The morning broke with the rain pouring in torrents.  I had tried to buy a pair of shoes before going to sleep, but they brought me a pair for a boy of twelve and assured me that there were no others in the town, and those I had come with were in tatters which were hardly to be kept on my feet.  The mud was indescribable,—­the entire country flooded, and all the bridges across a river we must pass carried away, except one over a narrow gorge where the rocks approached so closely that a couple of logs reached from side to side, and over these the horses must be led.  To say that I was at ease on this trip would be exaggeration, the more as the zaptie-bimbashi talked freely to his subordinate about us, and vented his rage at being obliged to make such a journey for two beastly infidels, to whom the only grateful service he could render was decapitation.  However, we reached the lake, to find the steamer waiting, tied to the top of one of the largest oaks a half mile from the actual shore, for the country was so inundated that we floated over entire villages as we boated out to it.  I delighted the heart of the bimbashi by a baksheesh of half a napoleon, which so astonished him that he hardly knew how to express himself, after all his bitter words and unkind intentions.  I was later convinced that if the Turkish authorities had known who I was,—­their old enemy in Crete,—­we should not have come out alive from Podgoritza.  In fact, when Danish Effendi at Ragusa heard that I had been put in prison in Albania he exclaimed, “If I had been there it is not only a night in prison he would have had, but a file of soldiers at daylight.”

Our steamer had come, however, not to carry me to Scutari, but, and perhaps fortunately, to take me back to Rieka, whence I had to go to Cettinje to get a refit, for I was ragged, bootless as my errand to Scutari, and draggled with mud from head to foot; notwithstanding which, as soon as the Prince had learned of my arrival, though in the midst of a diplomatic dinner, he sent for me to come to the palace, and made me sit down with the company as I was and tell my story.  I had to wait a few days for the voyage to Scutari, profiting by the occasion of the return of some engineers and the French consul at that place.  We found the town flooded, a fisherman by the side of one of the streets showing us a fine string of fish which he had caught in the roadside ditch.  Decay, neglect, and utter demoralization were written large on the general aspect of the capital of one of the most important of the provinces of the Turkish Empire in Europe, i.e. important to Turkey.  The magnificent country around Scutari for miles on miles square—­most fertile ground, producing, beside wheat, the finest tobacco known for cigarettes generally sold as of Cavalla (and how many nervous hours I have soothed with it during these campaigns), and enormous crops of maize—­lies a large part of the time every year under water, as I had found it, for the sole reason that the Drin, which ought to empty into the sea below the Boyana (the outlet of the Lake of Scutari, the Moratcha, etc.), has built a bar by its floods and abandoned its proper course, emptying into the lake a flood which the Boyana is incapable of managing.