The day after our trip to Kolashin the rain set in again, and we passed nearly a fortnight more at the convent before the weather broke and I was able to set out, taking with me a gang of men to make the roads passable for my horse, so much had the rains wrought havoc with the face of the land.  The flooded state of the country and unfordable rivers forbade the trip to Wassoivich, and I was obliged, to my great regret, to relinquish it and to go back to Cettinje, having lost nearly three weeks in the rain at Moratsha.  Returning by a different route from that by which I came, I crossed the Duboko at a point much lower down than that of my first striking it, where it makes the most magnificent trout stream I have ever seen.  The trout from it feed the Moratsha and the Lake of Scutari.  In the Duboko they are caught, according to the statement of a native of the district, as heavy as forty pounds; and Mr. Green, the English consul at Scutari, told me that they were sometimes caught much larger in the lake.  There were plenty in the Zeta at Niksich and at Danilograd, and I saw one brought to the Prince’s tent one day, during the siege, which weighed twenty-two pounds, shot by one of the men, for they refused all kinds of bait, and were only taken by shooting or the net; or, horrible to relate, by dynamite, the ruinous effects of which on the population of the river the Prince was too easygoing to forbid.  I have seen one of the spring basins, from which the Zeta takes its rise, carpeted by tiny trout and other fishes, killed by the explosions of dynamite, which rarely killed, but only stunned, the larger fish, of which few were retrieved even when stunned or killed.  I one day remonstrated indignantly with the Prince for this barbarous butchery, and told him that if he permitted his men to carry it on his son would reign in a fishless country, and he promised to forbid it; but the matter passed from his memory in a day.  The Duboko was a safe nursery for the fry, for it was such a torrent that dynamite was useless, since it would have been impossible to retrieve a fish if killed.

Our road lay through the district of Rovtcha, which is considered the poorest for the agriculturist in all the Berdas.  It is very hilly, and the rock is, where we passed, a rotten slate which the rains and the torrents cut away rapidly, carrying the alluvium down to the plains and Lake of Scutari.  Digging and bridging, we reached, early in the afternoon, the village of Gornje-Rovtcha, and were then informed that it would be impossible to reach another habitation that day, and that the road passed through an immense forest infested by wolves, in which we should be compelled to sleep if we held on.  This I had no desire to try, remembering our experience with the shepherds on the first night out from Niksich.  So we passed the hours to the dark in shooting at a mark, and went to bed early.  The house which was selected to be honored by my repose, the best in the village,