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We passed into a queer pallid country, pale grey houses, pale yellow or pale green fields, grey sky and stones, a violently rolling plain where our guide lost his way, and we became increasingly aware of the discomfort of our saddles, and prayed for the journey to end. We refound the route, and asked a peasant, "How far to Jabliak?" "Bogami, quarter of an hour." We cheered.
"Bogami, don't believe her, gentlemen," he cried, "it's only a quarter of an hour." We left them quarrelling. It grew dark, and we grew miserable. Jabliak seemed like a dream, and we like poor wandering Jews, cursed ever to roam on detestable saddles in this queer pallid country. At last a peasant said it was five minutes off, and then it really was a quarter of an hour distant.
Never a wheel comes to Jabliak, and so it is a village without streets. Everything which passes here is horse-or woman-borne, and for hay they use long narrow sledges which slide over the stones and slippery grass as though it were snow. "Urrgh," said a man, "you should see this in winter. Snow ten and twelve feet deep, and only just the roofs and the tops of the telegraph-poles emerging."
Since Jabliak we had not seen an ugly man or woman, and the dignity of their carriage was exceeded only by the nobleness of their features. Ugly women must be valuable in these parts, and probably marry early; humans ever prize the rare above the beautiful. Mike spoke to many of the girls, asking them their names and of their homes.
He advised us to make a detour from the straight road and to see the famous black lake of Jabliak and the Dormitor mountains. We thanked him gratefully. He waved our thanks aside. "And I will write to my friend the Minister of War. He will arrange that you go to Scutari." He then explained all the reasons why Montenegro should hold Scutari when the war was over.
Jabliak is a queer village, fifty or sixty weathered wooden houses with the high-peaked roof of Northern Serbia flung down into this wilderness, where the grass and crops fight for existence with the pushing stones, and where the summer is so short that the captain's plum tree the only one will not ripen save in exceptional years.
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