Chapter IV: The Pilgrimage on the Forest-Mountain (1)

Through the Forests of the Black-Mountain—The Flower
of Illyria—A Mysterious Fly—Enchanted Ground—The Fairy
Mountain—Great Christian Pilgrimage—The Shrine on the
Mountain-top—Christian Votaries in the Garb of Islâm—The
Night-encampment—How the Turks dance—Anacreontic Songs—An
Epic Bard, Poetic Genius of Bosniacs—Insolence of Turkish
Soldiers and their Ill-treatment of the Rayahs—Types at
the Fair—Aspect and Character of Men—_Chefs-d’œuvre_ of
Flint-knapping—Christian Graveyard and Monastery—Dismiss our
Zaptieh—Night on Forest-mountain of Troghìr—Wrecks by Wind
and Lightning—Scene of Forest Fire—Timber Barricades—Summit
of Vučia Planina—A _Bon-vivant_—Steep Descent—Night in a
Hole—Almost impassable Gorge—Egyptian Rocks—Repulsed from a
Moslem Village—Tombs of the Bogomiles—Arrive at Franciscan
Monastery of Gučiagora—Fears of a Massacre—Relations of
Roman Catholics with the Turks—Austrian Influence in
Bosnia—Aspirations of the Bosnian Monks.

At last we made our escape from the Kaïmakàm, and, escorted by our new Zaptieh, began ascending the Crni Vrch, or Black-Mountain, named, like the Crnagora (Montenegro), not from any blackness of the rock, but from being covered with dark forests, or simply from its savage wildness, ‘black’ being with the Sclaves synonymous with everything harsh and fierce. About an hour and a quarter’s ascent brought us to one of its summits, when we passed a Mahometan woman, who, though veiled, went through the absurd formality—common enough among the Bosniac Mahometans—of squatting against the roadside with her back turned towards us till we had put a sufficiency of road between her and ourselves. Further on we came to a shed such as we had seen in the vale of Ussora, where we regaled ourselves with coffee, and a chubby kind of cucumber, which however our Zaptieh was the only one to fancy.

Beyond here the scenery became wilder and indescribably beautiful. On one side rolled out beneath us the Possávina and the winding vale of Bosna, and far beyond the dim ranges of Slavonia; on the other side rose the peaks and shoulders of Vlašić and Troghìr and a tossing sea of low mountains, the nearer billows green with the fine forest growth, into which we now plunged—and to quit the scorching sun of noon for woodlands still fresh with the dewy coolness of night is indeed to take an aërial bath! The beeches amongst which we now steered our course, by a meandering forest-path, were no longer gnarled and stumpy, but tall and queenly, as those of an English park. Amongst them, here and there, towered isolated oaks, champions as it seemed of a lost fight, tough rugged old barbarians, battling every inch with those civilised victorious beeches—hemmed round but unyielding—heroic, taking every attitude of god-like struggle—here a manly, muscular Laocöon, wrestling with serpentine brambles and underwood, that insinuates itself among the knotted limbs—a mighty Hercules, uplifted arm and club as to fell the hundred-headed Hydra—or there sovereign Jove, the Thunderer himself, hurling—so the jagged branches interpreted themselves—forked lightning at the beechlings round! But in vain. The oaks must be content to reign in plain and valley. On these uplands the beeches camp triumphantly, till higher still the pines repulse them from the mountain citadel, and in the great struggle for existence each tree finds its own level.

But how soft the refrain from this deep bass of nature! Pale, dreamy tufts of male and lady fern, delicately luminous in the forest-depths, Canterbury bells — for English pilgrims, what fitter accompaniment?—vibrating to the zephyrs in the orbs of sunlight; brighter still, the ruby coronals of sweet-williams; and, where it should be, among its native mountains, luxuriant gentian, drooping like Solomon’s seal, weighed down as with elfin vases of lapis lazuli. This is the flower of Illyria, which, as Pliny tells us, took its name from her last king—that Gentius who ruled these lands in the days of Perseus of Macedon, and who first brought into credit the virtues of the herb which now alone preserves his memory.

Now and then we emerge on a glade of breathing bracken—from the leafy orchestra round, the myriad chirp of tree-crickets, caught up below by blue and red winged brothers, who, in their glee, half skipping and half flying, seem amphibious of earth and heaven—a ‘kingly’ minstrelsy, as beseeming the rank and beauty of the butterfly dancers. Amongst the company we noticed a purple Emperor, Dukes of Burgundy, majestic swallow-tails, a cream-spotted tiger-moth—beauties of Camberwell—not to speak of blues and lesser stars—marsh fritillaries and delicate wood-whites, hovering over damper hollows; and in one dark watery dell ‘edged with poplar pale,’ a black and mysterious butterfly, which I am content to leave within the limits of the Unknown. It is not for me to enquire into the transformation of such sooty insects—_nec scire fas est!_—for we are now treading enchanted ground—we are actually on the skirts of earthly fairyland. Yonder dark forest mountain, unfathomable as it seems, is called by a name which the Bosniac woodman still mentions with awe. It is nothing else than the Vila Gora—the fairy mountain. Yes! even within the limits of Europe the nymphs of the old world have something more than twilight thickets for their mourning; here at least they have still some sunny glades and laughing runnels left them for their merry-go-rounds. We are now in a land where the fairies live not only in the lays but the minds of men—and malicious sprites some of them are, sable as that mysterious fly! As the peasant gropes his way through yonder haunted pine-wood, the trees begin to drip with grisly lichen, the trunks grow scarred, and sooty with storm and lightning, and a cloudy pall obscures the sun, and a sudden gust of wind rattles the bony limbs above—and lo! across the gloomiest forest-crypt, lashing her coal-black stag with serpent scourge, shoots—_the Evil Vila_!

