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We expected, if Beechy were well, to get on next day; but the Chauffeulier was troubled about the road between Ragusa and Cattaro and no proper "route-book" existing for that part of the world, unexplored by motors, he could find out surprisingly little from any one.
The city stands at the end of an inlet of the sea fifteen or twenty miles long, and it has mountains around it so high that it is only in fair summer weather that the sun can be seen; in winter Cattaro never enjoys his presence.
In the city of Cattaro, the ancient Ascrivium or Acrivium, some small remains of the Roman period are to be seen encrusted in the walls of the clock-tower, an altar and a memorial to a girl and her teacher.
At Nyegushi I engaged as guide one Krsto, recommended me in 1903 at Andrijevitza by a botany professor from Prague, and while our start was preparing went with Kapetan Gjuro Vrbitza and another officer by a track to the mountain's edge whence we could look directly down upon Cattaro. A gun emplacement was made there later.
The Servian dream is for the waters of Cattaro to be covered with ships under the eagle of the Nemagna, for the country folk know well the story of Uros, the great Stephan Nemagna, and the epic of the wars against the Turks.
We shall win in the end. But Cattaro will fall at once. I have been there for weeks with the guns pointed on us day and night. Gott bewahre!" He, like Baron Nopesa, believed it to be a case of "Now or never!" Austria must fight. If she waited a few years the Slav combine would be too strong. "We have the whole of the German army with us," said the officer, "and you could do nothing to stop us."
His brief reign was brought to a close at Cattaro, in 1861, by an assassin's bullet, and Nicolas, his nephew, reigned in his stead. War broke out again on the Hercegovinian insurrection of the following year, the results of which were disastrous in a high degree to Montenegro.
"I'm hanged if I won't give chase!" I exclaimed. "How can you? You were saying at lunch that so far as you'd been able to fog it out, there wasn't more than the ghost of a road after Castelnuovo on to Cattaro; and it's to Cattaro one must go for the ancestral ruin." "If there's a ghost of a road, it will do for me and this motor," I said.
For Cattaro is a natural harbor of the first order, capable of accommodating the whole Austrian fleet. The barracks at Cattaro are plainly visible from the top of Mount Lovcen, but to bring guns of a large enough caliber up there to reach those barracks was practically impossible, on account of the rugged nature of the surrounding country.
The conquest of Montenegro followed that of Serbia. The much-coveted strategic position of Mount Lovcen, commanding the Bocca di Cattaro, was captured by the Austrians on January 10, 1916, while the capital, Cettinje, was likewise occupied three days later. Farther east, the ill-starred Dardanelles venture was coming to a disastrous end.
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