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The sun-kissed waters of the Bay of Quarnero looked for all the world like a vast azure carpet strewn with a million sparkling diamonds; on our starboard quarter stretched the green-clad slopes of Istria, with the white villas of Abbazia peeping coyly out from amid the groves of pine and laurel; to the eastward the bleak brown peaks of the Dinaric Alps rose, savage, mysterious, forbidding, against the cloudless summer sky.
This division was therefore the result of forces created by man and changeable by him. The Croats settled in the northwestern half of the territory south of the Slovenes; the Serbs roughly in the southeastern part of it. Here geographical influences the direction of the rivers and the Dinaric ridges combined with divergent political and economic possibilities, produced a dualism.
The first is the Dinaric Alps or Velebits, a continuation of the Julian Alps. These separate Dalmatia from Bosnia as far as Imoschi, where they enter Herzegovina, finally joining the Montenegrin chain. The chain of the shore commences on the left bank of the Kerka and extends to the Narenta, which cuts it. It runs as far as Trebinje, beyond the river.
The latter, intrenched high on that tremendous natural rampart formed by the Rhaetian and Tyrolean Alps, the Dolomites, the Carnic, Julian, and Dinaric ranges, had an immense superiority over their enemy on the plains below.
It is a question, rather, of finding a practicable route for a standard-gauge railway over or through the mile-high range of the Dinaric Alps, which parallel the entire coast, shutting the coast towns off from the hinterland. Until such a railway is built, the peoples of the interior have no means of getting their products down to the coast save through Fiume.
Towards Abbazia the red soil becomes more abundant, the hills are terraced, and vegetation is more luxuriant, great chestnuts and bay-trees appear, and cypresses when Lovrana is reached. This north shore of the Quarnero, stretching to Fiume, is the Riviera of Austria. The Dinaric Alps surround it from Monte Maggiore, and the Liburnian Karst to the Velebits.
With the successive Eastern invasions and the consequent race differentiations, maritime and inland Dalmatia were separated, and the Turkish conquest made the Dinaric Alps into a bulwark not to be crossed. The Illyrians furnished the Romans with many distinguished soldiers, of whom Claudius Gothicus, Aurelian, Septimius, Probus, and Carus of Narona were soldier emperors.
From Burnum a road by way of Petrovac reached the basin of the Save; from Salona a fan of carriage-roads spread out one across the Dinaric Alps by Æquum and the hill of Prolog to the Danube, another by the same hill to Livno and Kupres, a third between Delminum and Serajevo.
The long, narrow strip of territory sandwiched between the Adriatic and the Dinaric Alps which comprised the Austrian province of Dalmatia, though upward of 200 miles in length, has an area scarcely greater than that of Connecticut and a population smaller than that of Cleveland.
These generally show in their forms the craggy and stony character of the Dinaric Alps, rising perpendicularly from the water on the side of the prevailing wind, and without vegetation. On the other side are softer hills and plains with southern vegetation, the aromatic scents from which are carried by the breeze.
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