The sledge houses at Niksich had never been moved, nor would there have been any object in moving them, for the remotest part of the plain was to be reached in a long hour's walk, and the rocky setting of its grassy luxuriance, rising into higher land all round, by steep ridges, would have shown the builders that where the house was built, there it would stand. On these great planinas there might have been a range far greater, but the presence of the cemeteries, which must have been the result of a considerable duration of residence, proved that the planinas now deserted, save for the summer haymakers, had once been held by a considerable population. I desired to open one of the graves, but the superstition of the people, whom no inducement could prevail on to meddle with the dead, made it impossible to find workers to aid me. I can only conjecture, therefore, from the emblems on the tombs and the rudeness of the reliefs, that they must date from early Christian times, probably the so-called Gallic (really Slavonic) invasions prior to Diocletian; and two or three huge and elaborate roadside crosses, cut from single stones and minutely decorated in relief, found nearer Cettinje, added to the conjectural evidence, for the origin of these was equally unknown to the present inhabitants. We passed caves known immemorially as places of refuge and admirably placed and prepared for defense. There is a great and untouched field there for prehistoric research.
We stopped to pass the night at Shawnik, a village in one of the most picturesque ravines I ever saw. There runs the Bukovitza, a tributary of the Drina, a wild and bold trout stream, abounding also in grayling, the trout being unaccustomed to the fly, as they are in most of the streams hereabout. Shawnik lies in the gate to the open country, the gateposts being two huge bastions of rock from which a few riflemen could defy an army until they found a way around through the rough country of Voinik, the chain which lay between us and Niksich. I slept at the house of an Albanian tailor (all the tailors in Montenegro and the Berdas are Albanians) and was made comfortable. We found the voivode of the province, Peiovich, at Aluga, with his headquarters in the schoolhouse, and keeping a lookout for the Turks, who menaced an invasion from Kolashin, a band of them having just attempted to pass the Tara, which bounds the plain on the north, but being driven back with loss. I found Aluga a noble subalpine country, a rolling plateau with here and there a little lake; to the northwest the grand mass of Dormitor, and to the northeast the range of the highlands which border the valleys of Old Servia, while to the east and south the horizon was like that of the sea, an undulating plain rolling far away out of the range of vision. Scattered houses dotted the plain of Aluga, and the children came to stare, and brought us, with the shyness of wild deer, little baskets of strawberries, which in some places in the fir forests almost reddened the ground, and, having pushed the offerings in at the door, ran like wild creatures, as if to escape being noticed. Huge haystacks dotted the plain, and the population seemed prosperous. We pushed on to the frontier post at Dobrilovina through glades of fir-trees with pasture intervening, as the soil was rocky or fertile, and reached the margin of the Tara late in the afternoon, a good day's ride from Aluga.
The Tara has cut itself a cañon like those of the Yellowstone, and on a little space of alluvial land at the bottom lies the convent, a building of the Servian Empire, curiously spared by the Turkish invasions. We descended 2500 feet, measured by my aneroid, to the flat, where the monks made us most welcome. We walked along the river, a rapid and shallow stream filled with trout, which refused to take any lure I could show them,—and the monks said that they ate only the crayfish which abounded in the river.
We went to sleep, to be awakened at midnight by the scouts who came in to tell us that the Turks were out from Kolashin, and that some thousands of Albanians of the Rascian country were raiding in advance, and had already thrown their left far beyond us. Had they known we were there, we might have been taken in a trap from which only fleet fugitives would have escaped. With the dawn we were in our saddles again, and, by the urgent advice of Peiovich, I took the back track, while the battalion threw itself across the country to skirmish, and retard the advance of the Turks while reinforcements could be brought up. "Ride hard," said the voivode, "and keep ahead of the Albanians, for when it comes to fighting we shall probably have to disperse and every man provide for himself, and you do not know the country. Tell the Prince to hurry up reinforcements." I lunched in the schoolhouse of Aluga, and pushed on for Bukowitza and Shawnik, where the invasion would be stopped with certainty. Half way to Bukowitza there burst on us a terrific thunderstorm, with torrents of rain. One bolt struck so near us that the concussion knocked my perianik down, and my horse jumped up on all fours as I never saw a horse do before, but neither was touched by the lightning, and we arrived at the first house of Bukowitza drenched and tired, having knocked the two days' march into one.
The owner of the house at which we asked for shelter said: "What I have you are welcome to, but I have only two rooms, that in which the family sleeps, and the kitchen. You are welcome to the bedroom, but I fear there are too many fleas for you to sleep, and you had better stay in the kitchen." I accepted the kitchen, and after a supper of hot maize bread and trout fresh caught from the nearest brook, the whole flooded with cream, I spread my cork mattress on a long bench which served as chairs for the household, and, covering myself with my waterproof, the only bedding attainable, I went to sleep. I was awakened by the sound of something falling on the waterproof, which I took to be bits of plaster from overhead, but, as it persisted, I struck a light and discovered that it was caused by bugs which, not finding a direct way to me from their nests in the wall, had climbed up and dropped from the ceiling down on me. What with the insects and the chance of being aroused at dawn by an attack of the raiding Albanians, I did not sleep again, and was up at dawn preparing to continue the journey to Shawnik, where alone we could count on being safe from the swarms of bashi-bazouks, whose movements we could already follow in the air by the smoke ascending from house and haystack over the plains we had traversed the day before.
The day had broken fine, and after stopping long enough to make a sketch of the house where I had passed the night, destined like all others in the open country to be burned in the course of the day, I pushed on to the fastness of Shawnik. The advance of the Turks was practically unopposed, for there was only a battalion of Montenegrins against thousands of irregulars and a strong division of regulars, and the Prince, never much troubled about the odds except where he was personally responsible, had not sent a man of the reinforcements which Peiovich had urgently begged for by courier after courier, so he fell back skirmishing until Socica from Piva joined him, when he made a stand.
For several days the two armies watched each other, each waiting for the offensive of the other, until one morning found the plain covered with a fog so dense that the combatants could not see each other one hundred yards away, when the Montenegrins made an attack so furious that the Turks retreated and took refuge across the Tara and withdrew to Kolashin, abandoning the movement and the attempt to relieve Niksich. But the beautiful schoolhouse at Aluga and all the houses and churches on the planina and at Bukowitza, the haystacks which had so picturesquely dotted the plain, and which were to have furnished the winter subsistence of all the flocks of the region, were ashes.
The night at Shawnik had proved as sleepless from fleas as that of Bukowitza from bugs, and, what with the fatigue of the race against time and the lack of any sleep for forty-eight hours, the next day found me laboring under an attack of illness which left me absolutely helpless, with a raging headache and cholera morbus. I dragged myself out into the sun and ordered my horse boy to bring me a bucket of water as hot as I could bear my feet in, and then made him keep it hot with ashes until my feet were almost parboiled, when the headache gradually subsided, leaving me a wilted, helpless being, hardly able to sit in the saddle. I waited another day to recruit, and hoping to hear from Peiovich the result of the invasion; but, hearing that the deadlock might last for days, I returned to Niksich and found the siege still going on as if it were the work of the generation.