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Marko looked at it through the glass and found it to be mainly a provision train, for Medun was on the verge of starvation, the garrison having "shaken out the last grain of rice from their bags," to use the expression of the moment. When Marko's men found the actual number of fighting men in the Turkish sortie, they decided to fight it out.
Marko fought retreating from the morning until about 2 P.M., when the Turks stopped to eat, having driven the Montenegrin force back and toward Medun about three miles.
Rough, stony paths through rocky ravines, sometimes skirting deep precipices, and all round the intensely wild and magnificent mountains, led us to the great gorge where Medun is situated. Perched on a seemingly inaccessible crag, stands the famous ruined fortress, and at its foot Marko's house. We were made welcome by his widow, a regal woman of middle age, and still strikingly handsome.
I saw him some months later, and he told me that when the great sortie from Podgoritza to relieve Medun came in view of the blockading force, though at a distance of several miles, his men declared that they could not fight that immense army, which filled the valley with its numbers and had the appearance of a force many times greater than their own.
He had died but a few months before our visit, and by his last wish was buried in the little fortress of Medun, which many years ago he had stormed at the head of a handful of men under circumstances of great bravery. The ride thither gave us our first taste of the mountains.
Sometimes in a house in passing; again, an old woman trudging to market will sing the death dirge of a relation, perhaps dead many years. But we never heard those piercing, wailing notes without having the picture of Medun recalled vividly to our memory. When a man dies he is laid out in the sitting-room, and all the friends and relations are summoned.
His force of 2500 men was then blockading the little fortress of Medun, a remotely detached item of the defensive system of Podgoritza, and on the next day he set out for his post.
Voivoda Marko, the hero of Medun, defeated the Turks on these slopes in the first engagement of the last war, successfully inaugurating the campaigning which secured to Montenegro all the territory through which we had been riding for so many weeks, including the towns of Podgorica and Nikšić, and the great valley now stretched at our feet.
"Gizeh, Abusir, Sakkara, Dahsur and now here, if you look that's the Medun pyramid that tiny, sharp prick. If we had glasses...." "Yes; but why didn't you like the ball?" murmured Jinny the direct. "I did like the ball. Very much." "Then why didn't you stay?"
The fortress was obliged, a little later, to surrender, and in the subsequent siege of Niksich the artillery taken at Medun served a very good purpose, being heavier than anything the Montenegrins had.
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