horses, and off to the hotel.

The women on the roadside were clad in picturesque ever-varying
costumes. There were narrow carts with high Indian-like wheels studded
with large nails; there were Albanians in costumes of black and white,
everything we had hoped or expected.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER IX

SCUTARI

After a wash we went into the streets. It was the Orient, just as
Eastern as Colombo or Port Said. The little fruit and jewellers' shops
with square lanterns, the tailors sitting cross-legged in their windows,
the strange medley of costumes--even the long lean dogs looked as if
they had been kicked from the doors of a thousand mosques.

We left the shops for further explorations. Scutari has always been
described as such a beautiful town. The adjective does not seem
picturesque: yes, quaint, strange decidedly. One's second impression
after the shops is this:--

[Illustration]

Miles and miles of walls with great doors. The main streets branch out
into thousands of impasses each ending in a locked door. There are
hardly any connecting streets, for somebody's walled garden is between.
The Mahommedans hide in seclusion on one side of the town, while their
hated enemies the Christians live on the other. Each house, Turk or
Christian, has the same air of defiant privacy, the only difference
being that the Turk's windows are blocked with painted lattice. The
Mahommedan women's faces are covered with several thicknesses of
chiffon, generally black, while the Christian peasant women walk about
with an eye and a half peering from the shrouding folds of a cotton head
shawl which they hold tightly under their noses.

With difficulty we found the English consul's house, as the Albanians
speak no Serb and Montenegrins were not to be found at every street
corner. At last we found it appropriately enough in the Rue du Consulat
d'Angleterre. A gorgeous old butler resembling a wolf ushered us from
the blank walled street into a beautiful square garden filled with
flowering shrubs and creepers. Not to be outdone by the colours of the
flowers, the butler was clad in a red waistcoat, embroidered with gold,
a green cloth coat, blue baggy trousers, and a red fez with a tassel
nearly a yard long, while a connoisseur's mouth would have watered at
the sight of his antique silver watch-chain with its exquisitely worked
hanging blobs.

The interior of the house gave an impression of vast roominess. Wide
stairs, a huge