A man suddenly burst into the office, crying, “Sirdar!  Sirdar!”

Jo and Jan made their way through the darkness to the inn, squeezed between sweating horses to the door.  We were admitted.

The Sirdar received us kindly, but was dreadfully tired, and looked years older than he had two days before.  He had ridden some 150 kilometres in sixteen hours, had left Chainitza at two o’clock in the morning, and had been in the saddle ever since.  He is a famous horseman, but is no longer young.  Almost all his escort had succumbed to the speed, and he was full of the story of his orderly’s horse which had done 300 kilometres in four days, and was the only animal which had come through with him, he having changed mounts at Plevlie.  We left him and went straight to bed.

Just as we were comfortably dozing off, a man burst into the room and demanded “Mike,” and said something about a horse.  Jan dressed hurriedly and clattered downstairs.  It was pitch dark.  He ran to the stable, felt his way in, and struck a match.  There were two horses, one was lying on its side, evidently foundered and dying but Jan felt that they would not have disturbed him for that.  By matchlight again he found that his own horses had been turned out by the Sirdar’s orderly, and that one was missing.  Mike was not to be found, but the missing horse was discovered by a small boy in the dry river-bed apparently in search of water.  Jan retired to his bedroom to find that in his absence two more strangers had burst in, to Jo’s indignation.  He pushed them out and locked the door.

When we awoke the Sirdar had already retaken his whirlwind course—­evidently grave news called him to Cettinje—­leaving the orderly’s gallant horse dead behind him.

“He kills many horses,” said a peasant, shaking his head; “he rides fast—­always.”

We crossed the dry bed of the river and prepared for the hill in front of us.  Suddenly Mike’s horse plunged into a bog.  The poor beast sprawled in the treacherous green up to its stomach, and, thinking its last hour had come, groaned loudly.  Mike threw himself from the saddle, and with great effort at last extracted his horse, which emerged trembling and dripping with slime.  Mike grinned ruefully.

“I orter remembered,” he admitted.  “Sirdar, ’e get in dere one day ’imself.”

This day’s riding was the worst we had yet experienced.  Our horses were fagged, the road abominable, great stones everywhere on the degenerated Turkish roads.

The Turkish road is a narrowish path of flat paving-stones laid directly upon mother earth:  but that is the first stage.  In the second stage the paving-stones have begun to turn and lie like slates on a roof; in the third they have turned completely on edge, like a row of dominoes, and the horses, stepping delicately between the obstacles, pound the exposed earth to deep trenches of semi-liquid mud.  In the fourth stage the stones have entirely disappeared, leaving only the trenches which the horses have formed, so that the path is like a sheet of violently corrugated iron.  Most of the tracks are now between the third and fourth stages of degeneration.  One never knows how far the horse will plunge his legs into the trenches, for sometimes they are very shallow, and sometimes the leg is engulfed to the shoulder.