nace-like floors, the Carso is as lifeless as it is
treeless and waterless. No bird and scarcely an insect can find
nourishment over vast spaces of this sun-scorched solitude; even the
hardy mountain grass withers and dies of a broken heart. So powerful
is the sun that eggs can be cooked without a fire. Metal objects, such
as rifles and equipment, when left exposed, quickly become too hot to
touch. The bodies of the soldiers who fall on the Carso are not
infrequently found to have been baked hard and mummified after lying
for a day or two on that oven-like floor of stone.

The Carso is probably the strongest natural fortress in the world.
Anything in the shape of defensive works which Nature had overlooked,
the Austrians provided. For years before the war began the Austrian
engineers were at work strengthening a place that already possessed
superlative strength. The whole face of the plateau was honeycombed
with trenches and tunnels and dugouts and gun emplacements which were
blasted and drilled out of the solid rock with machinery similar to
that used in driving the Simplon and the St. Gothard tunnels. The
posts for the snipers were armored with inch-thick plates of steel
cemented into the rock. The _dolinas_ were converted into machine-gun
pits and bomb-proof shelters. In one of these curious craters I saw a
dugout--it was really a subterranean barracks--electrically lighted
and with neatly whitewashed walls which had sleeping accommodation for
a thousand men. To supply these positions, water was pumped up by
oil-engines, but the Austrians took care to destroy the pipe-lines as
they retired.

At the northern end of the Carso, in an angle formed by the junction
of the Wippach and the Isonzo, the snowy towers and red-brown roofs of
Gorizia rise above the foliage of its famous gardens. The town, which
resembles Homburg or Baden-Baden and was a popular Austrian resort
before the war, lies in the valley of the Wippach (Vippacco, the
Italians call it), which separates the Carso from the southernmost
spurs of the Julian Alps. Down this valley runs the railway leading to
Trieste, Laibach, and Vienna. It will be seen, therefore, that Gorizia
is really the gateway to Trieste, and a place of immense strategic
importance.

On the slopes of the Carso, four or five miles to the southwest of the
town, rises the enormously strong position of Monte San Michele, and
a few miles farther down the Isonzo, the fortified hill-town of
Sa