Letërsi - MAYHEW, Athol - Montenegro As We Saw It

“Yonder, meine Herren” said the obsequious young Austrian landlord of the Hotel zur Stadt Gratz, pointing to a height of some six thousand feet immediately above the town, where a towering, barren mountain descended to the waters of the Adriatic, like a petrified, ashen-gray cataract plunging sheer down from the heavens to the sea,— “yonder, meine Herren, up the Lowcen, lies the road to Montenegro.”

We were standing in the mellow light of an October evening in 1879, Dick and I and our host, by the little hunch-backed bridge in the arid waste devoted to the Montenegrin bazaar, outside Cattaro. Facing us, the mighty rampart of the Lowcen rose from the purple haze of the valley at our feet high into the deepening azure of the sky, and following the oscillating upward movement of our host’s forefinger, we traced the zig-zag markings of a path running like a thin white lacing up the broad bosom of the mountain. During our six days’ cruise in the Archiduchesse Carlotta, along the Dalmatian coast from Trieste to Cattaro, we had heard much concerning the difficulty of travel in Montenegro,—how the absence of roads rendered vehicular traffic impossible, and the rugged character of the country was dangerous to riding,—but it was only now, when the famous “ladder of Cattaro” (as the ascent into the Black Mountain is suggestively styled) stood fully revealed to us, that the physical impediments to comfortable transport could be fully comprehended.

MAP OF MONTENEGRO

Dick, who was neither as spare as a chamois hunter, nor, to judge from his spasmodic breathing up easy gradients, in the perfect condition of an Alpine athlete, gazed upon the towering perpendicularity of the Lowcen with a misgiving eye, and was eloquently silent.

“If the interior of Montenegro has the same aspect as its western frontier,” I could not help ejaculating, after a lengthy survey of the bare rocks that everywhere were visible, like mammoth bones sticking through the starved carcass of the earth, “by the shade of Macadam, it must be a fine country for stones!”

“The men of the Black Mountain have a saying,” said our host, “that when the Creator was in the act of placing stones upon the earth, the bag that held them burst, and they all fell upon Montenegro.”

We thanked him for his information with more politeness than effusion, for, to tell the truth, we were beginning to feel the effects of considerable disappointment. At home, in the seclusion of the library of the British Museum, our imaginations, heated, perhaps, by too copious references to romantic hand-books of travel and sensational gazetteers, had conjured up a glowing picture of the Montenegrin highlands, covered—as most of these alluring works of fiction assured us they were—with vast forests of oak and beech and pine, the rocks carpeted with the luxuriant undergrowths of arbutus, juniper, rosemary, and myrtle. To enjoy the outdoor life amid such sylvan scenery, we had a tent made, from designs kindly supplied by the inventive brain of Dick. The special characteristics of our canvas residence, on which Dick told me he rested his claim to future celebrity, were to be found in the marvelous union of (1) extreme lightness with (2) economy of space, united to (3) great strength and (4) portability. The same creative mind furnished the drawings for an entirely original cooking apparatus, which gave excellent promise—on paper, at least—of being the happiest combination of tea-pot, frying-pan, gridiron, and Dutch oven conceivable, and was moreover warranted to pack in any unoccupied corner of our saddle-bags. Owing to some slight miscalculations on the part of the gifted inventor, the tent, which was otherwise a triumph of construction, was made about the size of a marquee, and weighed a trifle over eighty pounds; while the colossal proportions of the cooking apparatus, originally intended to prepare a meal for two, seemed quite equal, judging from cubic capacity at least, to satisfy the rapacity of a company of the hungriest soldiers. Nevertheless, we had brought these necessary adjuncts to the more perfect enjoyment of existence on the wood-crowned heights of Montenegro with us here, to the southern extremity of Dalmatia, after numerous hair-breadth escapes at frontier custom-houses, and at unheard-of expense, owing to Dick’s “light and portable” inventions hampering us with about a hundred-weight of excess luggage. Bitter, therefore, was our disappointment when the youthful landlord revealed the true aspect of this much misrepresented country. The vision of the wood-crowned heights capped with our snowy tent, pitched under the shadow of some primeval oak, and the blue smoke curling upward from our cheerful camp-fire, faded from our mind’s eye, and in its place a horrible picture presented itself of two unfortunate travelers entombed in an elevated stone-quarry, having to blast holes in the rocks before driving in their tent-pegs, and compelled to live on raw victuals by reason of the dearth of “undergrowth” wherewith to develop the resources of the magic cooking apparatus.

We turned disconsolately from our survey of the Lowcen, and sought the retirement of our locanda.

It soon got noised about Cattaro—for rumor travels with telephonic rapidity in a town covering about the same area as we should devote to a block of alms-houses— that two adventurous spirits were anxious to hire saddle and pack horses to transport themselves and their effects over the Lowcen to Cetinje, the capital of Montenegro. This news caused great excitement in the Montenegrin bazaar, anything on four legs and bearing even the most distant resemblance to horse-flesh being immediately quoted in the market at a price equal to a native prince’s ransom. It was several days before the wild, untutored drovers of the Black Mountain could be brought to moderate their demands. The time was principally occupied by us in fruitless endeavors to squeeze Dick’s tent into a smaller compass than the dimensions of a moderate hay-stack, so as to adapt it to the requirements of a pack-saddle, and in an equally abortive attempt to master the rudiments of the Illyrian language. The triple c in the Cyrilian alphabet, however, was too much for us, so Dick, who still clung to the hope of ultimately bringing the cooking apparatus into action, got our young landlord to write him out a list of equivalents in the Slav tongue for such daily requisites as mutton, fowls, rice, eggs, bread, coffee, etc., on a leaf of his sketch-book. My lingual accomplishments were confined to dobro (good) and the Slavonic for “how much,” which became indelibly impressed upon my recollection by its exact resemblance to “calico” pronounced with a strong Yorkshire accent.

