shelter. In the midst of these loneliest of mountains one kept half expecting to catch sight of the cosy red gables and mullioned windows of some old Elizabethan mansion. The beeches seemed to have caught the inspiration of the landscape. In the freer atmosphere of these glades they had lost the almost poplar-like procerity of their forest-growth, and expanded into that more pear-shaped outline which is so congenial to genteel precincts. Over those forest depths through which we had been diving all the day had reigned the ‘silence of the central sea,’ but these woodland coasts and islands were alive with garden songsters—tits and wrens and blackbirds—fluttering about in the golden sunshine of evening, and filling our ears with familiar home melodies.
Here, too, we saw a most beautiful sight—a fine convolvulus hawk-moth (we had made acquaintance with another the evening before), up and dissipating at an hour when all well-regulated moths should be wrapped in downy slumbers, and making, as we thought, a most unfair use of a proboscis full two inches long to drain the nectar from a whole spike of yellow salvia, before any of its fellows should be awake to cry halves. It was a pert fly, and seemed quite to revel in the sunlight—a ‘fast’ trait, it is to be feared in a nocturnal insect. Such airs, too, as it gave itself!—flouting here, flirting there; flitting on from conquest to conquest. As if the gorgeous creature did not know that it was irresistible! As if the very sunbeams did not lackey it—showering gold-dust over that expanse of delicately-mottled grey! What Danae sprite, never so pent up in perfumed cell, could resist such courtship? What flowery elf be proof against the superb obeisance of that taper body, tricked out in all its tiger livery of rose and sable? To see it dawdle round a bevy of fair blossoms, in lazy eddies, drifting rather than flying, with a blasé air of languid inspection; to see it, in more light fantastic vein, dance off to the flower of its capricious choice, and bob airily up and down, coquetting with those saffron lips, ere it poised—how daintily!—to steal their sweetness. It was decidedly livelier than our friend of yestereen, and so intent upon its nectar as to let us gaze within a foot of it; it seemed to have a keener, a more epicurean, enjoyment of life, and gave itself all the airs of a bon-vivant. Indeed it showed its good taste in its preference for salvia; for the scent of these flowers is exquisite, and I have sometimes stopped wonderingly to look for musk, so like is the smell at a little distance off.
On this side of the mountains the flowers and foliage are more luxuriant. Glade and woodland are sprinkled with kinds we have not yet met with, a large rosy cranesbill, a yellow labiate, with a peak of the most gorgeous purple leaves—if indeed they were not petals—tremulous little hare-bells, lastræa and delicate varieties of ferns, while here and there bright scarlet strawberries gemmed the ground. The trees grow to an even more gigantic stature than those we saw before. We measured beeches fifteen feet in circumference, at about three feet from the ground; and many—as on the Mazulia Planina opposite, where some of the finest timber in Bosnia is said to grow—rise to a height of a hundred and twenty feet. A pine-tree measured fourteen feet and a half in girth.
For we are again immersed in the primeval forest—and night seems nearer and shelter further. The sun was already setting, when a gap in the trees revealed to us a mountain vista, which showed that we were on the wrong side of the ridge. A woodman whom we presently met told us that we were going towards Zenica instead of Travnik, and we discovered that we were on the debatable mountain neck, between the Vučia and Gorcevica Planinas. The woodman intimated to us that to strike across and attempt to regain the Travnik path was hopeless, and that we had better follow the ridge in the direction of Zenica. But we made up our minds to cut across and follow the valley of a stream which led in our direction. Accordingly we crossed over to the western side of our ridge, and found ourselves on the brink of an almost precipitous steep, descending to the Jasenica, our desired stream, heard but not seen, thirteen hundred feet below.
The mean angle at which this slope descended was, as nearly as we could calculate, 60°. Had it been bare, we could not possibly have descended it, laden as we were; but it was covered with beech-trees, which might stop us if we fell; so we resolved to attempt a descent.
It was certainly very difficult work; the beech-leaves made it slippery, and concealed rocks and boughs would trip us up, or a piece of soil give way. We were perpetually dislodging fragments of rock, which rolled and leapt down, quicker and quicker, crash after crash, cannoning against the trunks, taking bigger and bigger bounds, till a final plunge told us that they had reached the stream. They never lodged half way. Every now and then we seemed likely to follow them, but we always succeeded in arresting our fall by clutching at a passing trunk. It grew darker and darker; but we still kept on at our painful task, till, about six hundred feet down, I broke one of my knapsack straps in a tumble, and it being impossible in such a position either to mend it or to carry it, we were lucky in discovering, close by, a hollow—formed by the uprooting of a forest giant—to serve as sleeping-quarters for our third night running, sub Jove frigido, and where we literally lodged till peep-o’-day. The worst was that we were unable to collect fuel for a fire, and before morning a chill breeze sprang up, and the thermometer sank almost to freezing point; for, in less mountainous localities than this, August frosts are by no means rare in Bosnia. For nocturnal visitors we might take our choice—as the wind invented footsteps—of the wild swine, bears, and wolves, that inhabit these mountains; but none of these fourfooted gentry molested us; and, except that once or twice we woke with the cold, or by reason of sundry stones and awkward tags of root, which would keep running into us, we slept soundly enough.