Aug. 31st.—Next morning, after considerable bargaining, we engaged a flat beetle-like craft to convey ourselves and our fortunes to Stagno, viâ the left arm of the Narenta. The landscape now afforded most startling contrasts of fertility and barrenness. The heights that overhung the Narenta, or stretched away to environ its broad alluvial plains, were mere rock heaps, of that lunar desolation already described; so bare that the mountain goat can scarce glean a pittance on their bony terraces. But the broad delta below, formed by the double-armed Narenta, is the richest land in all Dalmatia; the maize by the river-side attains a gigantic stature; on other places the soil is covered by a luxuriant network of vines, which, without any training or apparent cultivation, yield grapes as fine as those of Mostar; and there are mulberry-trees at Fort Opus fifteen feet in circumference. But how little of this marvellous rich soil is even culturable now-a-days! To the right of us, what was once a blooming champaign, covered with tilled fields, and dowering a city wealthy and refined, is now a stretch of fever-breeding marshes which it would cost millions to drain. The wretched inhabitants of the few villages that now remain, are, during the summer months, never free from intermittent fever, and the stranger who values his life must not tarry at this season even to explore the interesting relics of antiquity that we are now passing on our right.
Among the swamps that lie two or three miles to the north of Metcović are still to be seen the foundations of many of the houses of the Illyrian Narbonne,[315] further remains of which, including many inscriptions, are scattered on the hill above, which takes its name from the modern village of Viddo. Here stood the old Narbona, or as it was called in the later days of Rome, Narona; a city so ancient that it was already of renown five centuries before our era, and which lost none of its eminence when, in B.C. 168, Lucius Annius added it to the possessions of Rome. At Narbona, now known as Narona, the Romans planted a colony, and among the many inscriptions that have been discovered, we find ample witness to its municipal liberties; while from others we learn that temples of Jove, Diana of the woods, and Father Liber, once graced this spot. Another inscription on the tomb of a Naronan lapidary, to which I shall have occasion to refer, may, perhaps, bear witness to an art which attained considerable perfection in the cities of Roman Illyria, and of which many traces, in the shape of beautifully engraved gems, are still discovered on this site.
Yet it was not under the Romans that Narona and the rich alluvial plains of the Narenta, amidst which our boat is meandering, attained that importance which makes the name of the Narentines familiar to the student of European history.
In the year 639 A.D. Narona, which till then had remained a flourishing Roman city, was reduced to ashes by a mingled horde of Avars and Sclaves, and a few years later the Serbian Sclaves called in by the Emperor Heraclius took possession of the vacant sites of the lower Narenta. Out of the ruins of the Roman Narona they built a new town, and here, on the site of classic temples, reared a fane to a Sclavonic god, whose name, Viddo,[316] is still perpetuated in that of the modern village. The site of this Illyrian Narbonne thus became a stronghold of heathendom in these parts, just as with the Sclavonians of the Baltic shores Paganism found its last defenders among those staunch Rügen islanders who guarded the precincts of the sacred city of Arkona. It was not till the year 873 that Nicetas, the Admiral of the Byzantine Emperor Basil, prevailed on the Narentines to accept baptism; the temple of their country’s god underwent a strange conversion, and Viddo lived again in a Christian guise as St. Vitus![317]
In the next century the country of the Narentines is still known as Pagania, the land of the Pagans, by which name Constantine Porphyrogenitus mentions it in his account of the Serbians; and it was during the ninth and tenth centuries that these barbarous Sclaves, yet untamed by a civilized religion, issued forth from the swamps and inlets of the Narenta, to ravage the coasts of the Adriatic, and to rival their heathen counterparts and contemporaries, the Sea-kings of the North. As early as 827 their ‘Archons,’ as the Byzantine Emperor calls the Starosts of their Republic, refused to pay the customary tribute to Eastern Rome; and soon after this date we find them in possession of Curzola, Lagosta, Meleda, Lesina, Brazza, and other islands of the Adriatic. But it is their rivalry with Venice which exalts the history of the Narentines into world importance. The rising city of the lagoons saw her commerce cut off by these hardy corsairs, and was at last actually forced to pay them an ignominious tribute. It was not till 997 that the Doge Pietro Orseolo II. succeeded in throwing off the yoke and attacking the pirates in their Narentan fastnesses. After three centuries of piratic domination, the Narentines saw all their island empire taken from them, and themselves not only forced to disgorge their plunder, but to swear allegiance to their rival. The power of the Pirate State was broken for ever; but the fate of Venice had trembled in the balance, and for a moment the whole current of European civilization seemed destined to be perverted from its channel by the inhabitants of the now obscure valley through which we are passing. It were perhaps as idle to speculate what might have been the history of Europe, had the Queen of the Adriatic been smothered in her cradle, as to discuss the fates of Lerna or Nemea, had infant Heracles perished in the coils of the serpent which he strangled; but the most casual student of Venetian annals must perceive that the final triumph of Venice over the Narentines is the great climacteric in the history of her rise.