On the evening of the fourth day after our arrival in Cattaro, a needy proprietor of four half-starved mountain ponies capitulated to our terms, which the landlord had fixed, out of consideration for our being strangers, at double the usual tariff, viz.: six florins each for our saddle-horses, and five florins for a couple of pack-animals.

The following morning we were up betimes and out in the bazaar making preparations for the start. Quite a crowd of white-coated Montenegrins and black-clad, silver-buttoned Bocchesi had collected at the foot of the Lowcen to see us off, for speculation was rife upon the object of our visit to Cetinje. Not one of the comfort-loving Cattarines would believe that even the maddest of proverbially mad Englishmen would voluntarily undergo the rigors of travel in the rocky wilderness of the Black Mountain merely to satisfy a craving after adventure and a love for the picturesque. So, as we carried letters of introduction to the Prince, an idea had got abroad in the bazaar that our mission was of a diplomatic character. If we were not embassadors sent from Queen Vittoria to invite the Prince to England, we must assuredly be the English representatives of a new frontier commission, come to patch up the all-absorbing Gusinje question, and thus prevent the impending war between the Montenegrins and the Albanians. These impressions were strengthened by the sight of one of our under-fed baggage-animals staggering about the bazaar in a drunken manner under the load of Dick’s “light and portable” inventions—the cooking apparatus and tent-poles which dangled over one side of the gable-shaped wooden pack-saddle, and counter-weighted the canvas bundle of the tent on the other, being immediately set down as portions of our surveying paraphernalia.

The natives who watched our start were either very seriously disposed, or too well-bred to express their appreciation of the ludicrous. But the spectacle of Dick’s efforts to squeeze his somewhat Dutch proportions into the small cavity of an old Turkish demi-pique saddle, with a pommel on it like a buffalo-hump and a back like the top of a Windsor chair, must have been a severe trial to them. Nor was I altogether free from the consciousness of a certain quaintness in my appearance, perched upon the apex of the Gothic elevation of a flea-bitten pony, with a rolling, sailor-like action about him which threatened an immediate dissolution of partnership,—my feet thrust well home into the shortest of stirrups, and my knees screwed up to a level with my waistcoat. Inwardly convinced of the precarious nature of our tenure in a Turkish saddle, but with a fairly confident exterior expression, we set off in Indian file, with our guide tugging at the halter of the leading horse, upon our voyage en zig-zag up the “ladder” of Cattaro.

Never having experienced the sensation of going upstairs on horseback before, I may be pardoned for a slight feeling of nervousness at the outset, the more so when a few steps up the ladder revealed the perilous character of the ascent. Let the reader imagine a mere ledge of rock some five feet broad, entirely unprotected by either wall or railing, standing out at right angles to the mountain, and having an ascending inclination of from 30 to 75 degrees, according to the length of each zig-zag. Let him, moreover, picture to himself this twisting shelf of a road thickly strewn with a loose debris of bowlders and jagged stones, which are constantly shifting and sliding down the narrow “shoot” behind him as his horse stumbles about in search of firm foothold; let him add to this a sense of insecurity begotten by the knowledge that the saddle he is balancing himself in has no girths and is simply attached to the framework of his horse by a rotten rope, and that the slightest derangement of his saddlery would inevitably hurl him down upon the chimney-pots of Cattaro,—and he will have an approximate idea of the varying emotions which accompany the traveler upon his clamber into Montenegro.

Twelve hundred feet above the town of Cattaro is the small fortress of St. Giovanni, built originally by the Turks in the fifteenth century. Thirty-nine “tacks,” to use a nautical term expressive of our course up the Lowcen road, bring us on a level with it. Thirty more, and we have dismounted to take a breather, and are looking straight down upon the diminished ramparts and gray towers, and right into the citadel of the Austrian stronghold. At the close of 1813, San Giovanni, after suffering the usual vicissitudes of fortresses on the Dalmatian coast, and belonging in turn to Turk and Venetian, Austrian and Russian, was taken from the French by the English under Hoste, to whose extraordinary skill in carrying heavy artillery up the craggy mountains that commanded it the highest compliment was paid by the French commandant, who had pronounced a decided opinion that it was impossible to establish a battery there. The astonishment of General Gautier on discovering Hoste’s great guns above the fortress of San Giovanni could only be equaled by the surprise with which Dick and I found ourselves without mishap in a similar position. However, as the portion of the mountain which was immediately over our heads was pronounced to be, if possible, steeper and stonier than that which lay at our feet, we elected to do the rest of the journey on foot. Nor did our ponies seem at all displeased with our want of confidence in their ability, Dick’s animal, especially, giving vent to sundry equine expressions of delight on finding himself free and independent.