But let us be chary of such ill-omened words! and pass on rather to that flowery dell among the beech-trees where the good Vilas are dancing. In form they are as beautiful maidens with ever-loosened zones. Their eyes are blue as the heavens, and their hair, which falls even to their ankles, golden as the sunlight. Some are riding through the forest on wind-swift steeds. They are singing the fates of men; they are weaving destinies; they are watching with motherly tenderness over the slumbers of the heroes of the race, who, lapped in their bosoms, are dreaming on of better days in many a mountain cave, till the guardian nymph shall rouse each warrior from his sleep, to sunder for ever the chains of the oppressors. Methinks they are waking even now!

Once or twice our ears were saluted with strange idyllic strains, harmonising with the scenery, and we passed by swineherds recumbent beneath spreading beech-trees, and piping to their bristly charge on barbaric instruments. We chose a shady chestnut-tree by a stream, under which to cook our frugal repast (for though nature was bountiful of blackberries we could not live on them), and while so engaged a shepherd lad came up and serenaded us with Bosnian airs on his rude double pipe or Svirala.

We now followed a small tributary of the Ussora, and in its shallow bed made our first acquaintance with the mineral wealth of the country. It was a brilliant mosaic, a medley of vermeiled jasper, snow-white quartz, fragments of rich iron ore, glittering scales of mica, green serpentine; and we picked up a beautiful piece of opaline chalcedony, enwrapping a nest of little crystals in its agaty folds. The hamlet near the point where this rivulet runs into the Ussora is known as Zlatina, which means golden, and is a name commonly given throughout Bosnia to places where gold is popularly supposed to exist; but though there are many old gold mines in different parts, and gold is still washed in some of the rivers, the ignorant peasants are said to mistake sulphur for it, or perhaps more probably the interior of iron-pyrites—our ‘crow gold’—so that the name itself proves nothing.

Beyond here we forded the Ussora, and now began to fall in with long trains of Bosnian rayahs, a troop of small Bosnian horses laden with bales and human beings, all streaming in the same direction as ourselves. It was evening when we began to ascend a small wooded mountain, escorted by this motley troop; the women and children mostly on foot, the men usually on horseback, and with their bright red turbans—worn about here by even the poorest classes—forming a brilliant foreground to the surrounding foliage. We followed the current, and an hour’s winding ascent brought us to the summit of a mountain, normally lonely, and devoid of habitation, but now thronged to overflowing by a gorgeous array of peasants from the uttermost recesses of Christian Bosnia, and some even from beyond the Serbian frontier. The summit of the mountain formed a long flat neck capacious enough to accommodate many thousands, and rising to its highest point towards its north-western extremity. As each detachment of peasants arrived they tethered their horses, and made straight to the summit of the ridge, which was surmounted by a rude shrine. This was the central point of the vast assemblage, and the reason of this great Christian gathering was soon explained.

The Roman Catholic population of this part of Bosnia had assembled from their mountain strongholds far and wide to do honour to two of their saints, known in their own parlance as Svéta Góspa and Svéta Kátta—Our Lady and St. Catherine; St. Mary the patroness of the old Bosnian kingdom, and St. Catherine the favoured Virgin Martyr of Bosnian Queens. To-morrow was the feast of the Miraculous Assumption, and the pilgrims had thronged to this Christian Delphos, the sacred navel of their land, in a great crisis of their national history, if not to consult saintly oracles, at least to obtain the support of their two tutelary goddesses. Though we realised it not at the time, we were on something more than the eve of a Romish feast. On the very day of this great pilgrimage, while these thousands were praying before their mountain shrine, a revolt was beginning in Bosnia, of which we have not yet seen the end, and which, for better or worse, must change her whole future.

This is what happened at the shrine. On arriving, each peasant bowed reverently before it, and executed certain mystic passes connected with his religion. He then made his way step by step round the outside of the shrine, moving, as they say, with the sun, from left to right; and if he were particularly pious or particularly conscience-smitten, he stumped round on his knees. On the right or northern side of the shrine a priest standing within it held forth a gilt crucifix, which each passer-by kissed; and having performed the circuit of the exterior, each votary entered the shrine itself and completed his devotions before barbaric pictures of his divinities which were facing east—laying, it might be, on the altar a homely nosegay of rosemary and golden zinnias. Many devotees, after leaving the mysterious canopy, remained facing it outside, as represented in the sketch, on their knees, counting their beads or holding out their clenched fists in a peculiar attitude, intended, perhaps, to represent a cross. Some prayed very earnestly; and indeed the occasion was no ordinary one. When each had finished, he left the immediate neighbourhood of the shrine and joined the multitude below, so that the grassy slope around the building, which was a rude wooden shed, was reserved for those actually performing their devotions. This sketch was drawn on the eve of the festival, when the shrine was less crowded.

