We now wanted to make our way into the Narenta valley over the north-west shoulder of Mt. Bielastica, but were turned out of our course by the deep gorge of the Priesnica, and thought it best to ascend the south-eastern promontory of a largish range known by the name of Mt. Igman—though the title covers a multitude of peaks. The scenery now became more beautiful than ever, though profoundly lonely, save here and there for a beautiful black squirrel leaping from branch to branch, or a huge brown vulture floating through the azure overhead. The steeps up which we now made our way were covered with forest more varied in its composition than those of Troghìr and Vučia. Beech, as there, was the predominant tree; but oaks and thorns, dark firs and pines, glaucous ashes and fountainous birches—often so happily blended and grouped as to transcend the planter’s art—disputed the sole dominion of the queen of the forest. The trees were perhaps hardly so large, as a rule, as those we had seen in the mountains of more northern Bosnia, but we noticed one pine no less than eighteen feet in circumference at a yard from the ground. Another speciality of this forest-mountain was that the trees were not so thickly crowded, and grew more freely. The sovereign beech has no need to gird herself so closely, but can stretch out her queenly arms, and spread far and wide her leafy flounces without fear of her robes being pressed and crumpled by the crowd. Glades are here more frequent, and ever and anon a charming lawny break would open a vista through the trees, and we caught a glimpse of the distant ridge of Bielastica.
Mount Bielastica from slopes of Mt. Igman.
We reached two summits of the mountain we were on, the first by our aneroid 4,350 feet above sea-level, the second 4,560. About these summits, which were less wooded than the lower regions, we found a variety of flowers, recalling the flora of our chalk downs—the yellow snapdragon, the scabious, white as well as mauve, and the heartsease, though larger and of a richer purple, much as we remembered them on our own Chilterns; and here, as there, the chalk-hill blue seemed the commonest butterfly. But besides these we noticed rosy sweet-williams and autumn crocus, with its double trinity of lilac petals—iris-like—a design for a gothic window. On one summit, gained earlier in the day, we found a curious bulbous plant with a tall stalk and drooping purple bells, each curving down on a separate stem like a pigmy snake’s head;[267] and some mountain lawns shone blue as the sky above, with a wondrous thistle whose leaves as well as flowers were tinged on their upper surface with a bright azure.
But what surprised me most, was to see the Solomon’s seal-like flower, which we had noticed in all the Bosnian forests, bristle up erect and stiff on the breezy mountain summit, after undergoing such a transformation that I should not have known it for the same plant had not I marked the gradual transition. It was now for the first time that I identified the mysterious floral weeping-willow, which had delighted us so often, with an old friend—the autumn gentian. As we descended the mountain we watched the transition with astonishment. The flowers, instead of circling the upright stem in a perfect coronal, crept to the upper side of it as it gradually declined. The leaves and bells grew larger—the stem as much as two feet long—till in the damper parts of the forest the whole was once more transformed into what looked like Solomon’s seal with tall azure cups stretching upwards from the back of its drooping stem—a perfect emblem of hope in sorrow.
But a curious feature in the mountain formation began to make itself painfully felt. There was no water. All the streams ran below ground. Vale and mountain were alike pitted with those inverted-conical hollows—the Dolinas, which we remembered in the limestone wilderness of Carniola—that terrible Karst. These circular hollows are nothing but swallow-holes, formed by the water in its passage to the caverns of its underground course. And so it happened that we were forced to climb on, hour after hour, through the mid-day heat of a Southern sun, without discovering a drop to drink. Our intense thirst rendered us so desperate that we willingly forsook our proper course to plunge into deep gorges in the forlorn hope of finding water. But it was invariably to find that all our labour had been wasted, and that we must climb upwards once more and seek elsewhere. Three times we thought that we had succeeded, and as many times we were disappointed; twice what we hoped to be drinkable turned out to be a filthy pool, almost too bad for cattle; once, however, we thought to have procured some from a shepherd whose temporary hut had attracted our attention from a height above. The poor man went and fetched us a bucket of liquid, but it was green slime! At last, about four in the afternoon—after eight hours of hard struggle since the coffee which we had quaffed at the roadside shed—almost fainting with drought we found, in a moist part of a track that we had hit on, some mules’ footprints, in which some of the rainwater from the storm of the previous day was still standing. This we eagerly sucked up through a hollow hemlock stem; and, though the beaker was novel, were much refreshed.
But what with our frantic searches after water and vain attempts to find a pass which exists nowhere but on the Major’s map, we had diverged very seriously from our right direction; and, on reaching a mountain edge, we discerned ourselves far out in our bearings, and far too much to the north-east. Two thousand feet below us we descried an inhabited country, and, delicious sight! a stream; and though night was closing in, and both my brother and myself are subject to the inconvenience of being night-blind, we resolved, if possible, to descend to this friendly valley before darkness set in. It was a race against night; but we literally bounded down, and striking on a shepherd’s path, were able to run the rest of the way, and descended two thousand feet and were quenching all the thirst of the day in the crystal stream, within half an hour from the time when we reached the mountain edge. A peasant whom we here met conducted us to a Han on the high road a little way off, and we found ourselves under shelter exactly sixteen hours after our start in the morning, during which time we had given ourselves hardly any rest.
Plan of Bosnian Han.
Aug. 26th.—Our Han was a miserable little hovel, consisting chiefly of one room, which served at once for kitchen, squatting-room, and bedchamber, in which we slept on a wooden daïs amongst a lot of ragged Turks; but travellers must expect strange bed-fellows—and after all, our chamber was comparatively flealess. We found that we were on the high road which connects Sarajevo, with Mostar, the capital of the Herzegovina, but on the wrong side of the pass, and about seven hours’ walk from Coinica, the first town in the duchy of St. Sava, and our this day’s destination. We stopped on our way to refresh ourselves at a Han, of which I give a plan and elevation, in order to convey an idea of the ordinary cottage in this part of Bosnia: for the dwelling-houses are like the inns, except that their entrance arch opens on to the yard and not on to the road. The lower part is, as usual, reserved for horses and cattle. Making your way through these stables you ascend a ladder in the middle and emerge above on a central hall, at once guest-room and kitchen, with a divan at one end round a bay window open to the air, and the rafters above literally tarred by the smoke which rises from a chimneyless hearth of flat stones. The external walls here are of stone—a Herzegovinian characteristic.