should not go to Niksics, and a council of the chiefs had refused propositions made by Raouf Pasha to permit him to pass unopposed, and decided to hold out on the Duga coûte qui coûte. The battle of Muratovizza was fought about the middle of November; Goransko was relieved by the treaty for two months, and the attack on Niksics was imminent. I decided to go to Niksics if possible, and watch the result.

While in Cettinje I did what I advise all who go there to do, ascend the hills to the south of the village, and study the land; for one may see nearly the whole principality at a glance, with much of Albania, the mountains of the Vasoivichi (children of Vaso) and the intervening Kutchi, and below them, spread out, like an eternal temptation to turn Turk, the ancient Montenegrin possession-the beautiful plain of the Zeta-stretching from Podgoritza all the way to the city of Scutari, though every year, owing to the thriftlessness of the Turk, some part of it is buried under the rising lake. Here Hotti, brother of Vaso, did settle, and kept his land by obedience to the Pashas and embracing Catholicism, which the Turks would tolerate.

One could see how well the border Commissions had done their work in cutting and carving for the Turk, by throwing all the districts which agriculture would claim outside the Montenegrin's boundary, and leaving him only what he could always defend. At our right was the canton of Zermnitchka; to the left, the Katunska, and Garatsch beyond, which overlooks the plain of Danilograd, and on one side protects it; in front, at our feet, the pretty valley of Dobrotskoselo, with the road winding through it to the valley of the Rieka beyond, and then a glimpse of the Rieka itself, winding through a band of meadow towards the lake.

On the edge of the plain, crowning an isolated volcaniclooking hill, was the ancient fortress of Jabliak, looking like the rather formal cup of the crater. This fort, the scene of some of the most daring feats of Montenegrin heroism, is still included in the principality by the map of Kiepert, though the Commission for defining the boundary threw it, like every other point the Turks could hold, on the Turkish side of the frontier.

It was easy to see from this point the greater part of what the Montenegrins have fought for these centuries-a poor, rocky waste of limestone, which nothing but the sheer spirit of domination should provoke any one to invade. In no other land I have ever seen is there so little earth for so much rock. In the crevices of the crumbling grey limestone stunted shrubs and trees find root, and among the fragments of the stone, slowly being split up by frost and rain, cling bouquets of wild sage and thyme, with little. flowers strange to me, but which the bees know, and here and there, where a little real earth had clung or formed, clumps of a magnificent autumn crocus and scattered cyclamens. There was nothing approaching a forest and nothing resembling a plain in the whole district north of Dodosh, the frontier village under the guns of Jabliak. Down in the valley of Dobrotskoselo, at our feet, one could see how systematically the Montenegrin works for his little land: every band of earth a few feet wide being held up by a stone terrace, and the fields were really only long strips of land circling round and round to the very centre of the valley, and even there is no plain, but still terraces and terraces continually. This is one of the gardens of the principality; but there is not land enough for the amount of stone to induce an Isle of Wight gardener to pay 6d. an acre rent for

it, if he had to do the work on it which here has been done by past generations. Down by Rieka village is, as I have said, a strip of meadow land; but, as the Turks will not drain the Scutari plain, it is being flooded with every rainy spell, and fevers depopulate the villages along it, as well as those along the lake itself, which are half the year in a swamp. This, again, is still being converted into lake, so that the boatman can see on a still day, as he floats along the surface, the villages of past generations, roads and bridges, beneath him; and along the shore are still ruins of other villages abandoned and waiting for the rising flood to bury them-after the fever the flood. And the lazy Turk, festering there in Scutari, with the water rising twice a year to his windows, has no conception that Government has duties as well as privileges, or even that his revenues would be greater by wise administration; but lets the fever eat up the people and the floods devour the land till population and desolation curse the earth for his sake. If any rational man doubts who should govern this fair scenefair in spite of its barrenness on one side and its neglect on the other-I ask him to stand on that summit of Dobrshnja with me and see what the Montenegrin and the Turk are doing under his eyes.

Away across the plain, beyond the Zeta, rise the mountains of the Kutchi, as I have said, and there with a glass one may see Medun. From the plain rises a table land, the road up to it winding through a ravine, an ascent, perhaps, of 200 feet, and then an easy sloping pasture land, with here and there a house visible among the trees, and at the upper side, on a crag overlooking a torrent on the edge of the table land, stands Medun, looking like a crystallization of the rock it is built on. Reading of the battles which have

made the locality famous even in Montenegrin annals one imagines awful ravines like the Duga, or gorges like Klek, but there was nothing here which in the distance one could consider as a formidable position-a gently sloping valley across the table land, easy heights on both sides, until it reaches Medun, where one side is sunk in the ravine over which the town looks.

CHAPTER VII.

ITH all Prince Nikita's devotion to road-making, to which he seems as much inclined as his pre

decessor was to military organization, it seems hardly possible that in his own day Montenegro will be a country fit for carriages, and they who would see some of the wildest and most picturesque parts of Europe must be good mountaineers, for even on horseback some of these roads are scarcely passable. The road from Cettinje to Rieka, though a tolerable zigzag and paved after a fashion, is in some parts so precipitous that the guide invites you, in your own interest, to dismount in going down, as a false step on the part of your pony would certainly send you over his head. The descent is so rapid that within an hour from Cettinje we enter the valley of Dobrotskoselo, where figs are abundant, the vine is luxuriant, the vegetation still green, and wild flowers in blossom, long after everything in the plain about Cettinje is dead and bare.

Everywhere are the same steep, rocky slopes which we found on entering the principality, and after a continuous descent for three hours we arrive at the head of the valley of Rieka proper, and see a view worth the trip. The river Rieka, after the habit of Montenegrin rivers, bursts out of the mountain already a respectable stream, and winds through a

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