An Observer in the Near East

by William Le Queux

In Cattaro, being the bearer of despatches for His Britannic Majesty’s Foreign Office in London, and being therefore armed with a laisser-passer, my baggage was not examined, and at one o’clock I again boarded the same steamer which had brought me from Trieste, the Graf Wurmbrand, bound for Gravosa—which is the port for Ragusa, in Dalmatia.

Ragusa I found a quaint, mediæval place, reminding me strongly of one of those old towns on the Italian Riviera—I mean those unfashionable ones, at which the train stops and nobody gets out—ones that you only visit if you are motoring from Monte Carlo along to Genoa. It is a town of ponderous walls, of narrow streets, and queer dark byways. Across its dry moat and through its ancient gateway carriages do not pass, and as soon as you are in the main street you are out of it again, and passing through a water-gate are upon a small quay.

Difficult it is to realise that this quiet, old-world town, where everyone speaks Italian, was once the great port of the Balkan hinterland in the days when Venice was Queen of the Seas. And yet to the antiquary it is pleasant to stroll in and out of the old sixteenth-century churches, the Rector’s Palace, and the rest, to examine the mediæval Onofrio fountain, and to spend a day, as I did, among the architectural relics of an age bygone and long forgotten.

While there it rained for the first time after the long dry season. And if you have ever been in Italy—or anywhere, indeed—in the extreme south of Europe on the first day of the rainy season, you will know what I mean when I say it was not a mere shower. Water came down in sheets, and for a whole day and a whole night it never ceased, while the lightning flashed and the thunder crashed and echoed in the chain of mountains behind the town.

Palms and oranges grow in profusion in Ragusa, while across on the beautiful island of Lacroma—which legend connects with Richard Cœur de Lion—is vegetation more luxuriant than even upon the French Riviera. Prince Mirko of Montenegro, Colonel Constantinovitch, his father-in-law, and a number of wealthy people, mostly Austrians, have fine winter villas outside the town, and life there in spring is said to be quite charming.

Many yachts call there during the season, and there is opera at frequent intervals. Zara, Spalato, and Lussinpiccolo are all favourite winter resorts of the Austrians and Hungarians, but none is so smart or so select as Ragusa, which, by the way, has its hotel, the Imperial, where the charges equal, if not quite eclipse, those of the best hotels at Nice or Monte Carlo, while the cooking is inferior.

For the owner of a pretty villa overlooking the sea who desires to spend a quiet, healthful winter, Ragusa may be pleasant, but I confess it struck me as a particularly dull little town—a place so full of faded glory as to be painful.

The journey from Gravosa across Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Hungary to Servia I found tedious, though mostly through fine wild mountain scenery. I performed it partly by road and partly by rail, making Mostar and Sarayevo—the Bosnian capital—my halting-places.

The rail, a narrow-gauge one with a single train a day, starts from Gravosa at five o’clock in the morning and first ascends the Ombla valley from the sea. Gradually it rises in a series of zigzags over the grey bare rocks and through many tunnels for sixty miles to Gabela, a little mountain town, and then through the dry beds of a series of great lakes, and across barren plateaux until it descends into the valley of the Narenta, which narrows into a series of dark, romantic defiles, while the mountains grow higher and more wild, until Mostar, the capital of Herzegovina, is reached.

Mostar is a rather dull little town on the Narenta, still half-Turkish, with its mosques and bazaar where one can obtain inlaid silver work from Livino. But there was certainly nothing to attract, so I pushed on next day to Sarayevo. Between the two capitals the scenery is superb, indeed some of the grandest in the whole of the Balkans. Through the Great Defile, or Gorge of the Narenta, the train slowly wends its sinuous course beneath the high precipices of Velez, and then through the Prenj Mountains, across the Glogosnica valley to the small garrison town of Jablanica, a lonely little place in a very wild district.