It had been hot enough in the saddle, but now that we were nearer the ground the glare of the sun, reflected from the bare gray rocks, was intolerable. The difficulties which beset our path, too, forced us to look constantly on the blinding track, which gradually narrowed down to the semblance of the top of a ruined wall, strewn ankle deep with crags as sharp as bottle-glass. I have neither space nor inclination to dwell upon the tortures of the last stage of our clamber; suffice it that our progress can only be described as a rapid and varied succession of such staggers, lurches, plunges, and recoveries as might accompany a ‘prentice hand upon the tight-rope; and that when we did ultimately throw our dislocated anatomies upon the top of Lowcen, it was only to realize those aches and pains which are said to follow a liberal use of the rack and bastinado.

There is consolation in companionable misery: instinctively we turned to solace ourselves with a study of the anguish of our guide. He was sitting composedly on a rock, eating chunks of goats’ cheese and maize-bread, without a bead upon his brow or a flutter in his respiration.

I have described at length the character of the road from the coast into Montenegro, so as to give the readers of Scribner as vivid an impression as possible of the stupendous barrier raised by nature between the Sclavonian mountaineers and the source from whence they draw their supplies. Up the track we had just ascended, pack-animals alone can be used to transport goods. But as horse-flesh is scarce since the war, and serviceable only to carry such small commodities as can be slung panier-fashion to a pack-saddle, the bulkier necessaries of life, together with the more ponderous articles of merchandise, have all to be brought from the sea into the principality upon the shoulders of the mountaineers.

Many men, carrying live sheep around their necks, like big woolly comforters, or heavily laden with packing-cases on their backs, passed us on our way up the “ladder” with their swift and noiseless tread, muffled by the soft, sun-dried goat-skin of their mountain shoes. Even as we sat resting and fanning our flushed faces in the cool highland air, a train of stalwart, big-boned, broad-hipped women, clad in their mournful-looking black-and-white garments, and singing a strange, monotonous chant, came up from below, each with a heavy sack of maize-flour strapped upon her back. Yet there was not the slightest trace of moisture on their broad brown faces, nor a quaver in a single voice to show that they were fatigued or overburdened.

Inwardly wishing that our powers of endurance in the mountains were but equal to those of the Montenegrin women, we once more hoisted our groaning bones into our respective saddles and went on our way to Cetinje. Turning reluctantly from the magnificent view spread out like a huge ordnance map at the foot of Lowcen, with the waters of the Bocche di Cattaro winding like a blue serpent between the olive-clad hills of Dalmatia, out to the broad Adriatic sparkling on the horizon, we faced inland and saw nothing but the gleaming limestone of the mountain desert.

The track still led upward, but in a tolerably straight line, to a point where occasional loud explosions, accompanied with innumerable echoes, told us that the laborers were at work, blasting the rocks to make the new carriage-road from Cattaro to the capital. Presently we come upon them, and a more picturesque gang of navvies it would be difficult to conceive than these same mountain road-makers, clad in their shaggy sheep-skin jackets and white woolen pantaloons, each with a big gourd water-flask at his waist, and a long yataghan thrust. through the party-colored scarf wound around his middle.

The new carriage-road through Montenegro, planned to run by easy gradients round the Lowcen to Cetinje, and thence to Rjeka, where the river joins the lake of Scutari, is destined, when finished, to work a wonderful alteration in the present aspect of the country, for it is only then that the land will be opened up to the influence of outer civilization and commerce. Originally commenced at Cattaro in 1872, under the direction of M. Slade, a Dalmatian engineer from Ragusa, the work had to be suspended as soon as it reached the Montenegrin frontier, on account of the outbreak of the war. Now, however, that the unusual blessings of peace have fallen upon the land, Prince Nikita—surnamed by his people “the roadmaker”—is pushing the work vigorously forward. By the end of the present year it is expected that half of the road will be completed; so that soon the traveler may avoid the horrors of the “ladder,” and visit Cetinje in a diligence or mountain wagon.

Leaving the highland navvies to their work at the top of the pass, we turned our horses’ heads south-east, and crossed a sterile, undulating plain leading to Niegush, the village birthplace of the reigning Prince. Half-way thither, we reached the edge of a plateau, and halted involuntarily to gaze down upon the panorama of Montenegro revealed. It was only now, as the eye wandered in astonishment over the rocky chaos of the Dinaric Alps, rolling away to the horizon in a succession of ridges and bluffs and irregular spurs, that one could fully realize the vast sterility of this Great Stone Land.