But what was most striking was the thoroughly Mahometan appearance of so many of these Christian devotees. The influence of Islâm seemed to have infected even their ritual; for many grovelled on the ground and kissed the earth, as in a mosque. There was one man whom I should have mistaken for a Hadji or Turkish pilgrim; there were others with the shaven crown of a true-believing Moslem, and the single pig-tail, so thoughtfully preserved by the Faithful to aid the Angel Gabriel in dragging them into Paradise. There were women with faces so nearly eclipsed that they seemed in fear of the injunctions of the Koràn; and even the monks who had come up from the monastery of Comušina might be mistaken at a little distance for Turkish officials. There was something pathetic in the sight of so many Christians, dressed indeed in the garb of Mahometans, but still clinging to the faith of their fathers![175] Indeed, the whole scene was one which, though well-nigh impossible to describe, no one who had seen it could ever forget, and in which even those who lament the superstition must acknowledge some elements of grandeur and beauty;—the solitary mountain-peak, momentarily thronged by pilgrims who in some childish yearning after heaven had pitched their place of worship here so as to be nearer their celestial goal—the votaries themselves—these poor peasants, brutalised by centuries of misrule, steeped in ignorance and bigotry, outcasts of this world rapt in silent communings (as they believed) with another and a happier; beneath them the primeval forest; around in every direction an aërial gulf; and beyond, far as the eye could pierce the deepening twilight, range upon range of lonely mountains.

Not but what these thrifty Bosniacs had turned the opportunity to account by combining with their religious festival and pilgrimage a large fair—or, as the Germans would say, a year-market—which occupied the other end of the mountain neck. A long lane was formed along which to arrange the wares, but the show was mostly reserved for the _festa_ itself on the morrow. On each side of this lane the peasants were camped in families; and in the festivities of the night and the fair next morning we saw displayed before us, as in some brilliant picture-book, the whole life of the rayah country people from a large tract of Bosnia: their varying costumes, their simple diet, their cheap necessities, their dances and discordant minstrelsy, and over all, the shadow of a Damoclean scimetar.

As the night drew on the whole neck of the mountain was lit up by cheery bonfires, round which the peasants clustered in social circles. Our Zaptieh provided us with blazing logs for ourselves, over which we performed our own culinary operations, supplemented by a generous haunch from a sheep, roasted in the usual Bosnian fashion. This is how the peasants cooked their meat—for on this high-day there were some who indulged in such a luxury as mutton. They took a sharp stake about eight feet long, and inserting it in the slaughtered animal’s mouth or neck, skewered it right through the carcase and out at the tail. Two low forks were now driven into the ground, the huge spit with its burden was lodged on them, a large fire was kindled over against it, and the peasants took turn and turn about to make the spit go round. A goodly portion of the assemblage seemed determined to make a night of it, and what with carousing, dancing, singing, and playing, I will not deny that they succeeded.

The first dance I saw was of a comic kind, performed by two men, and there were so many varying figures that one fancied they must improvise them as they went on. The accompaniment on a ghuzla, the one-stringed lute of the Serbs, was of the dolefullest, and the dance itself was anything but graceful. The chief object that they apparently had in view was to dislocate every limb in the most comfortable way possible. Now and then they stamped on the ground, and then walked after each other and round each other in a clown-like fashion; and now and then they would pause and tread gingerly with their feet, as if they were trying whether ice would bear, fumbling the while in a stupid way about their noses, as if to see that spectacles were safely fixed on them. The Kolo, however, or round dance of the Sclaves, was more elegant, and chiefly danced by the girls, who formed themselves in a ring and danced round and round, sometimes in a very spirited manner.

The most monotonous of all the dances was that with which some Turkish officials, who had fixed their quarters at the further end of the mountain neck, solaced themselves. Not that they danced themselves! they were far too lazy and phlegmatic to do that; but they impressed into their service a succession of rayah boys, who in turn danced long _pas seuls_ before their lords and masters. Without leaving what we may call his pedestal, a boy kept treading the ground to the weary see-sawing music, and trying to make every muscle and limb quiver like a jelly. Then, after performing this operation for a good ten minutes, with his face towards his Turkish admirers, he slowly turned round on his pivot and danced—if such tremulous distortion could be called dancing!—for an equal space of time, with his back to the spectators, and then he gradually swerved round again as if he were roasting before a slow fire, and was from time to time adjusted by a turnspit! But the Turks, comfortably squatted on carpets strewn over the turf, gazed gravely on by the hour together, and seemed to enjoy the spectacle.

We heard much playing of ghuzlas and double pipes and flutes, and much vocal accompaniment with lyric songs and long epic ballads. The instruments, with the exception of the ghuzla, were the same as the Croatian already described, and the ghuzla itself resembled a tamburitza with three strings and bow in place of fingers; but the playing on them struck me as slightly better than what we had heard at Siszek. The metre was as curious and as much a relic of an older world as the instruments whose Arcadian affinities have been already touched on. One of the many minstrels was enchanting an audience of Bosniac maidens with a lyric, whose measure, unless my ears deceived me, was identical with that of Anacreon’s song beginning,

λέγουσω αΐ γυναῖκες,
Ἀνακρεων γέρων εἶ.

And it was strange and impressive, with the air merry with tree-crickets from the foliage around, to catch, as it, seemed, the cadence of that exquisite ode in which the Teian bard paid his homage to the same cicadas!

μακαρίζονμέν σε τέττιξ,
ὅτι δενδρέων ἐπ’ ἄκρων
ὀλίγην δρόσον πεπωκὼς,
βασιλεὺς ὅπως ἀείδεις.

But the songs, though interesting, were not beautiful, and, to tell the truth, were often more like a succession of street-cries than any other sound, human or divine! This was mainly owing to what was the chief peculiarity of the singing—the long stress, namely, laid by the voice on the last syllable or the last trochee, insomuch that success in a singer seemed to lie in the ability of keeping on at the concluding howl longer than his fellows.

