The Commandant asked for, and got, half a dozen sheets from us as a sort of superior backsheesh, and promised us horses for the morrow.

The next morning dawned dismally.  Miss Rawlins and her companions were to go on by post cart, and their conveyance arrived first, only two and a half hours late.  It was a sort of tinker’s tent on four rickety wheels.  There seemed to be barely room for one within the dark interior, but both Miss Rawlins and the little Russian climbed in somehow.  Charlie, the orderly, clung on by his eyelids in front, and off they went.  We last saw two faces peering back at us beneath the fringe of the tent.  They had no luck.  Half-way to Uzhitze the cart upset and they were all rolled into the ditch, missing a precipice of sixty feet or so by the merest fraction.

Our own horses arrived later, we mounted, and with cheers from the assembled authorities, we rode off.

The rain came down in a steady drizzle; we discovered that the waterproof cloaks which we had borrowed from Nish were not very weathertight.  We climbed right up into the clouds, but still the rain held on.  From the floating mist jutted great boulders and huge red cliffs.  Our guide put up an umbrella and rode along crouching beneath it.  At 1400 metres we reached an inn, where we lunched.  A Montenegrin commissioner insisted on paying our bill, and said that we would do the same for him when he came to England.  Every one in Serbia or Montenegro is interested in ages.  They were astounded at ours.  They said that Jo would have been seventeen if she were Serbian; and one rose, shook Jan warmly by the hand and said he must have “navigated” the marriage well.

We rode over the frontier, but we were not yet in the real Montenegro.  This is not the black mountain where the last dregs of old Serbian aristocracy defied the Turk, this is still the Sanjak, three years ago Turkish, and with pleasant pasturages spreading on either hand.

At last we came up over Plevlie.  To one corner we could see the town creeping in a crescent about the foot of a grey hill, far away on the other side was a little monastery, forlorn and white, like a shivering saint, and between a great valley with four purplish humps in the midst of the corn and maize fields, like great whales bursting through a patchwork quilt.

Our horses were thoroughly cheered up, and we passed through the long streets of the town at a lively trot, a thing Jo was taught as a child to consider bad form.

A semi-transparent little man in a black hat stood on the hotel steps beckoning to us.  But we had no use for hotel touts, and waved our sticks saying, “Hospital.”  He seemed curiously disappointed.

The hospital, many long low buildings, lay buried in a park of trees.  The staff lived in a tiny house near by, where we were welcomed by the cook, Mrs. Roworth.  She explained that as the house was hardly capable of holding its ten or twelve occupants, a room had been taken for us at the inn, but that we were to meal with them.