THE LADDER OF CATTARO

In every language which has given a name to the country it is called the Black Mountain : thus, in Greek it is styled Mavro Vonni; the Albanians speak of it as Mal-Esija; on the Arabic maps it is marked Al-jubal-al-Aswad; the Turkish for it is Karadagh, and the Slavonic Tzernagora. These are curiously unanimous misnomers for a mountain which, from the light, gleaming character of its limestone formation, ought by common consent to have been christened “White” instead of “Black.” Etymologists, however, have a tendency to get over the difficulty by telling us that in days of old the gaunt, bare mountains of the principality were covered from base to brow with forests of oak and pine; but that five hundred years of constant warfare with the Turk has cleared every vestige of cover from their sides; so that the soil, having no longer the necessary net-work of roots and undergrowth to bind it to the rocks, has been gradually washed away from the face of the mountains. The Montenegrins, on the other hand, attribute the name of their country to the deep purple shade which the rocks assume during the after-glow of sunset. We were followed into the village of Niegush by a young goat-herd, who left his flock to take care of themselves, and was friendly and communicative in the extreme, but who would doubtless have been better company if we could only have understood him. He insisted upon carrying Dick’s Winchester rifle, which he handled with the air of a veteran warrior. The lad could not have been more than fourteen, and was evidently thoroughly acquainted with the mechanism of its repeating action. Dick, by the by, had rather relied upon his Winchester to astonish the natives; but we soon discovered that every Montenegrin knew it perfectly, many hundreds of the carbine pattern having been taken from the Turks during the last war. Nevertheless, the Niegushians, who came out in a crowd to welcome us, were most anxious to prove its shooting qualities. On our part, we were nothing loth to test their reputation as marksmen, of which we had heard much! So one of the villagers who, from his confident bearing, appeared to be the crack shot of the place, took the rifle, rested it over one rock and aimed at another about the size of a tombstone, some three hundred yards off, and, after occupying an unconscionable time in getting a comfortable sight, made an elaborate miss, a full yard below his target. They used the whole magazine full of eleven cartridges, each excited villager in turn, and would willingly have exhausted Dick’s pouch if he had permitted it, but without coming much nearer the mark. Yet we had no difficulty in striking the target at the first shot—and that fired from the shoulder. This feat was hailed with great acclamation, and seemed to strike the villagers as a very considerable achievement indeed. Subsequent friendly matches at rocks—in the absence of game—in various parts of the principality, satisfied us that the Montenegrins are anything but the great shots they would have the outer world believe them to be, and that we, who were by no means “plumb-center” men with the rifle, could always hold our own, and frequently beat the best of them.

They made much of us in Niegush; and we responded by inviting the discomfited marksmen into a little hovel, with only a door and no window to it, dignified with the title of a khan or inn, and by circulating a large gourd full of raki amongst them until it was empty. Then we went upon our way, sliding down declivities, and scrambling over obstructive bowlders, until we came to a spot where I noticed in a little basin of the rock a stone wall, some four feet high, surrounding a little disk of earth no bigger than the top of a loo-table. We took it at first for a burial-place. On closer inspection, however, it turned out to be a cultivated inclosure, protecting about half a dozen blighted potato plants! Proceeding farther, I discovered that every particle of soil which the wind or rain had not swept from the crevices and hollows of the rocks was walled about and guarded in a like careful manner. Surely no more pitiable picture than this can be given of the fight for life amongst the stones of Montenegro. After having been seven hours on the road, we pulled up at nightfall at the hotel in Cetinje.

The Montenegrin capital lies on a little plateau of verdure, inclosed in an amphitheater of barren rock. At the southern extremity of a broad, well-kept chaussee, flanked to the right and left for five hundred yards by squat, red-tiled, stone-built cabins, curiously Irish in aspect, is the Vuko Volotic, sole house of entertainment in the little mountain metropolis. The dimensions of Vuko Volotic, as it is called after the patronymic of its director, are altogether out of proportion to the size of the capital. Next to the Prince’s palace, it is the most imposing building in Cetinje, and boasts the unusual architectural adornment of an upper story. Its interior is fitted with the luxuries of a salle-a-manger and a cafe, with a billiard-table on the ground-floor, and a large reception-room and commodious bedrooms—all excellently furnished in the French style—under the roof. Here we eat and sleep with a heartiness and tranquillity which can only be engendered by a knowledge that we are being boarded and lodged upon the equitable principles of the fixed-tariff system. It is the first time in our lives, moreover, that we have been able to patronize royalty,—for Prince Nicholas himself is the proprietor of this highland hostelrv. In no other country in the world, I imagine, could the traveler have such a chance of interviewing its ruler,— the mere pretext of an overcharge in his bill or the fancied incivility of a servant being enough to procure an audience with the head of the reigning house of Petrovic. We, however, can find no such excuse. The charges are not exorbitant; the “boots” is civil and the chambermaid attentive. Were it not that the Montenegrin “Mary” is clad in a white chemise, black apron, and flannel coat without any sleeves to it, and that “boots” brings us our “Bluchers” in the morning arrayed in innumerable gold-embroidered red waistcoats and a long white coat, confined at the waist by a crimson scarf, from which protrude a small arsenal of fire-works—were it not, we repeat, that the Prince’s secretary, M. Popovic, always presides at the table d’hote in the full splendor of the national costume, and with a long Austrian “Gasser” revolver thrust into his girdle, we might, at least from the comfort with which we are housed, imagine ourselves in a good French pension or a superior German Gasthaus.

SHEPERD BOY OF THE LOWCEN

Cetinje has been justly styled the smallest capital in the world. Including the public buildings, such as the old Palace, or Bilyarda,—so called from the first billiard-table brought into Montenegro having been placed there by the present Prince’s uncle, —the new Palace, the Convent, the Hospital, the Hotel, the Prison, the Cartridge Manufactory, the Schools, and the Reading-room, there are not so many as a hundred houses in it. These are all substantially built of stone (of which there is, heaven knows, no lack in the country), with roofs of rugged Italian tiles, guarded against the mountain storms by weighty rocks placed upon them. ‘One peculiarity about the cottages is, that they have no chimneys. Although most of the Montenegrins have a home, they cannot lay claim to the comforts of a hearth—it being the fashion of these people to light their wood-fires in the center of the floor, and to allow the smoke to escape through the numerous apertures left for this purpose in the roof. But where the smoke issues, the rain finds an entrance, so that from the middle of October, when the rainy season commences, until the beginning of the new year, when it ends, it is quite as necessary to put up one’s umbrella in-doors as out.