One asks oneself with amazement how such dolorous chaunts could possibly have originated? Was it possibly the dire necessity of droning in concert with a bagpipe? The ‘_dudelsack_’—pitilessly expressive word!—is not unknown in Bosnia at this day, and was certainly as much the property of the primitive Sclave as of the primitive Englishman. Doubtless, too, early singing is pinched and crippled and distorted by the rudeness of early instruments. I did not see a bagpipe here, but traced its evil communications everywhere. It seemed to have corrupted all the other instruments. They had caught it. It had got into their throats like a fog, and given a twang to every chord. It was a positive nightmare of bagpipes. There was a bagpipe in the flute, and a bagpipe in the lute, and a bagpipe even in the whistle!

The singing, at any rate, reacts on the poetry; for the long expenditure of breath renders a pause a physical necessity for the recovery of wind at the end of every two lines, so that the lays were generally divided into couplets. Much that looks Procrustean, and many apparently capricious full-stops in classic metres might, one would think, be referred to similar causes. Nearly a minute would sometimes elapse after one couplet before the singer had recovered breath to continue.

But what carried one back into epic days at once was a larger gathering, forming a spacious ring lit up by a blazing fire, in the middle of which a Bosniac bard took his seat on a rough log, and tuning his ghuzla began to pour forth one of the grand sagas of his race. Could it have been an unpremeditated lay? Without a book or any aid to memory he rolled out the ballad for hour after hour, and when I turned to rest, not long before sunrise, he was still rhapsodising. I do not pretend to know what was the burthen of the ballad. Perchance it recorded the enchantments of the Vila in yonder forest-mountain; perchance it told how Czar Dūshan marched to seize the city of the Cæsars; or of the finding of Knez Lazar and the sad day of Kóssovo; or, mayhap it belonged to that later cycle of Serbian poetry which centres round the half-hero, half-renegade, Marko Kraljević.[176] For in this land, without books, without history, it is these heroic lays—Tabories they call them, from Tavor, their God of War—that keep alive from generation to generation the sacred traditions of the race. In the days of bondage these have been the one proud heirloom of the Serbian people from the Adriatic to the Danube. Their spirit has been continually refreshed from the perennial fount of epic song. Separated by creed and the barriers of nature, and the caprice of man, it is this national poetry that has kept them from forgetting that they are brothers, that has turned their mind’s eye back from the divisions of the present to the union of the past, and has fed their ambition with the memories of a time when one of their princes seemed about to catch up the falling diadem of Byzantium and place it on his brow. For the Bosnian Serb seems to forget the narrower traditions of his half alien kingdom in these more glorious legends, which override the cant of geographers and diplomatists, and make him see a brother in the Serb of the Black Mountain or Old Serbia, or the free Principality; and, indeed, he too has some claims to share these memories, for the city of the Serbian Cæsars, Prizren the Czarigrad, lies within the Bosnian limits.

Doleful, then, as these strains may seem to a civilised ears, it ill becomes the stranger to mock at them. Over those rude men they seemed to exercise a kind of charm. The hearers of the bard to whom I was listening seemed never to grow weary. Every now and then an ecstatic thrill would run through the whole circle, and find utterance in inarticulate murmurs of delight. So carried away are the emotions of the listeners, that it is by no means rare—though I did not witness this;—for them to be moved to tears. ‘I cannot describe,’ says an observer,[177] ‘the pathos with which these songs are sometimes sung. I have witnessed crowds surrounding a blind old singer, and every cheek was wet with tears; it was not the music, but the words, which affected them.’ For these songs speak to the heart. They are instinct with that natural simplicity which is the very soul of pathos. True, there is lacking something of the tremendous energy of our old Teutonic sagas. There is less sword-play; but there is more poetry. We should never expect to find an Anglo-Saxon gleeman of our epic days likening, as does one of these unlettered Bosnian bards, the cheeks of the loved one to the flush of dawn and her eyelids to the silken wings of swallows. This airiness of phantasy, the brilliance of the imagery, seem to witness the close communion of the race with the Oriental world around them; but there is a national sobriety ever bridling the imagination, just as we have seen the Oriental gorgeousness of a Serbian lady’s dress tempered with something of the homely Serbian house-mother. But what, perhaps, is more striking than all, is to find the rude simplicity of Homer combined with a dramatic force more characteristic of the age of Euripides.[178] Surely in such spring flowers—and wintry indeed has been the spring of this poor Bosnian stem!—is to be found the best proof that the stock is not all cankered, and the surest earnest of fruits to ripen yet. In a poetry that has received the reverent homage of Goethe it cannot be fanciful to see a token that the race is capable of attaining to the highest pinnacles of civilisation. It can hardly be unreasonable to seek here for a retort against those who speak of the South Sclavonic rayah as an utterly degraded being, and who cannot discern that

He still retains,
’Mid much abasement, what he has received
From Nature—an intense and glowing mind.

It is unfortunate that I am unable to conclude the account of this—to me—uniquely interesting night with the mention of songs and ballads, and that more must be added which it is most displeasing to relate.

