[The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II by William James Stillman]@TWC D-Link book
The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II

CHAPTER XXXVIII
20/22

The owner of the boat put a mattress in it where I could lie at length, and so, sleeping, or listening to the songs of the rowers, or watching the stars overhead, I found myself in the course of the night at Dulcigno, where I was warmly received and hospitably entertained by the governor, a comrade of the war-days.

With a little expenditure and energy Dulcigno might be made a delightful winter resort, the climate being that of Naples and the surroundings picturesque, but Montenegro has neither the capital nor the appliances to profit by its position.
A company had proposed to the Prince to build a port and construct a hotel and all necessary appurtenances if he would give, in compensation, the right of establishing gaming-tables, after the fashion of Monte Carlo, but the Prince, awake to the importance of maintaining the respect of Europe so fairly won, refused the offer.
From Dulcigno the road I had to take to Scutari was a plunge into the unknown.

I hired two horses, one a pack-horse for the baggage and the other a poor hack for riding.

The roads were fetlock deep in mud, and the whole region so inundated that we often had to take across country, profiting by the ridges to avoid fording the unconjecturable depths of water in the ancient roads.

At one point we had to pass a deep ditch, over which I forced my horse to jump, but the baggage horse refused it until pushed to it by main force, when he plumped in over head, ears, and baggage, and we had very great difficulty to extricate him, as the water was at least four feet below the bank.
But I reached Scutari fortunately before night, wet, bedraggled, and muddied from head to foot, my clothes in tatters from the tenacious wait-a-bit thorn hedges we had had to force our way through, and all my baggage soaked, more or less as the water had had time to penetrate to it.


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