TABLE D’HOTE AT CETINJE

Judging from the depopulated appearance of what one might call the High street, I should imagine it would require a very small statistical staff indeed to prepare a census of Cetinje. During the late war, however, its aspect must have been unique, deserted as it was by all save a score or so decrepit highlanders, left under charge of the school-master, the sole able-bodied adult non-combatant remaining in the place. The Prince, with all his war-loving subjects commanded by the ministry, the members of the Senate, the heads of the civil service, and the elite of the clergy, were every mother’s son of them away fighting in the Herzegovina, or grappling with their old enemies on the Turkish border; while the Princess, as the Director-General of the Transport Corps and Chief of the Commissariat Department, was hurrying up and down the country at the head of every sound woman and child in the principality. Dismal as Cetinje must have looked in those desperate times, when the liberty of the land was trembling in the balance, it is none of the liveliest now that the freedom of Montenegro is assured. There are seldom more than a dozen men visible in the only thoroughfare of the town, and these have a listless, apathetic, do-nothing air about them telling too plainly that, now that the war is over, the Montenegrins’ occupation’s gone. With these gentry, time seems infinitely more difficult to kill than the Turks. The Montenegrin is a fighting man or he is nothing, never having been taught any peaceable pursuits, and reared as he has been from childhood only to the use of arms. In peace as in war, his girdle is full of silver-ornamented artillery and decorated offensive cutlery. He is a walking magazine of murderous weapons. Under his red-morocco pouch, or kolan, lurks the long, heavy, six-chambered “Gasser” revolver, with a barrel a foot in length, and capable, when used over the left arm by way of a rest, of bringing down a man at five hundred yards. By the side of this miniature Gatlin, and ready to hand, stuck crosswise through the silken waist-sash, is an ivory-hilted yataghan—an ugly serpentine weapon as long and heavy as a sword-bayonet, and as formidable in their practiced hands as a Goorkha’s kookree; while over his shoulder is slung his dobro pouska—an Austrian “Wenzel” breechloader, or a Turkish Peabody-Martini rifle. Yet, despite the aggressiveness of his appearance, a Montenegrin never uses his weapons except in warfare against the enemy. It speaks volumes for the control these mountaineers habitually exercise over their spirited tempers when I state that, although loaded fire-arms are constantly carried by every grade of man in the country, only four murders have occurred during the present reign (nineteen years), and that assassination or jobbery with violence are crimes almost unknown. Thus, notwithstanding the outward ferocity of their appearance, they are, among themselves and to all strangers who visit them, in the main a chivalrous and courtly race. Therefore, let none of the wandering tribes who yearly set out from our shores to explore new ground, avoid these picturesque people on the score of their murderous proclivities. Let them be assured, on the faith of the latest visitors to the country, that in no part of the habitable globe can they travel with greater personal security than in Montenegro.

A MONTENEGRIN INTERIOR

Candor, however, forces me to admit that we did not find the Montenegrins so scrupulously honest as most writers on the country have reported them. The great fault in existing works on Montenegro appears to me to be that they have all been written with a strong Slavophile bias. The Rev. Mr. Denton, in his “Montenegro,” depicts an almost Utopian race, with barely a moral blemish to sully their spotless purity. “Another virtue besides their simplicity of life,” says this gentleman, “is their perfect honesty.” Lady Strangford, again, tells us that, during her sojourn in Cetinje in the summer of 1863, she mentioned to the Prince that she had lost a gold bracelet in Albania. “Had you dropped it here.” said Nikita, “even in the remotest corner of the Black Mountain, it would have been returned in three days.” “I am sure this was not mere talk,” adds her ladyship, “because I was frequently told of a traveler who left his tent, with the door open, on a Montenegrin hill-side, and returned, after three years’ absence, to find every single thing as he had left it.” Now it so happened that, after leaving Cetinje, we went to look at Podgoritza, a town which had been annexed to Montenegro under the Berlin treaty some nine months before our arrival. Outside Podgoritza, just beyond the fine old Tzernitza bridge spanning the Moraga, there is a plain; and at a spot opposite the ruins of a palace of Diocletian, we pitched Dick’s tent. We gave hospitable entertainment to all comers in celebration of the ultimate utility of Dick’s inventions, and, among others, to two young Montenegrins with a perfectly unappeasable voracity of appetite. At night we all slept soundly under canvas without taking the precaution of keeping any guard, relying implicitly on what we had heard and read about Montenegrin honesty. On waking in the morning we found ourselves relieved of a quarter of sheep, a saddle-bag containing a silver tobacco-case, a knife and fork, and a bag of tobacco. The affair made quite a commotion in Podgoritza, and the Minister of War, who was in residence at the quaint little war-office by the bazaar, was fearfully indignant on hearing of this outrage upon strangers, the more particularly, perhaps, because, at an interview we had with him before starting on our camping expedition, he was most impressive in his assurances of the Montenegrin regard for the sanctity of property. Thanks to the rapidity with which the Voivode Plamenaz put a couple of men and a sergeant, accompanied by a singularly intelligent dog, on the track of the thieves, they were captured before the afternoon, and everything was restored to us save the mutton, which the robbers—who were none other than the young gluttons whom we had entertained the previous day —had eaten raw. They were taken to Podgoritza, where each received twenty-five stripes with the bastinado and a short term of imprisonment. After this adventure we did not care to test the people’s love of honesty further, seeing that the only chance we ever gave them they punctually availed themselves of.