It is only just to say that, taking into consideration the troubles in the Herzegovina, and—what may have been traceable in the hurried calling-out of the reserve at Dervent and Tešanj—the possible foreknowledge of the imminence of an outbreak in Bosnia, it was quite natural for the Turkish authorities to view with suspicion an assemblage of several thousand Christian Bosniacs, and even to take precautionary measures against any disturbances—or conspiracy. No one can therefore blame the Kaïmakàm of Tešanj for despatching some officials and a retinue of gendarmes to watch the proceedings. This night the Turks had taken their station at the end of the neck of the hill, as if the better to ward off any possible attack, and to secure a line of retreat if necessary. The presence of these Zaptiehs gave me an opportunity of observing how these tools of the Mahometan government dealt with the Christian Bosniacs, when not under the immediate surveillance of foreign consuls. Briefly, they treated them like a herd of cattle; and it is hard to say which was the more revolting, the intolerable insolence or the downright cruelty.

I was standing in one of the circles where a Bosnian gleeman was rehearsing a national epic, when the spell of the song was rudely broken by a Zaptieh, who, bursting through the ring of listeners and thrusting the rayahs to right and left, stood before the embers in the middle, and, playing with his cutlass with one hand, demanded, in such a savage tone as quite infuriated me, who would light his pipe. The Bosniacs took it more calmly. The old minstrel laid down his lute and paused for awhile in his lay. For a few moments there was a moody silence—as if some blunted sense of injury had outlived long use of wrongs—then a fine man stepped forward sheepishly and lit the bully’s pipe.

Another time a knot of peasants were gathered together in friendly converse in the grassy middle-lane, when two Zaptiehs rushed forward with whips, and flogged them away, _women_ as well as men! But the worst instance of brutality that came within my observation took place while I was discussing a bottle of Slavonian wine, and exchanging English songs for Bosnian, with a merry group of rayahs, belonging mostly to the Greek Church, ‘Serbs,’ as they proudly called themselves, who had come to take part in the fair and festa of their Roman Catholic rivals. Of a sudden our festivities were broken in upon by the sounds of a scuffle behind, accompanied by such shrieks as made me start up, and the firelight fell on a gendarme—the same, I think, who had interrupted the minstrelsy—who, with a stick or some kind of weapon, was beating an old Christian man as if he were a pig, and kicking the poor cringing wretch the while till he howled for mercy. I was stepping forward to interpose, but two Bosniacs clutched hold of me and held me back, whispering with more covered hatred than can be described, ‘’Tis only the Turks!’ The Zaptieh, however, not wishing to provoke Frankish intervention, desisted from his belabouring, and left his victim to limp away as best he might. The group of ‘Serbs’ had not shown any sign of attempting a rescue, but I saw more than one brow knit ominously for the moment. But the visible emotion was transient, and their faces relapsed into that impassive stolidity which is the normal expression of the Bosnian rayah.

It has been already observed that a Zaptieh had been told off with the express commission of observing our motions, and it was a continual annoyance to find a gendarme ever dogging at our heels. But it was obviously disagreeable to the Turks that I should be about at all; and as the night advanced our detective began to find the duties of espionage somewhat wearisome, and appears to have put our own Zaptieh, with whom I noticed him confabulating, up to bidding me retire to rest, as if he were rather commander than escort. This he did to my no small astonishment, while I was listening to one of the ballads, and was sent roundly about his business for his pains, to the unconcealed delight of the Christians, who from that moment dubbed us Consuls—a name given by the Bosniacs to any Europeans who are not subject to the caprices of Turkish gendarmes; for they argue that no one less than a foreign representative would dare to lift a finger against these creatures of their tyrants.

But at last, though the epic still rolled on—sometimes these rhapsodies continue with intervals for days at a time!—and though the interest of the audience flagged not, I thought it time to follow the example set hours before by L⸺, who was somewhat footsore, and to lie down beside our fire. And if anyone fancies that our mountain lair was altogether a bed of roses, he is mistaken, for the night was very cold, and we were always being partly scorched and partly frozen; and as the ground was anything but even, falling asleep was rather a doubtful advantage, since we were pretty sure to roll either into the embers on one side, or down the steep on the other; and if neither of these casualties befel us ’twas odds that we started up with a most corporeal and hoofy nightmare upon us, and discovered that one of the Arab horses, which encompassed us round about, had mistaken our blanket bags for fodder, and was proceeding to act upon that assumption.

But it begins to dawn, the vast camp is astir, a subtle aroma of coffee pervades our waking senses, and a new day breaks forth, wondrously fair to look upon, but to Bosnia pregnant with bloodshed and misery.

Yet there is no sign of trouble here. New arrivals are perpetually swelling the festal gathering and crowding round the shrine. It was a brilliant scene, which no words can convey; but the reader will permit me to introduce the characteristic group seated on yonder trunk.

The man to the right, in a red turban and a dark indigo jacket, is a fair example of the Bosniac rayah of these parts, and indeed his dress is much the same throughout the country. He wears a loose white linen tunic and trowsers, which latter are confined about the calf in this instance, though they are often loose and flowing, as among the Croats. His feet are sandalled in the never-failing _Opankas_, which seem common to all the southern Sclaves, and may not improbably be the same foot-covering as that mentioned by Constantine Porphyrogenitus. The Byzantine Emperor says that the Romans called the boots of the Serbli (or Serbs) Serbula, and Serbulianos all those who were poorly booted; and indeed, if these are the sandals alluded to, it must be confessed that the Byzantine contempt for them as boots was merited, for experience has taught me that the straps easily break, and that the soles are worn through in no time.

The woman seated on the middle of the trunk is representative of the ordinary Latin peasants hereabouts, the red border of her jacket being probably an ensign of her Catholicism as near Dervent. The rest of the jacket is black, contrasting with the clean white tunic below; but the general effect would be funereal were it not for her apron, which is of as divers colours as Joseph’s coat, and displays those diamond patterns so much affected by the peasants near Belgrade. The twin brooches on her belt may remind the antiquary of those worn by our Anglo-Saxon great-grandmothers, or of such as are exhumed from old Serbian graves, and the silver work of her ear-rings is doubtless an inheritance from Byzantium.

