at our speed when we realized that the
telegraph wires were no longer with us--one can always find the nearest
way by following the telegraph, for governments do not waste wire. Jan
looked for them and found them streaming away to the left, and among
them, well up on the horizon, our enemy the soldier.

"Look," we cried to Bogami, "isn't that the shortest way? The wires go
there."

"Bogami," he replied; "wires can, horses can't, bogami."

There is a fine military road to Chainitza, made by the Austrians, but
it remains a white necklace on the hills, almost an ornament to the
landscape. No one seemed to use it, while our old Turkish road which
snaked and twisted up and down was pitted with the hoofs of countless
horses. It is a stony path, and our animals were shod with flat plates
instead of horseshoes; they slipped and slithered, and we wondered if in
youth they had ever had lessons in skating.

There was a heavy mist, but it began to break up, and through peepholes
one caught fleeting glimpses of distant patterning of field and forest,
and hints of great hills. The sun showed like a great pale moon on the
horizon. There were other travellers on the old Turkish trail, horsemen,
Bosnians in great dark claret-coloured turbans, or Montenegrins in their
flat khaki caps, peasants in dirty white cotton pyjamas, thumping before
them animals with pack-swollen sides, soldiers only recognizable from
the peasants by the rifle on their backs, and Turks; most were jolly
fellows, and hailed us cheerfully.

From a house by the roadside burst a sheep, followed by five men. They
chased the animal down the road whistling to it. We had never heard that
whistling was effectual with sheep, and certainly it did not succeed
very well in this instance.

Somewhere beyond this house Jan's inside began to cry for food, two
biscuits and a cup of _cafe au lait_ being little upon which to found a
long day's riding. He tentatively tried a "compressed luncheon." Its
action was satisfactory, but whether it resulted from real nourishment
contained in the black-looking glue, or whether it came from a sticking
together of the coating of the stomach, we have not yet decided. Jo
preferred rather to endure the hunger.

Bogami had quite a charm; for instance, he appreciated our troubles with
the beasts we were riding. Jo's horse stumbled a good deal on the
downhills; her saddle was very uncomfortable and so narrow that she
could never change her pos