In this beautiful valley I waited several days, wandering amongst the hills.  There were flocks of wild pigeons and other game in the vicinity, and one morning of summer weather I took my gun and strolled out alone, having no apprehension of personal danger where there was no fighting population.  Approaching a village curiously intent, I discovered an old woman, who, on seeing this unexplained stranger, armed, and with no company of her kin, set up a terrible hullabaloo, shouting, “The Turks!  The Turks!” and calling the boys to the defense, and in a jiffy the whole village was up in alarm.  I ran as fast as I could in the direction of the monastery, conscious that every boy in the valley had some old pistol, and would not even ask the questions I could not answer before immolating me in the defense of his village.  Life is of no account in such circumstances, and the explanation would have been made too late to do me any good, but I never walked out again without my interpreter while in that country.

The object of my excursion was the ancient convent of Dobrilovina, then the advanced post towards Kolashin, the Turkish station in Old Servia, and the point from which all invasions from the east entered Montenegro; and the ride was by far the most interesting of all that I made in the two principalities.  From the valley of Zupa we rose on a plateau known as the Lola Planina, on which the watershed is to the north and east and into the Danube.  We rode through Drobniak a province the right to which was still theoretically disputed between Turk and Christian, the fruition of peace belonging to the latter; that of war to the former, for it always fights with Montenegro, and is periodically ravaged by the Turks.  We were on the watershed between the Adriatic and the Euxine, and the brooks were tributary to the Danube through the Tara.  The land is an immense upland, rolling slightly, and the finest grass land I ever saw; it is an immense prairie, with the horizon unbroken, except by the picturesque peak of Dormitor at the north, the summit peak of the mountains of upper Herzegovina, and the centre of the glacial system of the lands between the Adriatic and the great Rascian valley which divides Servia and the lower Danube from Montenegro.  The flora was entirely new to me.  I rode through a thicket of marguerites so tall that the flowers came up to my face, while the grass came up to my horse’s belly.  This is a great hayfield, and the people come from far to cut and store the hay for the winter, when they harness the stacks and drag them bodily to their villages on the snow, which sometimes falls, they told me, to the depth of fifteen or more feet.  To the east stretched the rolling prairie without a house or a village to the Signavina (desolate land) Planina, solitary as the Sahara, for no man would build where a Turkish raid on this disputed land might sweep him and his into one destruction.