In three hours we reached Plavnitza, a quay on the mud, where more passengers were waiting for our already crowded craft.  There were officers, peasants, Turks, and soldiers clad in French firemen’s uniforms.  These uniforms, by the way, caused a lot of ill-feeling in Montenegro.  The French sent them out in a spirit of pure economical charity, and had the Frenchmen not been, on the average, small, and the Montenegrin, contrariwise, large, perhaps the gift would have been received with a better grace; but the sight of these enormous men bursting in all places from their all too tight regimentals, was ludicrous, and the soldiers felt it keenly.

Two women came aboard, attached to officers, and wearing long light blue coats, the ceremonious dress of all classes; one carried a wooden cradle strapped on her back, the woman with no cradle had in her arms a baby of some ten or eleven months, which she fed alternately on grapes and pomegranate seeds.  With each was a large family including a beastly little boy who spat all over the decks, and one of the fathers, a stern gold-laced officer, carried a dogwhip with which to rule his offspring.

After a while we caught sight of Tarabosch, the famous mountain, and then the silhouette of the old Venetian fortress.  From the water projected the funnels of yet another Turkish ship which had been sunk in the Balkan war, and we steamed into the amphibious trees on the mudflats of Scutari.

A boat with chairs in it came for us and we disembarked.  The boat was rather like one of those that children make from paper, called cocked hats, only rather elongated, and the rowers pushed at the oars which hung from twisted osier loops.  Governor Petrovitch met us on the quay.  He was a fine-featured old man dressed in all the barbaric splendour of a full national costume, pale green long-skirted coat, red gold embroidered waistcoat, and baggy dark blue knee breeches with a huge amount of waste material in the seat.  He kissed his daughter and greeted us genially.  We clambered into the usual dilapidated cab with the usual dilapidated horses, and off to the hotel.

The women on the roadside were clad in picturesque ever-varying costumes.  There were narrow carts with high Indian-like wheels studded with large nails; there were Albanians in costumes of black and white, everything we had hoped or expected.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER IX

SCUTARI

After a wash we went into the streets.  It was the Orient, just as Eastern as Colombo or Port Said.  The little fruit and jewellers’ shops with square lanterns, the tailors sitting cross-legged in their windows, the strange medley of costumes—­even the long lean dogs looked as if they had been kicked from the doors of a thousand mosques.

We left the shops for further explorations.  Scutari has always been described as such a beautiful town.  The adjective does not seem picturesque:  yes, quaint, strange decidedly.  One’s second impression after the shops is this:—­