The day after our trip to Kolashin the rain set in again, and we passed nearly a fortnight more at the convent before the weather broke and I was able to set out, taking with me a gang of men to make the roads passable for my horse, so much had the rains wrought havoc with the face of the land. The flooded state of the country and unfordable rivers forbade the trip to Wassoivich, and I was obliged, to my great regret, to relinquish it and to go back to Cettinje, having lost nearly three weeks in the rain at Moratsha. Returning by a different route from that by which I came, I crossed the Duboko at a point much lower down than that of my first striking it, where it makes the most magnificent trout stream I have ever seen. The trout from it feed the Moratsha and the Lake of Scutari. In the Duboko they are caught, according to the statement of a native of the district, as heavy as forty pounds; and Mr. Green, the English consul at Scutari, told me that they were sometimes caught much larger in the lake. There were plenty in the Zeta at Niksich and at Danilograd, and I saw one brought to the Prince's tent one day, during the siege, which weighed twenty-two pounds, shot by one of the men, for they refused all kinds of bait, and were only taken by shooting or the net; or, horrible to relate, by dynamite, the ruinous effects of which on the population of the river the Prince was too easygoing to forbid. I have seen one of the spring basins, from which the Zeta takes its rise, carpeted by tiny trout and other fishes, killed by the explosions of dynamite, which rarely killed, but only stunned, the larger fish, of which few were retrieved even when stunned or killed. I one day remonstrated indignantly with the Prince for this barbarous butchery, and told him that if he permitted his men to carry it on his son would reign in a fishless country, and he promised to forbid it; but the matter passed from his memory in a day. The Duboko was a safe nursery for the fry, for it was such a torrent that dynamite was useless, since it would have been impossible to retrieve a fish if killed.
Our road lay through the district of Rovtcha, which is considered the poorest for the agriculturist in all the Berdas. It is very hilly, and the rock is, where we passed, a rotten slate which the rains and the torrents cut away rapidly, carrying the alluvium down to the plains and Lake of Scutari. Digging and bridging, we reached, early in the afternoon, the village of Gornje-Rovtcha, and were then informed that it would be impossible to reach another habitation that day, and that the road passed through an immense forest infested by wolves, in which we should be compelled to sleep if we held on. This I had no desire to try, remembering our experience with the shepherds on the first night out from Niksich. So we passed the hours to the dark in shooting at a mark, and went to bed early. The house which was selected to be honored by my repose, the best in the village, was of one room, from which the animals were excluded, with the usual floor of beaten earth. A huge bedstead of small fir poles, the only important piece of furniture in it, was assigned to me, and the family—all women and children—spread their rugs on the ground. After eating a supper brought from the convent, and some potatoes, the only provision, except a little coarse maize bread which the house afforded, we went to bed. The bedstead was abundantly provided with straw, but nought beside, and the fleas routed me from my first sleep and compelled me to evacuate the premises. I took my mattress and went out where my pony was picketed, and, spreading it in his lee, to break the cold north wind fresh from the mountain, I tried to sleep.
The poor horse had supped miserably; a little barley from the convent and some musty hay furnished by the woman of the house, but which even in his hunger he refused to eat, left him ill-compensated for a hard day's walk, and he turned his head to me now and then with a coaxing whinney which was as plain a supplication for something to eat as I could have made myself, but the only effect of which was to break my doze as soon as begun, until I lost my patience with him, and gave him a sound box on the ear, when he turned his head from me, and lay down again. It made my heart ache to be unkind to him, for he was the gentlest and most serviceable friend I had in Montenegro, but I could get nothing to give him if I had paid a guinea the pound for it, and he would not let me sleep. The intelligent brute felt what language could not tell him, and ceased his complaint, though the blow I gave him would hardly have killed a gad-fly on his hair; but it sufficed, and gave me more discomfort than him, for I did not cease to reproach myself for the ungrateful return for his fidelity. But I slept no more, and watched the stars in their courses till the dawn.
A glass of milk and a crust of the bread I had brought from the convent made my breakfast, and we pushed on to our next stopping-place, the convent of Piperski Celia. The road lay for the first hour through a forest of beeches and firs, the former the finest, as timber, I ever saw—straight trunks, thirty or forty feet to the first limb; in some places the beech being the exclusive wood, and in others the fir, but all a luxuriant growth. Properly worked, this forest would have made a great revenue for the principality. Before the war it had been leased to a French company, and many trees were lying in all stages of preparation for rafting down the Moratsha. This was succeeded by a forest entirely of firs, also splendid trees, and then we came into a region which was beyond all my experience or imagination,—a wide and barren waste of rock, gray, glistening in the now burning sun, and without a trace of vegetation that could be recognized by the casual vision. There was no soil, and apparently never had been any, and the silvery-gray of the lichenous limestone blinded one with its glare in the sunlight. Midway in it we came on an old Roman road, one of the finest pieces of antique engineering I ever saw. In some places it was cut out of the solid rock like a dry canal, the banks being nearly as high as our heads, and the ruts of the chariot wheels were still there to show that the utter barrenness of the land had existed the same from ancient time. It was probably the great road from Dyrrachium to the upper Danube.
