“Look,” we cried to Bogami, “isn’t that the shortest way?  The wires go there.”

“Bogami,” he replied; “wires can, horses can’t, bogami.”

There is a fine military road to Chainitza, made by the Austrians, but it remains a white necklace on the hills, almost an ornament to the landscape.  No one seemed to use it, while our old Turkish road which snaked and twisted up and down was pitted with the hoofs of countless horses.  It is a stony path, and our animals were shod with flat plates instead of horseshoes; they slipped and slithered, and we wondered if in youth they had ever had lessons in skating.

There was a heavy mist, but it began to break up, and through peepholes one caught fleeting glimpses of distant patterning of field and forest, and hints of great hills.  The sun showed like a great pale moon on the horizon.  There were other travellers on the old Turkish trail, horsemen, Bosnians in great dark claret-coloured turbans, or Montenegrins in their flat khaki caps, peasants in dirty white cotton pyjamas, thumping before them animals with pack-swollen sides, soldiers only recognizable from the peasants by the rifle on their backs, and Turks; most were jolly fellows, and hailed us cheerfully.

From a house by the roadside burst a sheep, followed by five men.  They chased the animal down the road whistling to it.  We had never heard that whistling was effectual with sheep, and certainly it did not succeed very well in this instance.

Somewhere beyond this house Jan’s inside began to cry for food, two biscuits and a cup of cafe au lait being little upon which to found a long day’s riding.  He tentatively tried a “compressed luncheon.”  Its action was satisfactory, but whether it resulted from real nourishment contained in the black-looking glue, or whether it came from a sticking together of the coating of the stomach, we have not yet decided.  Jo preferred rather to endure the hunger.

Bogami had quite a charm; for instance, he appreciated our troubles with the beasts we were riding.  Jo’s horse stumbled a good deal on the downhills; her saddle was very uncomfortable and so narrow that she could never change her position.  We came into most magnificent scenery, the beauty of which made a deep impression even upon our empty selves.  There were deep green valleys, rising to peaks and hills which faded away ridge behind ridge of blue into the distant Serbian mountains, great pine woods of delicate drooping trees which came down and folded in on every side, and though it was almost September there were strawberries still ripe at the edge of the road, little red luscious blobs amidst the green.

Metalka at one o’clock, and we were on the real Montenegrin frontier.  There are two Metalkas, a Montenegrin and an Austrian, and they are divided one from the other by a strip of land some ten yards across which rips the village in two like the track of a little cyclone.  Bogami directed us to a shanty labelled “Hotel of Europe.”  A large woman was blocking the door; we demanded food, she took no notice.  Hunger was clamouring within us.  We demanded a second time.  She waved her hand majestically to her rival in Austria, at whose tables Montenegrin officers were sitting with coffee.