We stopped to pass the night at Shawnik, a village in one of the most picturesque ravines I ever saw.  There runs the Bukovitza, a tributary of the Drina, a wild and bold trout stream, abounding also in grayling, the trout being unaccustomed to the fly, as they are in most of the streams hereabout.  Shawnik lies in the gate to the open country, the gateposts being two huge bastions of rock from which a few riflemen could defy an army until they found a way around through the rough country of Voinik, the chain which lay between us and Niksich.  I slept at the house of an Albanian tailor (all the tailors in Montenegro and the Berdas are Albanians) and was made comfortable.  We found the voivode of the province, Peiovich, at Aluga, with his headquarters in the schoolhouse, and keeping a lookout for the Turks, who menaced an invasion from Kolashin, a band of them having just attempted to pass the Tara, which bounds the plain on the north, but being driven back with loss.  I found Aluga a noble subalpine country, a rolling plateau with here and there a little lake; to the northwest the grand mass of Dormitor, and to the northeast the range of the highlands which border the valleys of Old Servia, while to the east and south the horizon was like that of the sea, an undulating plain rolling far away out of the range of vision.  Scattered houses dotted the plain of Aluga, and the children came to stare, and brought us, with the shyness of wild deer, little baskets of strawberries, which in some places in the fir forests almost reddened the ground, and, having pushed the offerings in at the door, ran like wild creatures, as if to escape being noticed.  Huge haystacks dotted the plain, and the population seemed prosperous.  We pushed on to the frontier post at Dobrilovina through glades of fir-trees with pasture intervening, as the soil was rocky or fertile, and reached the margin of the Tara late in the afternoon, a good day’s ride from Aluga.

The Tara has cut itself a cañon like those of the Yellowstone, and on a little space of alluvial land at the bottom lies the convent, a building of the Servian Empire, curiously spared by the Turkish invasions.  We descended 2500 feet, measured by my aneroid, to the flat, where the monks made us most welcome.  We walked along the river, a rapid and shallow stream filled with trout, which refused to take any lure I could show them,—­and the monks said that they ate only the crayfish which abounded in the river.

We went to sleep, to be awakened at midnight by the scouts who came in to tell us that the Turks were out from Kolashin, and that some thousands of Albanians of the Rascian country were raiding in advance, and had already thrown their left far beyond us.  Had they known we were there, we might have been taken in a trap from which only fleet fugitives would have escaped.  With the dawn we were in our saddles again, and, by the urgent advice of Peiovich, I took the back track, while the battalion threw itself across