Why should the bowler hat, indiarubber collars, and bad teeth be indissolubly bound to “Education Bills” and “Factory Acts”?  Why should the Serbian peasant be forced to give up his beautiful costume for celluloid cuffs, lose his artistic instincts in exchange for a made-up tie?  It is the march of civilization, dear people, and must on no account be hindered.

Coming back to Serbia from Montenegro was like slipping from a warm into a cool bath.  One is irresistibly reminded that the Lords of Serbia withdrew to Montenegro, leaving the peasantry behind, for every peasant in the black mountains is a noble and carries a noble’s dignity; while Karageorge was a pig farmer.  There is a warmth in Montenegro—­save only Pod.—­which is not so evident in its larger brother; a welcome, which is not so easily found in Serbia.  The Montenegrin peasant is like a great child, looking at the varied world with thirteenth-century unspoiled eyes; centuries of Turkish oppression has dulled the wit of the Serb, and at the outbreak of the war Teutonic culture was completing the process.

We passed beneath the shadow of Shar Dagh, the highest peak in the peninsula, six thousand feet from the plain, springing straight up to a point for all to admire, a mountain indeed.

We reached Uskub at dusk, found a hotel, and went out to dine.  The restaurant was empty, but through a half-open door one could hear the sounds of music.  The restaurant walls were—­superfluously—­decorated with paintings of food which almost took away one’s appetite; but one enormous panel of a dressed sucking pig riding in a Lohengrin-like chariot over a purple sea amused us.

In the beer hall a tinkly mandoline orchestra was playing, and a woman without a voice sang a popular song—­one thought of the women on the Rieka River—­a tired girl dressed in faded tights did a few easy contortions between the tables, and in a bored manner collected her meed of halfpence—­we thought of the cheery idiot of Scutari.  Was it worth it, we asked each other, this tinsel culture to which we had returned?  And not bothering to answer the question went back to our hotel and to bed.

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CHAPTER XIII

USKUB

Uskub is a Smell on one side of which is built a prim little French town finished off with conventionally placed poplars in true Latin style; and on the other side lies a disreputable, rambling Turkish village culminating in a cone of rock upon which is the old fortress called the Grad.

The country about Uskub is a great cemetery, and on every hand rise little rounded hills bristling with gravestones like almonds in a tipsy-cake.  Strange old streets there are in Uskub.  One comes suddenly upon half-buried mosques with grass growing from their dilapidated domes, a refuge only for chickens; some deserted baths, and in the midst of all, its outer walls like a prison and with prison windows, the old caravanserai.