The standing figure to her left belongs to a very curious type both of feature and costume. This was the first occasion on which we came upon a dress the affinities of which were other than Serbian or Croatian. The multitude of decoration is overpowering. She is studded with Turkish coins as with a cuirass of scale armour, her arms loaded with bracelets, and her fingers with rings; ornamental patterns are crowded over her jacket and apron,—a gorgeous orange being the pervading colour. Her hair was spangled with coins in a way which we afterwards saw repeated among the unveiled Mahometan women of the Narenta valley. There was a certain heaviness about the dress which contrasted with the lighter costumes around; it belonged to the general class of Bosnian costume extending west and south towards Dalmatia and the Herzegovinian frontier. Its _nuances_ are decidedly Dalmatian. As we crossed the mountains towards Travnik we came upon more specimens of this type; and in the gorges of Troghìr and Mazulia were again struck by the curious stamp of features, which in these mountains seems always to accompany this peculiar attire. The broad face and flat nose suggest quite a different parentage, and I noticed brothers and husbands who showed that the peculiarity was not confined to one sex. I remember one man in particular with nose so curiously flattened that one was almost tempted to believe that his profile had been deformed by a bandage drawn tightly across the face in childhood, after the old Hunnish fashion, and went on to speculate whether some of the followers of Attila, or perchance some of those Tartars who flooded Bosnia in the thirteenth century, might not have been caught in these mountain basins. But this much is certain, that at the present day these gorgeous barbarians speak Bosniac like their neighbours.

To the left of our Hunnish friend sits a woman in the most civilized costume of Christian Bosnia, and which, with peculiarities of its own, is eminently Serbian, of the Danube, and will recall the maiden of Tešanj. Here, however, besides the hair plaited round a tasselled fez, and the scarf crossed X-wise over the bosom, is the expanding skirt and the fur-bordered jacket, such as the ladies of Belgrade delight in wearing.

Some of the girls have decked their hair with zinnias and even sunflowers. The quantity of false coral and bead necklaces worn is overpowering, as is the endless variety of modes in which the white and red kerchiefs that drape the heads are set. Sometimes it was arranged not unlike the coiffure of the last queen of Bosnia, as she appears on her monumental slab. Sometimes, as has been already noticed, it threatened to conceal the face entirely, and some of these half Mahometans were to be seen with the ‘bags’ reaching to their ankles, _à la belle Turque_. One girl was arrayed as a bride—in lily white, except the flowers in her hair, which just peeped forth from beneath a kerchief-veil, woven of the lightest texture of the country, and falling airily about her person, fringed with simple lace.

But another maiden demands my presence, and I am called away to sketch, at her own request, a Bosnian belle, coiffed in the brightest of rosy kerchiefs, enveloped in a jacket with the most gorgeous golden border, and cinctured with a sash of orange and purple. Whether the attitude in which she sat for her portrait was the most elegant she could have chosen, and whether her boots, in which I fancy she took a peculiar pride, were of that form most adapted for displaying maidenly gracility of ankle, may be left for a forbearing public to decide.

Her hair is dark—and who so ungallant as to suggest that its hue is due to artificial causes? Granted that a powder does exist called Kna; let it freely be admitted that the fair Serbs often show themselves as desirous as the ladies of the harem to acquire those raven tresses which the Koràn distinguishes as a sign of comeliness and strength. But a glance—a scintillation—from those eyes would annihilate any detractor so mean as to bring such imputations against our Bosniac beauty! Here at once, so to speak, we are on _terra firma_. These at least are incapable of assuming an un-genuine hue; and they are _black_,—black as the sloes with which the national poets delight to compare their mistresses’ orbs, and haloed round with such dark lashes and eyebrows as the same Serbian imagination fondly likens to ‘leeches from the fountain.’ But she was rather the exception in the crowd, and the evident esteem in which her good looks were held was probably more due to this accident of hue than anything else; for if at times the tresses of her artless village rivals _happened_ on the fashionable colour, their eyes were oftener of a traitorous turquoise than of jet; and as to the little children, their hair was of a tell-tale flaxen! Nay, it is to be feared that if our damsel was on the look out for a black-eyed sweetheart to match her, she would find some difficulty in realizing her hopes, since the men’s eyes were generally of greys or watery blues, and their lanky locks took an unfortunately reddish hue of brown; and even supposing her pockets to have been as full of gold, she was likely to fall as far short of her ideal as the maiden of Serbian poetry, who sings:—

I wish the happy time were nigh,
When youths are sold, that I might buy.
But for an azure-eyed Milinar,[179]
I would not give a single dinar,
Though for a raven-black eyed youth,
A thousand golden coins in truth.
Alas! alas! and is it true?
My own fair youth has eyes of blue![180]

The women looked as a rule pleasanter than the men, whose general appearance, as may perhaps be gathered from the illustration, is anything but prepossessing. The whole crown is shorn of hair, Turkish fashion, but usually, instead of the single pig-tail of the faithful, two long elf-locks are left dangling from the back of the head, and the effect of the bare occiput with these two sickly appendages is little short of disgusting; add to which that the natural length of the neck is exaggerated by this tonsure. From the front the aspect is not more pleasing; the bald pate, combined with the bony attenuated face and round eyebrows, being often in a ghastly manner suggestive of a death’s-head. The long sunken eye-slits, whose outer corners curve down, so as to follow the lines of the brow-arches, give them an air of sleepy cunning, the eyebrows often overhanging as to form a den for the suspicious roving eyes. The lips are thick, broad, and pouting. The whole face seems dazed, and it is almost beyond mortal patience to see the heavy, slow, owlish way in which their head turns on its axis if anything attracts their attention. When you look at them they always seem as if they do not know what expression is expected of them, and their stolidity is enhanced by turbans which make them look top-heavy. It is easy to understand why the quick-witted Greeks of the lower Empire should have nick-named the Sclaves Chondrokephaloi, or ‘block-heads.’

