But the Preki Put '-the peasant often apologises for its weakness,' a Servian euphemism to describe an unspeakably bad roadis, on the whole, more desirable riding than the Kalderma, the old Turkish road, some three metres wide, made of cobblestones which time has worn to every possible level and polished to the slipperiness of ice. The Turks made their roads for all time, because travellers seldom attempt to face their perils, as the tracks proclaim that are worn down on each side of the deserted stone causeway.

Sir Harry Blount, who travelled through Bosnia in 1634, described it as a hilly country, cold, not inhabited, and in a manner a continued wood, mostly of pine-trees.' It is still possible to ride for days through magnificent primæval forests, both in the region about Vlasenica and in Western Bosnia; but twenty-five years hence, when the timber firms which are now at work there have finished their contracts, the finest trees, many of them of two or three centuries' growth, will have disappeared, and great tracts of country, unless forest laws are carried out with the utmost rigour, will be laid bare to the bone. A certain amount of felling was of course necessary for the preservation of the forests, and it is true that millions of young trees, self-seeded, are springing up in the moist fertile soil, so that the process of re-afforestation is, to a certain extent, a natural one; but how will these young plants fare when they have lost the protecting shade of the great trees, and, with their loss, a change of climate has come about? It is no easy task, moreover, to safeguard these great natural nurseries against the attacks of cows and goats (the forester's worst enemies), which vie with the peasant himself in the recklessness of their depredations. The Karst of the Hercegovina is a warning to Bosnia, and the exploiting of the chief riches of a country for decades, if not centuries, in advance is on many grounds a questionable policy.

The limestone or Karst of Bosnia is still clothed with magnificent forests of beech and oak and fir; in the Hercegovina and Montenegro it stands revealed in absolute bareness. Dante might well have used the Karst region as a setting for a Ring in his Inferno. Sometimes it is like a desert, where sand has congealed into stones, or a landslip of rocks, arrested suddenly in their fall; or, again, it is like the bed of a prehistoric ocean that has rolled away and left these barren layers exposed; or the surface of the sea, swollen with the great rollers of a subsiding storm, petrified as they heaved and then scarred with a myriad indentations. It is the coldest, most cruel, most hopeless landscape in Europe-a grey, unfriendly, forbidding land, in which human beings have no part or lot; a land to which man sold his birthright when the shipbuilders of Ragusa deprived it of its natural covering of protecting forest. And yet, here and there, a peasant builds a stone-walled, stone-roofed shelter, leaving scarcely space for an eyelet window to look out on the dreary waste around,

and painfully raises a scanty crop in the little hollows, sometimes scarcely two yards across, where the rain has washed down a few inches of unfruitful soil.

The journey from Gatzko to Trebinje-a twelve hours' drivetraverses one of these monotonous tracts, rising and falling in ridges, each of which is crowned, towards the Montenegrin frontier, by an Austrian fort, while to the west the stony landscape stretches away, as far as the eye can see-treeless, lifeless, featureless. That July day of scorching sunshine, when I passed through it, it was indeed a weary land, where there was no shadow of a great rock. For long hours we met no human being till we came on a blind man, with fixed unseeing eyes, alone, marching along the dazzling white road with sure and rapid steps towards some unknown goal. His lonely figure added another touch of strangeness to the scene.

Where the Karst rises into a mountain range its bleakness becomes impressive. Sometimes all the lines of stratification are visible for miles, so level and parallel that they seem to have been ruled by some gigantic hand, sometimes tilted at every angle and broken up in wild confusion. A bitter wind blows over these high regions even in summer; cairns of stones twenty feet high at each turn of the road, as it descends over wall after wall of rock, serve as landmarks in the winter, when the deep snow has blotted out every feature of the country, and here and there a cross or turbaned pillar shows the resting-place of a peasant, who sank into his last sleep in some winter storm.

But the Karst, because of its very bareness, is more sensitive to changes of sky than a country where cultivation and trees afford of themselves colour and light and shade. The white precipices of mountains like Orufa and Prenj in brilliant sunshine against a blue sky assume an almost transparent fineness of outline, and there is a charm even in the monotony of the great plateaux which, though it is difficult to define, is sensible enough.