ONE OF THE PRINCE’S BODY-GUARD

By the robbery from our tent we were, perhaps, selected as the unfortunate exceptions to prove the rule of Montenegrin honesty. That the people are, as a rule, honest is beyond doubt; and the virtue is more exalted by their extreme poverty. But that the needy are not beyond temptation—even in Montenegro—was shown us in the most practical manner possible.

To return to Cetinje, we soon were quite at home in the little capital, the more so as most of the frequenters of the Vuko Volotic spoke German. Dick became very active and expert in model-catching, and even overcame the maiden coyness of one of the prettiest girls in the place—the black-eyed Emily Kovic, who stood to him for a sketch. And a pretty picture the little “highland lassie” made as she leaned against her cottage wall, dressed in her delicate white sleeveless coat and green gold-embroidered waistcoat, open at the bosom so as to show the dainty golden-edged shirt confined by a single button at the throat. The white woolen coat, or gunj, and the kappa, or cap, are two articles of the national costume worn alike by both sexes, with the distinction only that with females the coat is made sleeveless and of a finer quality of cloth, ornamented at the skirts with gold embroidery, and that a black cashmere veil is attached to the crown of the kappa, and so arranged as to fall down at the back of the head.

The cap is, perhaps, the most peculiar part of the Montenegrin dress. By the men it is rarely removed from the head either indoors or out. In shape it is like a large forage-cap, with a black-silk edge and a crimson-cloth crown. On the rim of the crown is embroidered, in gold thread, a small semicircle, inclosing either the arms of Montenegro or the initials of the Prince. With this quaint head-covering is associated a legend which says that, when the Serbs were conquered, each member of the race placed a mourning-band around the edge of his fez, but that the Montenegrins added the half of a small golden disk to the edge of the uncovered portion of the cloth, to mark their own bright spot of freedom on the blood-red field.

The struka, or long brown slip of a shawl worn over the shoulders as a German student carries his plaid, is another characteristic portion of male attire, almost as indispensable to the comfort of the mountaineer as his opankes, or soft, pliable, sun-dried skin slippers, so curiously attached to his feet by a net-work of string running from the toe to the instep. As long as a Montenegrin has his struka, in which he can roll himself, he is perfectly indifferent as to whether his sleeping-place is the hard mud floor of some smoky way-side khan or the harder bed of his native rocks. It is his sole baggage in a campaign, where it serves him in lieu of a tent; for the rugged character of his country forces him to march in the lightest of marching order, unhampered by knapsack or haversack, relying on the women, who follow to battle on the heels of their warrior lords, to replenish his cartridge-belt and supply him with rations. Thus it will be seen that no very elaborate machinery is required to set the Montenegrin army in motion, which is, perhaps, the reason why it is so seldom quiet, the transport, commissariat, and medical branches of the service being in the hands of the women, who are freely “requisitioned.” Neither is the state hampered with the expense of paying or clothing the troops. Each of Prince Nikita’s 20,000 fighting men gives his service gratuitously, and supplies his own uniform, which is simply his national dress; the officers according to their various grades being merely distinguished from the men by different devices, displayed on a silver or golden badge sewn on the front of their kappas. Thus the Montenegrin army is, perhaps, unique in its organization. It is entirely self-supporting in time of peace, and nearly so when in the field, ammunition being the costliest government material necessary to its support; and to this, I imagine, can be traced the secret of its long-continued resistance to the Turks.

EMILY KOVIC

The social organization of the Slav, we are told, is essentially a family confederation. This would certainly appear to be the case in Montenegro, where everybody stands in the closest relationship one with another. To the stranger, this kindred alliance is somewhat confusing, the more so as all proper names in the principality invariably end in vic, pronounced vitch. Great discrimination is, therefore, required on the part of any one who, like ourselves, happened to be of cockney origin, in order to distinguish vitch from vitch. In Cetinje the ties of blood are certainly superior to anything like considerations of caste. In the Vuko Volotic, as I have before mentioned, is a cafe, where most of the male inhabitants of the capital beguile themselves with card-playing and billiards during the—to them, no doubt—monotonous days of peace. Here, in the evening, after table d’hote, may be witnessed the unusual spectacle of a “family confederation,” composed of the postman, His Excellency the Minister of Finance, the “boots,” the Prince’s secretary, and Mr. Vuko Volitic. all engaged in a sociable game of skittle-pool! Surely the great republican principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity could be put to no severer test than this. One of the most difficult problems which the traveler in Montenegro may set himself to solve is, not exactly how the people manage to live in their highland desert,—for that becomes apparent when he discovers that their daily wants are almost as small as the productiveness of their country,—but how, in the absence of all trades and industries, they can earn any money. Certain it is that during the whole period of my stay in Cetinje I never saw a single male Montenegrin at work upon anything which was likely to produce him a single “zwanziger.” Supposing even that he showed a laudable desire to set about some lucrative occupation,—an extremely unlikely conjecture, by the by, if it involved any hard labor,—it would be difficult to point to any trade or industry which could give him employment, there being no shops in the capital, except one or two devoted to the sale of raki and tobacco, and the one solitary factory in the principality making only—cartridges!

