The Montenegrins are born fighters and die fighters.  From one end to the other Montenegro is one wilderness of mountain crags and towering precipices, traversed only by foot trails.  Here and there a shelf of level soil may be found, just enough to enable people to grow their own necessities.  The capital of this rocky domain, high up among the crags and overlooking the Adriatic, is Cettinje, which was to be stormed and conquered by the Teutons.  The main street, about 150 yards long, comprising two-thirds of the town, is so broad that three or four carriages may be driven abreast down the length of it.  It is composed entirely of one and two story cottages.  A few short streets branch off at right angles, and in these is all of Cettinje that is not comprised in the main street.  The king inhabited a modest-looking, brown edifice with a small garden attached.  Overlooking the capital is Mt.  Lovcen, on top of which the Montenegrins planted guns to defend any attack that might be made against them.

South of Montenegro and north of Greece lies another country of instinctive fighters.  It is similar in physical aspect, but very different in its population.  This is the land of the Albanians, whom the Turks conquered by force of arms, like all the rest of the Balkan peninsula.  They are a distinct race by themselves; it is supposed that they are the descendants of the ancient Illyrians, those wild tribes of whom the ancient Greeks wrote.  Nor is this unlikely, for in such a country as theirs the inhabitants are most likely to remain pure from generation to generation.

Returning for a few moments to Belgrade, we now may resume our course down the ancient highway toward Saloniki.  Down the Morava Valley passes the railroad, after which it passes within a few miles of the Bulgarian frontier, near Kustendil; dangerously near the frontier of a possible enemy, but especially perilous in this war in which the Serbians would naturally endeavor to retreat toward her ally, Greece.

Just below Vranya the railroad enters what was, before the two Balkan Wars, the Turkish territory of Macedonia.  This region down to within sixty miles of Saloniki was reconquered from the Turks by the Serbs, having been Serb inhabited since early in the Christian era as shown by historical record.  As early as 950 Constantin Porphyrogenitus writes of its inhabitants as Serbs, from whom, he says, the town of Serbia on the Bistritza River near Saloniki took its name.  Throughout this region there are so many mountain ranges that it would be impossible to name them all.  Nowhere has blood been more continuously shed than here, and nowhere in Europe is the scenery more beautiful.

Especially impressive is that section around Monastir, toward the frontier of Albania and away from the main line of the railroad.  Here, not more than a day’s walk from the city of Monastir, or Bitolia, as its Slavic inhabitants call it, is Lake Prespa, a small sheet of crystal-clear water in which are reflected the peaks and the rugged crags of the surrounding mountains.  Through a subterranean passage the waters of this mountain lake pass under the range that separates it from the much larger lake, Ochrida, the source of the bloody Drina.