I remember one picture, that had the delicacy of an old silverpoint engraving; a narrow valley, running back into the Baba Planina, and midway, on a rocky height of its own, a ruined castle, rising above a Turkish village, with its minaret and decaying mansions; a little vague cultivation in the hollows, and the rest, mountains, castle, valley, all stones, stones; but everywhere pale wreaths of mist-it was not long after sunrise-curled, and hung, and broke into foam, softening the outlines of keep and rock and precipice into a mysterious uncertainty. It was a harmony in grey, in which a note of colour would have jarred.

Beyond the castle-Kljuć (the Key), as it is called-on the face of the encircling cliffs is the entrance to a deep cavern, from which issues one of those strange rivers characteristic of the Karst. The waters fall into the valley, only to vanish again into the ground six

hundred paces away. Tradition says that Sandalj, who was the most powerful of the independent rulers of Chlum (not yet called Hercegovina), blocked up the subterranean passages, and so flooded all the surrounding valley, and for three years defied the Turks in his island castle.

These old rulers of the land are still great heroes to the peasants, and Serb and Turk alike delight to pour out endless stories of their doings. The old Turk who had climbed with us into the ruined keep told us, with great wealth of detail and much reported conversation between Sultan and Prince, how Duke Stephen-for the Emperor Frederick the Fourth had in 1440, in return for Stephen's recognition of his suzerainty, bestowed the title of Herzog on the ruler of Chlum-took to himself the bride who was destined for his The son fled to the Sultan, who received him kindly and gave him an army to avenge his dishonour, and thus the Turks were for the first time brought into the land. The version of the story that history seems to have accepted says that this son of Duke Stephen was taken as a hostage by the Turks when they conquered the country, and that he became a Mohammedan and eventually married a daughter of Sultan Bajazet the Second.

son.

Here at Kljuć, and again on the banks of the Drina (this time overthrown and hidden by bushes), I saw great stone seats, ornamented with a single line of simple carving, where the peasants said Duke Stephen was wont to sit and dispense justice; and the magnificent peninsula of rock between the Tara and Piva, now Montenegrin territory, is still called Stiepanstiena (the wall of Stephen), while the strip of fertile land below is Stephen's Field. All the castles in this borderland that are not Stiepangrads are Yelena or Yerengrads. Who was this Yelena of the peasants, whose summer home was the wonderful castle of Samobor, the lonely height,' which was built, they say, with stones handed from man to man, by peasants standing in a chain from the little town of Cainica, three hours away; who raised the stately watch tower that guards the rushing waters of the Lim, and the yet more remote Hissarlik, far in the Sandjak of NoviBazar, and many another little-known, almost inaccessible stronghold? Was she the sister of the Servian Czar Urosh, who married the Bulgarian Czar Michael, or the wife of the great Dúshan; or was she Helen Comnena, wife of Herzog Stephen, himself a castle builder? Possibly there is no need to connect the Prokleta Yerena,' the cursed Helen, the Greek,' as they call her, who flung her lovers from the terrace of her castle at Zvornik into the river Drina below, with the St. Helena who died a nun and whose wonder-working tomb is still shown in the celebrated church at Detchani (though the transition from sinner to saint was easy and not uncommon in those days), and many of these Yerengrads may have been built by the Romans long before Slav times.

Even more unique in interest than the romantic castles in which Bosnia abounds are the strange groups of vast stone monuments which are supposed to be the burying-grounds of the obscure and persecuted Bogomiles. All that is known of this heretic sect, which appeared in Bosnia almost with the introduction of Christianity itself, comes through the medium of the prejudice and passion of their persecutors. There seems little, however, in their life or doctrine to justify the violence with which they were pursued by the Byzantine Emperor Alexius, no less than by successive Popes of Rome and Kings of Hungary. This filthy people,' worse and more horrible than demons,' 'imbued with the cunning of the Old Fiend,' 'Basil, the deluded founder of the wretched Bogomiles '-such are the epithets which prepared the way for boiling cauldron and fire and sword.