THE MONTENEGRIN WAR OFFICE

Yet the cafe at the Vuko Volotic is seldom empty, and the clicking of the billiard—balls is incessant But where does the money come from to pay the score ? This is beyond the limits of conjecture; unless, perhaps, the Prince, in his dual capacity of father of his people and proprietor of the hotel, supplies his children with the necessary pocket-money to patronize his house of hospitable entertainment.

Life in the Montenegrin capital, we soon found, was not by any means a continual delirium of excitement. The dismal secretary to the Austrian Legation attached to the court of Montenegro, a fellow-lodger in our hotel, likened existence in Cetinje to being shut up in a sarcophagus. We considered his simile a happy one long before we had been twenty-four hours in the capital, while we, too. began to share the depressed diplomate’s sense of being buried alive. “Lions” there were none either in the village or its neighborhood, and, with three exceptions, the show places of the tiny metropolis were entirely without interest. These favorable exceptions were the Prison, the assembling-place of the Senate, and the Reading-room. The Cetinje Prison is certainly the most remarkable house of correction in Europe. It is, in fact, more like a pound than a prison, being built only of four stone walls about eight feet high, with no roof, and a door which generally stands wide open, by reason of its being nearly off its hinges. In Montenegro, a criminal is his own jailer. He is a simple and docile sort of fellow, who, when he has committed any crime, expiates it in the most exemplary manner by walking straight to prison, and obstinately refusing to come out until he has completed the term of his sentence.

PRINCE NICHOLAS I

If Cetinje is the smallest capital in the world, the meeting-place of the Senate is undoubtedly the largest in the universe, for it holds its sittings in the open air, under the famous plane-tree, in the center of the village. The legislative power in Montenegro is vested in the Senate, which is composed of sixteen members, elected annually by all males having borne or bearing arms— a voting qualification tantamount to universal suffrage among so warlike a race, with whom the military age commences at twelve, and the obligation for offensive service runs from seventeen to fifty. This Senate, for which every Montenegrin is eligible, although the heads of the principal families are invariably chosen, is invested with administrative functions, and also acts as a court of justice. Under the shadow of the plane-tree the Prince may be seen from time to time, seated on a low stool dispensing justice, surrounded by a circle of Senators. The Rev. Mr. Denton, however, tells us that only minor offenses are judged under the tree, such, in fact, “as require not so much the discrimination of a judge as the intervention of an arbiter.” There is, however, no stated period for the holding of these al fresco as sizes; the feast of St. Basil, the occurrence of a fair or market, or any time, indeed, “when people most do congregate,” being sufficient for the jail-delivery of the district.

Mr. Gladstone, the most powerful and eloquent friend of the men of Tzernagora, tells us that “it is impossible to relate the fortunes of this heroic people without begetting in the mind of the reader a restless suspicion of exaggeration and fable.” And yet it is not a legend which honors Montenegro as being one of the first countries to set up a printing-press. The fact, as Mr. Gladstone shows, is beyond dispute. “It was in 1484,” says the great liberal leader, “that the printing-press was set up at Cetinje, in a petty principality; they who set it up were men worsted by war and flying for their lives. Again, it was only seven years after the earliest volume had been printed by Caxton, in the rich and populous metropolis of England; and when there were no printing-presses in Oxford, or in Cambridge, or in Edinburgh. It was only sixteen years after the first printing-press had been established (1468) in Rome, the capital of Christendom; only twenty-eight years after the appearance (1450) of the earliest printed book, the first-born of the great discovery.” The Montenegrins of today have remained true to their literary traditions, and the reading-room in Cetinje is always fairly patronized, and well stocked with newspapers from all parts of Europe, but the major portion of the population being limited in their lingual accomplishments, the favorite foreign journals are “The Illustrated London News,” “L’Illustration,” and the Leipzig “Illustrirte Zeitung.” We also noticed on the reading-table “The Sunday Chronicle” of San Francisco, and a pamphlet called “Die Privat Speculation au der Borse.” This stock-broker’s circular must have been added to the library by some wag, and was, undoubtedly, the cruelest satire on Montenegrin poverty conceivable.

Before leaving Cetinje for Albania, Dick and I had an audience with the Prince. Nicholas I., Hospodar of Montenegro, is descended from Petrovic Njegos, proclaimed Vladika, or Prince Bishop of Montenegro, in 1697, who liberated the country from the Turks and, having established himself as both spiritual and temporal ruler, entered into a religious and political alliance with Russia. The order of succession made during the life-time of the late Prince had named Nicholas, the son of Mirko, elder brother of Prince Danilo (assassinated at Cattaro in 1860) as his heir. Danilo it was who first abandoned the title of Prince Bishop, or Vladika. At the same time he threw off the remnant of nominal dependency upon Turkey acknowledged by his predecessors, and obtained from Russia the investiture and formal sanction of his new title of Hospodar. From 1852 the religion, which is that of the Greek Church, has been governed by a bishop nominated by the Holy Synod of Russia. Former rulers of Montenegro possessed the whole of the revenues of the country, but in 1868, eight years after the present Prince’s accession, a general assembly of the representatives of the people decided to separate the public from the private income of the Hospodar. At present, his annual civil list amounts only to the modest sum of 350 Pounds ($1,750). To this, the Emperor of Russia has added 80,000 rubles, and the Austrian Government, 30,000.

