The fortress was a relic of Dushan, little mended by the Turk, and had been three times struck by lightning, the magazine each time exploding (once while I was in Montenegro), only because the Turkish government, in putting up the lightning-rod and finding the supply of rod short, had pieced it out with telegraph wire.  The body of the rod had fulfilled its destiny in attracting the lightning, while the telegraph wire, not being able to carry the load brought to it, had discharged it into the magazine.  And, when I saw it, the wire was still inviting another disaster.  I found in Eshref Pasha a most interesting and amiable personage, out of his place completely in the management of a turbulent and really hostile Christian population, with whom his very best qualities were a disqualification.  Eshref was a poet, a dreamer, and, I was told, the second man of letters in the empire.  He laughingly asked me if I had been at Podgoritza, and I as good-humoredly replied that I had not come to complain of my treatment there, but to pay my compliments to a fellow man of letters.  His broad, good-natured face lighted up with pleasure, and, dropping politics and fighting, we talked poetry and letters.  Secretaries and messengers were coming and going with papers to be signed, or orders to be given, and we could talk only by interludes.  I remarked that he must have little time for letters in all this complication of cares, and he replied that “poetry was his refuge in the night when he was unable to sleep; he had no other time.”  I tried to get a sample of his verse, and he recited me one, of which I could judge only by the sound, which was very musical; but to my urging for a copy for publication in England he objected that translators were not good for the reputation of a poet, which we all know.  I assured him of the entire competence of literary London to render him the completest justice, and he finally yielded in the spirit to my solicitations, but put them to the rout in the letter; for, though he promised the script for the next morning, it never came.  It is curious that Eshref fell through his good faith, for when, a few months later, the Porte issued an irade asking for indication of the reforms needed in the provinces, he replied by calling the population to formulate their wants, which they did, asking for the reopening of the Drin so as to facilitate the draining of the Lake of Scutari, the making of roads and a railway from Scutari to Antivari on the seacoast.  The Porte, unaccustomed to be taken at its word, recalled the poet, who shared the fate of his great predecessor Ovid.

CHAPTER XXIX

WAR CORRESPONDENCE AT RAGUSA