We reached the convent too late to get to Danilograd that night, considering the condition of the roads, and I asked for shelter for the night. Here, for the first time in my experience with Orthodox convents, lodgings were refused me by the old hegumenos, and I instantly ordered the horses to be loaded again, without attempting to soften his surliness. A few minutes' talk with the captain who was my escort showed him that I was a person too much in favor with the Prince to be treated with such derision, and he came to offer me a place to spread my mattress on a balcony exposed to the south wind and the rain; then, having begun to relent, he went further, and offered me a room, which I refused, and finally his own bed; but even that did not break my inflexible resentment. When he became pathetic in his repentance, however, I accepted a balcony whence I could look down on the fortress of Spuz, within easy range of its sleeping batteries; and then he offered me a supper, which I accepted, and we made peace. In the morning he had become humanized, and he gave me breakfast and showed me the body of St. Stephen, which is kept here in great reverence (not the proto-martyr, but a Montenegrin of the same name). The saint lay in state in a magnificent coffin, as if embalmed, and in his hand was an old and time-yellowed embroidered handkerchief which looked as if it might have been there a century or two. Remembering a dear friend in the Orthodox church to whom the relics of its saints were precious, I asked the hegumenos to sell me this handkerchief. He replied that he dared not take it, but if I had the courage to do so he would not prevent me, so I took the relic and put a twenty franc piece in the treasury of the convent, and went my way.
I found the Prince in his villa at Orealuk, contemplating new movements in a distant future, and, there being evidently nothing to keep me there, I decided to go back to Cettinje and await what was evidently the operation in view,—the movement on Antivari. My poor little pony like myself, only half fed for days, was not in a condition for rapid travel, and, though we pushed on in the rain, which began again, as well as we could, when we reached Rieka it was nearly sunset. Finding no preparation in the little house, our usual shelter there, for any guest, after giving the horse what small ration the village afforded, I resumed the journey at sunset. The horse had come the last few miles very heavily; I had been in the saddle twelve to fourteen hours each of the last two days, and the food I could get for him was insufficient even for a Herzegovinian mountain pony, so that it was hard work to get him to a pace above a slow walk as we approached Rieka; but when we left the place he seemed to realize that he had a work of necessity before him, and that the light would not see him through it, and he showed that he understood the case, for he needed neither spur nor whip to make his best pace over the very rough and difficult road. In spite of his best efforts, the darkness fell on us half way to Cettinje, with rain and a fog which made it impossible to see the way before me, or even to see the horse's ears.
There was on that road, on the mountain which frames on that side the plain of Cettinje, a passage of the bridle-path which even the Montenegrins, used to it, passed always on foot; a sharp ridge, almost an arête of rock, which carries a path hardly wide enough for two horses to pass each other on it, and on each side of which the rock falls away in a steep precipice high enough to leave no hope of survival from a fall down it. If I had dismounted I could not have seen the path before me; to stop and pass the night there, drenched and cold as I was, would have been fatal, for we were in the early cold of autumn in a high country; there was nothing for it but to trust to the horse, and I threw the bridle on his neck and left him to himself. A false step was certain death for us both, but I had no choice. He picked his way as if he were walking amongst eggs, slowly but surely, and we descended into the plain of Cettinje at 10 P.M. without a slip or an attempt on my part to interfere with the discretion of my pony. If I had possessed even an acre of pasture or a settled home where I could have turned out that good beast for the rest of his days, I should never have allowed him to go to another owner, for I knew that I owed him my life.
Of the following campaign, which resulted in the taking of Antivari and Dulcigno, I saw nothing. The jealousy of Jonine had been so excited by my always forestalling him with the news of the war, that he persuaded the Prince not to advise me of the movement; so, while I was waiting at Cettinje for the promised summons to join the staff, the army moved across the country to Rieka secretly, and the first warning we had of the movement was the firing of guns at Antivari. As the Prince gave me no further thought, I waited comfortably, "at mine ease in mine inn," for diplomacy to tie the ends of the well-spun out controversy. Fighting was practically over and my campaign ended.