Yet, after all, the hideous tonsure and what is vilest in their demeanour are but accidental badges of servitude and oppression—removable by a few generations of free government. The sluggishness of their deliberation may be quickened by culture; and, the causes of suspicion once removed, the hang-dog look of the Bosniac would disappear as surely as it has ceased among the free Serbians, and as it is disappearing at this day among the liberated Wallachian serfs. The slow, measured utterance of the race, so far from being a proof of inferiority, has been compared by Ami Boué to that of Englishmen, and this keen observer of the Serbs speaks of the people and language as born, if any ever were, for parliamentary government.

The frame of these Bosniac countrymen lacks the elegance and suppleness of the modern Greek, but it is stronger and of larger mould. No stranger who passes through Bosnia can fail to be struck at the exceeding stature of the inhabitants. The fair here is thronged with men six feet high, and over. An English traveller who passed through this country in 1634, and stayed a day or two in ‘Saraih,’ ‘the metropolis of the kingdome of Bosnah,’ says, ‘the most notable things I found was the goodnesse of the water, and vaste, almost _gyant-like_ stature of the men, which with their bordring upon _Germany_, made mee suppose them to be the offspring of those old _Germans_ noted by _Cæsar_ and _Tacitus_ for their huge size, which in other places is now degenerate into the ordinary proportions of men.’[181] Gaunt they may be, lean and overgrown; but they are sons of Anak; and though they may now seem a cowering rabble, the example of their self-liberated brothers in Montenegro and free Serbia should teach the world that in happier circumstances they too might hold up their heads and display the spirit of heroes. Even in their features, in their broad benevolent forehead and aquiline nose, are disguised the lineaments of grandeur and manly beauty. Despite the ill-favour of their expression, there was generally a lurking geniality to be detected in it, and when among themselves I was struck with their kindly manners and good-fellowship; indeed I suspect that it is generally the stranger’s own fault—probably his want of tact in posing before them as the friend of the Turk—if they do not show themselves friendly to him, and relapse into a bearish reserve. And though the Bosniacs are much accused of that common failing of the Southern Sclaves, intoxication, yet it must be said to their credit that in this large gathering—so large that hardly a spot of standing ground was left unoccupied in the whole mountain neck—we did not notice a single case of drunkenness, and this though there were plenty of booths in the fair for the sale of arrack and Slavonian wine. Indeed the general orderliness, the absence of license of any sort, among the Christian part of the assembly, was beyond all praise.

As to the fair the display of wares was poor enough, there being little exposed for sale beyond the usual crockery, and the cheapest and most gimcrack jewelry, brass rings, and brooches of the very worst Bosniac fabric, and here and there a little fruit—water-melons, and small plums and pears. The only articles worth mentioning were the square, elegantly chipped gun-flints, of a kind which is to be found in all Bosnian markets. These are knapped at Avlona, in Albania, near the old Acroceraunian promontory, from about which the flints are gathered; and they are interesting, as being probably the most perfect representatives in modern Europe of an art which was once the highest among mankind. Our Norfolk flint-knappers, who still export this old-world article of commerce to the savages of Africa, could never compete with the artists who turn out these _chefs-d’œuvre_ of delicate flaking!

About 1 P.M. we started on our mountain-crossing expedition towards Travnik; first descending from our altitude towards the Franciscan monastery of Comušina, which we found to consist of an unpretending house and a bare, pewless church standing in the middle of a wretched little village. The door of the monastery was fastened, and a woman who parleyed with us from an upper window said that all the ‘brothers’ were up at the shrine. On our way we had passed through the Christian cemetery—a wilderness so deep in bracken that it seemed to have been purposely left to the charitable clothing of Nature, as if they feared that even their graves, if seen, might be insulted by the passing Zaptieh. The memorials here were rude stones, sometimes scarcely touched by art, sometimes rudely graven with a Latin cross like one of the ‘Hadjuks’ graves’ already described. But we groped among the fern-leaves in vain for an inscription.

Beyond this we descended by a path to the Ussora, and finding that our attendant Zaptieh’s scansorial powers were small, and that, not having on his shoulders a heavy knapsack like ourselves, he was yet inclined to lag hopelessly, there was nothing for it but to dismiss him, after first inditing under a walnut-tree beside the waters of Ussora a letter in our choicest French to the Kaïmakàm, in which we gave our escort a good character, only expressing our regret that his inability to climb mountains _à l’Anglaise_ deprived us of the further pleasure of his company. We afterwards had reason to regret that besides the backshish or largess which was his due we gave him too large a proportion of our remaining store of bread, not sufficiently realising the slow progress which we should make between this and Travnik.

