were placed on either side at night; and now and then a long-range skirmish went on, or a Montenegrin brave, tired of the monotony of such a war, would go out between the lines and challenge any Mussulman to come out and try his prowess with a Christian.  One pope, Milo, a hero of the earlier war, rode up and down before the Turkish outposts, repeating every day his challenge, and at last the Turks hid a squad of sharpshooters where he used to ride, and brought him down with a treacherous volley, then cut off his head and sent it in to the Prince.

Our guns were not heavy enough to cope with those of the fortress, and so we passed the time shelling the redoubts thrown up on the little hillocks around the town, alternating these operations with an occasional assault of one of the nearest of them when the men got impatient for some active movement.  Meanwhile we learned that the Russian government was sending us four heavier guns, sixteen and thirty-two bronze rifled breech-loaders, the heaviest we had being ten-pound muzzle-loaders against a battery of field guns, Krupp steel, breech-loading twelve-pounders.  The Russian guns were landed on the Dalmatian coast below Budua and carried across the narrow strip of Austrian territory which separated Montenegro from the sea, between two lines of Austrian troops, lest some indiscreet traveler should reveal the violation of neutrality, and were brought to Niksich, about forty miles, on the shoulders of a detachment of Montenegrins over a roadless mountain country, no other conveyance being possible.

CHAPTER XXXII

A JOURNEY INTO THE BERDAS

Pending the arrival of the guns, I explored the more remote and by no traveler hitherto visited section of the Berdas, charged by the Russian Red Cross and the English committees with the distribution of a considerable sum of gold amongst the wounded and families of the killed in that section.  With a single perianik (one of the Prince’s bodyguard) and my horse boy, who served as interpreter, I set out for the great plains of the northeastern provinces, then menaced by an invasion of a strong division from Kolashin, intended to effect a diversion for the relief of Niksich.  Climbing the heights which make a rim like the wall of a crater round the plain of Niksich, I reached a table-land (planina) which rolls away to the frontier.  I made my first halt at the monastery of Zupa, situated in a lovely valley where the fertility of the land supports a considerable population, and where the Russians had established a hospital.  Nothing could exceed the kindness and humanity of those Russian surgeons.  There was one poor patient who had received a ball in the mouth, which lodged in the neck and caused a suppuration, involving an artery, which burst into the wound.  The carotid was tied, but the operation failed to stop the hemorrhage, and I found the surgeons relieving each other every quarter of an hour in holding a pledget of lint on the wound, in a determined effort to save the man’s life if it were physically possible.  The hospital was admirably conducted.