no French nor German, only Italian.  But Jan, with the help of a lot of old musical terms, and an imperfectly forgotten Spanish, managed to convey to him some intelligible compliments and sentences.  We got out at last, and his eminence accompanied us to the top of the stairs and gave us the difficult problem of bowing backwards as we went down.  This visit was necessary, as we might have had to get a “Besa” from him if we meant to go through to Durazzo.

The Serbian captain who had been on the Turkish gunboat met us in the street.  He dragged us into a cafe and began to order beer by the half-dozen.  He presented Jo with a small Turkish gold coin, which was valued at five shillings, as a bribe to allow him to join our party.  As he already had permission it seemed superfluous.

Some of our party were still pretty seedy.  Two had gone to a shop in search of castor oil.  A very old and withered chemist, who spoke bad French, invited them in and asked for an account of their adventures, interrupting them with explosions of “Ah poves, poves, poves, poves.”  “Ah, poves, poves, poves, poves,” between every incident and also at the final request for the medicine.  He showed them to the door and suddenly burst into unexpected English.

“Good naite, vairey good.  I am your poppa.”

In the hotel cafe we found two French aeroplanists, for four had arrived that day, sailing down over the city, to the great terror of the inhabitants.  They seemed to be afflicted with the same idea as “Quel Pays.”

“Ah, monsieur et dame,” said they, “quel pays.”

We asked them how things were.

“We have just come from Prizren.  The Serbs are in a dreadful condition.  All the roads are covered with starving and dying people.  The troops are eating dead horses and roots.  There have been violent snow blizzards all over the mountains.  We saw some of your people, too, doctors and nurses, they were going off to Ipek, ‘dans une condition deplorable.’  We came across the mountains; one of us is lost.  Awful country, nowhere to land if anything went wrong and one of our machines has not arrived.  God knows what has happened to them.  The rest of us are all coming along on foot.  We burnt fifty motor cars yesterday, monsieur, that made a blaze.”

We asked them what sort of a time they had had in Serbia; but much of their answer is unpublishable.

“Each time we ascended every Serbian regiment fired at us.  Once we came down over a battalion and the whole lot fired volleys, and when we landed and stood in front of our machine holding up our hands,” they pantomimed, “they continued to fire at us.  Then they came and took us prisoners, and were going to shoot us, although one of us had a military medal.  A schoolmaster recognised us as French and rescued us.  Our machine was broken; but we could get no transport and had to walk thirty kilometres back to our base without food.

“Another time we were chasing an Austrian, the Serbian batteries fired at us, monsieur, not at the enemy.  Our officers had to send from the aerodrome to tell them to stop.”