We thought we detected something of the old piratic genius of the race in the way in which our boatmen plundered the maize and vine fields as we passed; but there was nothing of Pagan savagery in their demeanour and conversation, which on the contrary formed a marked contrast to the rudeness and asperity of the ordinary Bosniac or Herzegovinian. They spoke indeed a dialect closely akin to the Illyrian of the interior, but they spoke it with energy, vivacity, elegance; with a softness of cadence so thoroughly Italian, that when, as all of them did at times, they changed to that language to address the signori, we hardly detected the change. Their very form is lither, suppler; of lesser mould, but a striking contrast to the overgrown ungraceful Bosniac. The eyebrows of these Narentines are not so arched, the hair is darker; they seemed to be many of them Sclavonized Italians, descendants perhaps of the Roman colonists of Narbona. One of our boatmen was a very interesting type of man. He spoke Dalmatian like the rest, but his face—which, like that of many other Dalmatian faces that I recall, beamed with all the openness of a sea-faring people—was typically Scotch; and, oddly enough, he wore what looked like a Scotch cap, minus the tails. His hair was of a lighter and more reddish hue than that of the others. One almost fancied that we had here before us a waif of that early Celtic population of Illyria already invoked as nomenclators of the Illyrian Narbonne whose ruins we are passing to our right.
Meanwhile we have been making very slow progress, since a fierce scirocco has set dead in the teeth of our small craft; and as we arrive at Fort Opus, an old Venetian station at the apex of the Narentan delta, our boatmen inform us that our two-master is too lubberly for them to hope to take us to Stagno in it while the scirocco continues to blow, in which case the voyage might take two or three days. They professed their willingness to find a smaller vessel which should be able to cope with the elements, and to resign half the wages, for which we had agreed upon, to the new boatmen. ‘You see, Sirs, it is not for want of will—but we cannot struggle against God!’
At Fort Opus, accordingly, we shifted into another smaller craft, pointed at both stern and stem, and beetle-like as the other, and were soon on our way again along a part of the Narenta’s course which might well be the source of weirdest myth and legend. Just beyond Fort Opus, the hills on the left—bonier skeletons, if possible, than before—draw nearer to the river, till they frown over its depths. It is at this point that ever and anon mysterious boomings and bellowings are heard to proceed as from the inmost recesses of the mountain. It is, say those who have heard it, as the bellowing of a bull, sometimes here, sometimes there, and sometimes everywhere at once. At other times it seems to issue from the darkest pools of the Narenta itself. I cannot say that we ourselves heard the ‘hideous hum,’ but these noises cannot be set down as the creatures of superstitious imagination; for a competent observer, Signor Lanza, who was physician in this district, and to whom is due a scientific account of this part of the Narenta valley, has himself borne ample witness of the existence of this phenomenon; nor does it stand alone, for there are equally authentic accounts of similar subterranean murmurs and explosions having been heard in Meleda and other islands of the Dalmatian Littorale. The explanation given by some is that the detonations are due to the pressure of the tide on the air pent up in the subterranean caverns which honeycomb the limestone Karst-formation of these Illyrian coastlands; but Dr. Lanza—who notices that the phenomenon generally takes place either at sunrise or sundown—confesses that ‘a veil of mystery hangs over the whole.’ Meanwhile, nothing but the portent is certain; and fearful as I am of giving publicity to ill-omened words, I cannot refrain from breathing a suspicion that this unhallowed bellowing may proceed from some hideous Minotaur, caverned in his labyrinthine den.
This neighbourhood is also much subject to earthquakes, which generally occur during the winter months; and as our boat toiled heavily past a succession of rocky headlands, we ourselves experienced a natural phenomenon scarcely less awful than these subterranean bellowings and convulsions. The wind rose higher and higher, whistling among the limestone ‘ruins of the older world’ that frowned above us. Our two boatmen knit their brows and muttered ‘la Fortuna!’ Dame Fortune, the old goddess of the way by sea and land, still retains some of her old attributes of wheel and rudder among these Romanized Dalmatian Sclaves; her name[318] is still used on these coastlands as equivalent to a tempest; and even in the interior of Bosnia the Sclaves have so far adopted the idea, that a snow-storm—the kind of storm dreaded most in the Bosnian mountains—is known to the peasants as ‘Fortunja.’