We now followed the river bed, every now and then wading from one side to the other of the shallow stream in a vain search for a forest-path which should lead in the right direction. We found Major Roskiević’s[182] map so completely out, that we really suspected that he had been the victim of the Vila’s enchantments—and who, conversant with the history of the building of Scodra, does not know that it is her practice to thwart engineers who presumptuously invade her precincts? And I would urge in proof of this hypothesis that her sacred mount, the Vila Gora of the peasants hereabouts, under whose brows we are now passing, is conspicuous by its absence on the Major’s chart. Before we had concluded our itinerary of Bosnia we had further proofs that the Vila or some other freakish sprite had possessed that unfortunate officer. Often has the Major played the part of a will-o’-the-wisp for our especial misguidance! At times he would display such extraordinary capacities of faith as to remove mountains. He would evolve streams which existed not, out of his inner consciousness, and when he conceived that this pleasantry had gone far enough he would swallow them up in the earth. He would transport villages bodily. He would run a broad valley through a mountain mass from which Xerxes would have recoiled, and bridge over chasms at which Stephenson would have shuddered. Not that his humour is always of this ponderous turn; oh no! he has his lighter veins, too, in which he will draw you a zigzagging road straight as a line, or pop the only path on the wrong side of the stream!

At about 5 P.M. we found ourselves at the junction of the Ziraja and the Blatnica, as we learnt from some peasants—_for they never meet_ according to the Major. The peasants, who were dressed in the heavily ornamented quasi-Dalmatian costume of these mountains, and were of the type which it has pleased me to call Hunnish, were much delighted at a present of English needles from the ‘consuls.’

We now began ascending the Troghìr Planina by a faintly indicated woodman’s path, overshadowed by a beech-forest of finer growth than any we had yet seen, interspersed with equally majestic pines. Amongst these mysterious labyrinths we lost our path, and coming towards dusk on an inviting glade commanding a lovely mountain panorama, pitched on it as our place of bivouac for the night. Here we found no difficulty in collecting firewood for a cheery fire, and bracken enough to form a springy mattress; and having cooked our frugal supper, we submitted to be lulled to sleep by the chorus of tree-crickets above. The night was again fine; so that, except for the cold, which in the small hours of the morning was bitter—as it generally is when the camp fire has burnt down beyond recovery!—we passed a fairly comfortable night, till we were aroused by the droning of gnats in our ears, and were again on our way, before the sun.

But now we began to be beset by a difficulty which while in the forest zone of the mountains we had not anticipated—namely, the absence of water, caused by the porous character of the limestone rock; and though we succeeded in finding our path again, all the runnels we passed were dried by summer drought. The woods were very silent, and there was no morning song of birds beyond the cooing of a dove; but while we were resting we heard a deep musical hum among the tree-tops, proceeding from myriads of gnats, some of which were droning below. We kept gradually ascending the back of the Planina, our path continually disappearing or losing itself in a maze of lesser tracks, which might have been made as much by animals as by man; and every now and then we had to scramble on as best we could over tree-trunks of monstrous girth that barred our path. But still no water to make breakfast palatable! till about two hours after starting we came to a stagnant pool or puddle about the size of an ordinary washing-basin, which, as necessity knows no law, we were driven to make use of, and to pick the tadpoles out of our tea as best we might!

But how describe this forest scenery! how paint, so that others may see as we saw them, the golden rays of the rising sun slanting between the leafy tiers of the beeches, intersecting their shady trunks with pillars of light, shimmering beyond against the dark mountain flank; not dappling it in round noon-day patches, but streaking it horizontally with golden ripples, comparable to nothing but mackerel clouds glorified by the sunset, trailing across some darker tract of sky. Now and then the mighty trunks and branches frame vistas of mountain and valley, flooded still by a forest sea unflecked by habitation—an enamel of quiet blue. Then the luminous foliage of the beeches gives place for a while to more sombre pines, whose turpentiny fragrance floats like morning incense down the forest aisles. Hour after hour, as we ascend, the forest still looms around us, but the scenery is perpetually changing.

At one point we reached a mountain bluff more open to the wind, and found ourselves in a clearing not made by man. From the rocky summit an awful scene of ruin burst upon us. That soft blue heaven—azure and cloudless as a tranquil sea—it, too, has its storms and windy Scyllas to play havoc among these aërial masts. This was one universal wreck—the wreck of an Armada. Far and wide every tree had been struck down like Canaanitic walls. The very current of the tornado was marked by the lie of the prostrate trunks. At times a confused medley—piles of scarce distinguishable spars and giant hulks—jumbled together as if they had been nine-pins!—showed the eddy of a whirlwind; but generally the trunks were strewn pointing from the north-east like so many magnets: one vast torrent track of destruction marking the course of the _Bora_, the irresistible storm-wind of Illyria. In places we have found the periodic force of this wind utilized by the Bosniacs, who cut the trees a quarter through on the leeward side and leave the rest to the woodcraft of Boreas.

But once more we plunge into the primeval shadows to find ourselves among more isolated monuments of ruin. Here it is the artillery of heaven that has been playing on the masted swell of the green Planina. Now we have reached the very focus of an electric storm. The trunks of beech and fir sometimes riven asunder, more generally erect but decapitated, stripped of bark and branches; sometimes shattered columns charred by the aërial explosion, sometimes splintered up into trophies of white spears. Here is one of the most striking witnesses to the stupendous power of lightning that I have ever seen. A beech about eighty feet in height was snapped in two, the upper part hurled on to the slope below, the lower still rooted to the ground, but the hard wood splashed by the thunderer’s bolt—as when a bomb-shell strikes the sea—into gigantic splinters: keen, shapely blades, as much as twenty feet in length.[183]