But we must attend to the lords of modern Foinica! A Zaptieh brings a message from the Kaïmakàm to say that he and the Kadi are about to drive to Kisseljak, our own destination, and to offer us a lift in one of their carriages; so, being for many reasons anxious to push on, we declined the pressing invitation of the monks to dine and pass the night with them, and descending once more to the village found an arabà waiting for us outside a Han, where we had ordered some eatables. The arabà—an ordinary country waggon, only provided with a better harness—belonged to the Kadi, but the Kaïmakàm had taken him into his carriage—a more sumptuous equipage—in order to provide room for us. We started therefore under good auspices, these two functionaries acting as our vanguard. Nor did the courtesy of the Turks stop here, for they had given our driver a supply of rosy apples and a sweet red-fleshed melon wherewith to serve us at intervals during the drive. About half-way down the Foinica valley our cortége stopped at a little roadside Han, where the Kaïmakàm motioned us to sit down by him on an open-air divan, canopied by shady branches and overhanging the stream; and while he treated us to coffee and water-melon both he and our Kadi reaped a quiet enjoyment by extending their hospitality to some fishes below.
The pebbles in the bed of the stream are stained of a rich brown and orange with the iron ore in which the valley abounds. On the flanks of the mountains, on either side, might here and there be detected huge scars and traces of old excavations. These are the mines of gold and silver worked of old by the Romans, and later on by the Ragusans, but now untouched. We are in the very midst of the mineral treasury of Bosnia. This vale of Foinica contains, besides these precious metals, lead ore, arsenic, quarries (unworked) of slate; and in a tributary gorge which we had seen running south-east, cinnabar, rich in quicksilver.[227] A little lower down, just where the Foinica stream runs into the Lepenica, the valley opened out considerably and formed an alluvial plain. Here and there among the stunted vegetation a column of blue smoke marked out a rude forge, where a little iron, the only metal exploited, is smelted to be converted into shovels, horse-shoes, and sundry tools and weapons for Bosnian home consumption. A few miles further down the Lepenica debouches into the valley of the Bosna, which is described as one vast coal-field.
Were we, one kept asking oneself, passing through what some day may become one of the Black Countries of Europe? Would, as the world grew older, something of the tremendous energy of our Midlands burst forth upon this stagnant valley—blasting, boring, blackening, metamorphosing its every feature? Mountains rose around us overgrown with primeval forest—habitations were few and far between. What there were, were miserable hovels—each in its mangy patch of maize—more ruinous than any we remembered having seen in Bosnia. It was hard to transform such into the busy streets of a great city—the silence of the woods seemed too inveterate to be ever broken by the crash of a steam-hammer. The hornpipe performed by our waggon, over what the Turks were pleased to call a road, was a positive relief to such desolation; and yet what stretch of imagination could convert it into an iron-way, or our ambling Bosnian pony into a locomotive? We seemed, however, to detect one little omen of the future, and accepted the augury: at one spot the foliage of some neighbouring beech-trees had been browned away prematurely by the fumes of a primitive forge.
And why, it will reasonably be asked, is all this mineral wealth allowed to rust in the bosom of mother earth? Are there not miners in plenty who go further afield than Bosnia in search for precious metals? Yes. But in Australia, even in California, there is something like civilized government. There are railways—there are roads; those in authority do not look upon the successful digger as their natural prey. They are, at any rate, too canny to kill the goose with the golden egg.
But here, not only are there natural obstacles serious in any country, but before any mining can be set on foot a long stretch of road must first be made, to be kept up at the expense of the projectors; add to this, that even when an avenue to one of the highways of the country is thus opened out, it will probably be found impossible to conduct traffic of any magnitude along them; and that there is scarcely a bridge in the country which would support the weight of a heavy load of ores.
But even were these obstacles overcome, there are others of a political nature fatal at the very outset to such enterprises. To take a single instance. Over the hills to the south-east of Foinica, near the Franciscan monastery of Kreševo, are veins of cinnabar and quicksilver, which have been estimated to be as rich as any in Europe. So rich in fact are they, that a German company were tempted to believe that, despite the expenses of preliminary road-making and outlay of another kind, it might pay to work them. But a concession must first be obtained at Stamboul, and nothing can be obtained at that sink of all human corruption without copious bribery. The company began in good spirits; they made first one ‘present’ and then another; but months passed, the demands of the Sultan’s ‘advisers’ grew more and more exorbitant, and the prospect of obtaining the required permission more remote, till, seeing themselves in a fair way to be ruined before they could begin, they gave up their enterprise as hopeless. Precisely the same causes have prevented the working of the vast coal measures of the Bosna!
There is one remarkable phenomenon in connection with these ore-bearing districts, which must strike anyone who examines the distribution of population in Bosnia; and that is, that these former centres of mining activity are at the present day the strongholds of the Roman Catholic population of the country.
Can it be merely accidental that three of the chief Roman Catholic monasteries in the country—Foinica, Kreševo, and Sutiska—are each placed in the very focus of the richest mineral areas in the province?[228]
No, surely, it is not fortuitous. It is rather the result of a chain of causes, reaching far back into the past, and which, if I read them rightly, are explanatory of much that is most characteristic and least intelligible in Bosnian history. Stated baldly, I cannot doubt that the presence of the Catholic population and their monastic seats in the mining districts of Bosnia is ultimately due to the Roman conquest, or—if we may single out a man—to Q. Asinius Pollio.