The next morning the horses came, but very late.  In the crowd watching our departure was an old Albanian without a moustache.  That was a strange sight; we looked harder.  It was a woman.  She must have been one of those who had sworn eternal virginity, and so achieve all a man’s privileges, even eating with them instead of getting the scraps left over from the meal.  But the punishment of death awaited her if she failed her vow.  Here was one, chuckling and grinning at some of us in our attempts to mount the weird saddles and weirder steeds which had been provided.  The Serb captain had a carriage, and another carriage took all our baggage, which had now sadly dwindled owing to the continued depredations of the police.  We straggled out of the town and through the crowded bazaar, for it was a Saturday.  Passed the Venetian fort and the river from which stuck the funnel of the steamer so mysteriously sunk one night.  We had heard that the Turkish gun flat which had transported us had burst her boilers, so now the Montenegrins had no steamers left.

The road was level and better than many we had come over, though once or twice the carriages were hopelessly mired, and had to be pushed across.  West’s horse had ideas about side streets, and bolted down each as he came to it.

We met the Adriatic Commission.  Mr. Lamb and Mr. George Paget, returning after so long an absence, were in the first carriage.  We recognized Mr. Paget at once, for though either of them might have liked old arms, only one would have collected old cookery books.  The rest of the commission came along later.  They stopped us.  We expected questions about the Serbs; but no.  They said—­

“Can one buy underclothing in Scutari?”

Their baggage transport had been sunk by an Austrian submarine and they had only what they were wearing.  We wished each other luck and went on.  There was no hope of arriving at Alessio that night, we had started too late.  As evening was falling, we came to an Albanian inn and decided to put up.

There was a stable full of manure on the ground floor, through which one had to pass, and in the dark one was continually slipping into the midden or running one’s head unexpectedly into horses’ hindquarters.  Up a rickety stair were two rooms.  The floor rocked as we walked over it, and every moment we expected to go through and be precipitated into the manure below.  The walls and floor were so loosely made that the wind blew through in all directions, and we called it the “castle in the air.”  We supped on chickens which we had brought from Scutari, and Whatmough and Elmer made a fire in the yard and got us cocoa.  By this time we were all getting fed up with romantic surroundings, and wanted something more solid.  The swarthy countenances about the bonfire, the queer costumes in the flickering fire, left us unmoved.

Sleep was impossible.  The wind caught one in every corner, threatening lumbago.  Stajitch fled and camped outside in one of the carriages, despite the rain.