The Bogomiles held the doctrine of the Two Principles of Good and Evil. All matter was the creation of the Evil One, and as such they rejected the Old Testament, the symbol of the Cross, and the Sacrament of Marriage; they repudiated all earthly possessions, and, as even their enemies allowed, they practised humility and asceticism. The heresy took deep root in Bosnia, and the zeal of the orthodox ultimately defeated their own ends. It was the persecution of Rome, not less than the desire to retain their possessions, that must account for the wholesale conversion of the Bosnian nobles to Islam at the Turkish conquest.

Nothing now remains of the Bogomiles beyond these lonely graves, some of which each day's ride brings before the traveller. Sometimes it is a solitary tomb, half-hidden by long grass and creepers, more often a group of six or seven roughly shaped blocks of stone, apparently thrown at random on the bare hillside, or hardly to be distinguished from a natural outcrop of rock of some little knoll or crest; sometimes-as in the great plain of Podromanje, where the only life seemed to be in the flocks of wheatears as they flitted from tomb to tomb-the whole landscape is one vast cemetery. The 'great stones,' as the peasants call them (many weigh, it is said, from ten to fifteen tons), are usually uncarved blocks, wider above than below, sometimes resting on a yet larger flat slab. Occasionally a mystic symbol of star or crescent, or wand, or a hand grasping a scimitar may be detected on the surface; more rarely the rude figure of a knight or a conventional row of dancers; now and again there is a line of inscription. In the Giaoursko-Polie, 'the strangers' field,' some six hours from Sarajevo, I saw a group of tombs, one of which especially shows rich and elaborate carving, geometrical designs, trees, horses, stags and hawks, knights in armour, and houses, which are evidently the prototypes of the Bosnian dwellings of to-day.

Listen to one or two of the inscriptions, with their unfamiliar cadences, fraught with the acute melancholy, the hopeless pessimism, of the Slav. Here lies Vlatko Vladjevič. He had neither father

nor mother, nor son nor brothers nor sisters, nor anyone else, only his sins.' Or to this, with its strange assumption of the first person, that startles the ear almost as with a voice speaking through the silence of the centuries: Here lies the good Voivod, a son of the good house of Obrenović. At this age I had not yet made myself to be hated, neither by the good nor yet by the bad. Those who have known me have pitied me. I desired to be a brave hero, but death has cut me short in this. I have left my very mournful father, and have gone upon my strange and lonely journey to a new alliance. Early have I gone away to that other world."

But it is not only for the monuments of the past that Bosnia is interesting. The actual peasant life of to-day, which, with its oldworld customs and its widely differing ideas and ideals, contrasts so strangely with the conventional officialdom of the towns and the military routine of the garrisons, offers an ever varying series of pictures and studies to the traveller. One of the most curious features of peasant life is the survival here and there of the Zádruga, the house community, 'one of the oldest institutions,' Sir Henry Maine calls it,' of the Aryan race, probably with the exception of the family the very oldest.' The tendency of recent years, in spite of the undoubted prosperity of well-managed Zádrugas, has been towards the dissolution of these agglomerate families. I suspect that young women who marry into a Zádruga do not always find it easy to adapt themselves to the rule of the house-mother, or to the company of many sisters-in-law, and it may be that female influence, even in Bosnia, can effect social changes. All property is held in common, except clothes and jewellery, but I noticed that when I wanted to buy an embroidered collar from a girl in a Zádruga, all the community consulted together as to the possibility of selling it.

In one of the Zádrugas that I visited I found the huge family of fifty persons at breakfast. A Bosnian hut, two-thirds of which is conical, grey shingled roof, marks the quickest and most natural transition from growing trees to a human habitation. The interior consists usually of a single room, dark and not over cleanly-for the peasant, though he never fails to enumerate pure air and pure water as the chief charms of his village, is as a rule careful to exclude both from his house and his person. This Zádruga consisted of a group of four or five huts and as many barns perched on an isolated spur of the mountains. The men of the party, five brothers and their sons and elder grandsons, were seated on low stools round a sofra or table about twelve inches high; at a smaller and still lower sofra sat boys of the next age, while at a third sprawled the babies-there seemed at least a dozen of them. Directly the meal was over, the men went off to their work; one brother started on a two days' journey with pigs to sell at Sarajevo, another for a distant pasture in the hills, while the little boys of six and seven were sent off, not without tears, to