After supper, Bovril and cheese omelette, we went out to seek the cafe.  We trudged back through the mud and stumbled into a house full of lattice work, like a Chinese store.  Startled we tried another.  This time we came into a stable, but there was a ladder leading upwards, and at the top a lighted room, so we decided to explore.  We climbed up and came into a large loft in which six long legged, heavily bearded Albanians were squatting about a fire; a gipsy woman with wild tousled hair and hanging breasts was in the corner of the hearth, and was telling some long monotonous tale.  An Albanian, who spoke Serb, told us to come in and have coffee.  It was like the illustration of some tale from the Arabian Nights.  After a while we climbed out again into the night, and went home.  Ramases hung about shyly, and the woman explained that he had nowhere to sleep; so we arranged that she should house him also.

Even as we poked our noses out of the door there was a promise of a fine day.  Below us we could see the Pasha up and superintending the packing of his family and furniture.  We celebrated by opening our last tin of jam, which we had carried carefully all the way, waiting for an occasion.  We left the remains of the jam for the small family, and as we were mounting we saw their faces smeared and streaked with “First Quality Damson.”  We started the climb almost at once.  The early morning smoke filtering through the slats made an outer cone, of faint blue, above the black roof of every hut and cottage; here and there were traces of roadmaking, groups of Albanian workmen on stretches of levelled earth which our trail crossed at irregular intervals.  Presently we entered the clouds, and were wrapped about with a thin mist faintly smelling of smoke.  After a while we climbed above them, and looking down could see the clouds mottling all the landscape, and through holes little patches of sunlit field or wood peering through like the eyes of a Turkish woman through her yashmak.

Our horses panted and sweated up the long and arduous slope for two mortal hours, up and ever up; but all things come to an end, and at last we reached the top.  We sat down to rest our weary animals and, lo! by us passed long strings of mules and ponies bearing the very benzine about which so much fuss had been made in Cettinje.  Alas for our reputations as miracle workers!  Had this blessed stuff only come a week later we should even have passed in Montenegro as first cousins of the king at least; but this was a little too prompt.

There was landscape enough here for any budding Turners, but we two had still eight hours to go and not money enough to loiter.  On the higher peaks of the mountains there was already a fresh powdering of snow; in the valleys the clouds had almost cleared away, leaving a thin film of moisture which made shadows of pure ultramarine beneath the trees.  Your modern commercial grinder cannot sell you this colour, it needs some of that pure jewel powder which old Swan kept in a bottle for use on his masterpiece, but found never a subject noble enough.  Some of that stuff prepared from the receipt of old Cennino Cennini which ends “this is a work, fine and delicate, suitable for the hands of young maidens, but beware of old women.”  Pure Lapis Lazuli.