Prince Nicholas is, undoubtedly, the most prominent figure in his country; and to his energetic patriotism is solely due the prominent place which Montenegro occupies on the present political map of Europe. Its claims are no longer neglected at foreign courts, and at the Congress of Berlin its lengthened struggle with the Turk for life and liberty was rewarded by a considerable extension of frontier. By Articles twenty-six and twenty-seven of the Berlin treaty, the town of Podgoritza and districts of Antivari were annexed to Montenegro, giving it the long-coveted sea-port on the Adriatic. These, and other rectifications of the frontier, added no less than 1968 square miles, with 115,000 inhabitants, to the principality; so that, at present, its total area is 3738 English square miles, populated by 311,000 people. But the Montenegrins’ old enemies on the Turkish border were not disposed to give up peaceable possession of a single acre under the Berlin award without a struggle. Thus, the Montenegrins narrowly escaped another war in trying to occupy the district of Gusinje, and even up to the moment of my writing, it is doubtful whether they will be permitted to claim this portion of the award of the Congress without bloodshed.

AN AUDIENCE WITH THE PRINCE

Prince Nicholas himself is of an eminently peaceable disposition. He has more of the scholar than the soldier about him. His great delight is in his schools which he has planted throughout the country; in his farm down at Danilograd, where he is experimenting in coffee-planting; and in his literary pursuits. As an author, the Prince has added to the literature of his country by the publication of a tragedy and a volume of songs. The poetic gift, indeed, is hereditary in the house of Petrovic, and there is scarcely a cottage in the country where at night-fall we may not hear some of the Prince’s verses sung to the accompaniment of the national instrument—the one-stringed, plaintive gusla. Indeed, the Prince’s popularity in the country is unbounded, as he is essentially one of his people. As the head of his highland clan, every peasant in the land, however poor, has a right to come to him for counsel or redress; and such is their affection for him, that no one would dream of questioning his judgment.

A LOUDRA ON THE RJEKA

We had been led to believe, before we came to Cetinje, that the home life of the Prince was as simple and unpretentious as that of a country squire. The Palace itself is certainly not more imposing than a well-appointed French chateau, or a first-rate Highland shooting-box. But the Prince himself does not appear to dispense with any of the forms and ceremonies which usually surround a ruling prince.

We were ushered into His Highness’ presence by an aid-de-camp, who acted his part of chamberlain with great elegance of deportment. And on our way to the audience chamber, on the first floor, we passed, drawn up in a kind of review order, a number of the stalwart body-guards of the Prince, each standing on a step of the staircase with a drawn saber in his hand. As soon, however, as our formal introduction to the Prince was ended, we were placed at our ease by the frankness and cordiality of his manner. The Hospodar, who is one of the largest men in his dominions, standing considerably over six feet, and with an almost Herculean depth of chest, was dressed in the national costume, with a revolver in his girdle, but without the kappa on his head. Unlike the rest of his race, he wears whiskers with his mustache, and these are trimmed in such a manner as to give to his somewhat swarthy features a distinctly Spanish look. These facial characteristics are very faithfully reproduced, as becomes an ardent admirer of his chief, in the features of M. Popovic, the Prince’s secretary. The Prince, who was the first of his dynasty sent for education to Paris instead of to St. Petersburg, speaks French perfectly, and is, moreover, well acquainted with German, Italian, and Russian. We, who are more familiar with the Teutonic than any other foreign language, were soon engaged in conversation with the Prince upon his dearest topic—the welfare and development of his country.

“You have, no doubt, been long enough in Cetinje,” said the Prince, “to hear that my people have surnamed me the ‘road-maker.’ Well, it is the highest title to which I aspire. I look forward to the completion of my road from Cattaro to Rjeka as the commencement of a new era in my country. For centuries we have been locked up in our highlands as in a prison. But when my new carriage-road is made, we hope to let the outer world see that we are neither so uncivilized, nor so ferocious, as we are sometimes reported to be.”

On my saying to the Prince that in my opinion the great want in the country was industrial occupation for the people, he replied :

“Yes, but you must give us time. For five hundred years we have been engaged in constant war with the Turks upon the border. Our only thoughts have been for the freedom of our country. But now that our land is secured to us, and a lasting peace is at hand, we hope to show the world that Montenegro has sufficient resources within herself to maintain her independence.”

But the lasting peace to which the Prince looked forward so hopefully as the regenerator of his country seemed already threatened. No sooner had we returned to the hotel from our interview, than news arrived from the war office at Podgoritza that the Turks were massing in force upon the Gusinje frontier. Hostilities between the Montenegrins and the Albanians had, we were assured, already commenced in a few slight skirmishes, and an army of at least 10,000 men would be immediately required by the Prince in order to occupy the territory.

Immediately on receipt of this news, Dick and I bade farewell to the Vuko Volotic, and set off for Rjeka, where we took a loudra down the river to Zsabliak, whence we rode across the plains to Podgoritza. The rapidity of our flight was occasioned by our anxiety to witness the war.

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