Monte Dinara

“Next morning early, leaving the high road on my left, I ascended to the visible source of the river [Cèttina]; the high peak of the Dinara, another mountain of the Vellebitch, that separates Bosnia and Dalmatia, serving as a direction. In about a couple of hours we arrived at a circular plain, about a mile in diameter, where several streams that flowed through the meadow formed the Cetigne by their junction. Under a dark-coloured rock were deep blue basins, boiling up like a caldron; these were the visible sources of that Cetigne which a few months before I had seen entering the Adriatic at Almissa. Above the rocks from which the sources issued rose the mass of Dinara, its ribs bare, and its peak square and precipitous. There is something invariably pleasing in a river-source; the virgin lymph in clearness and beauty, filtered by Nature herself, comes to the light in a fountain scooped out by the same hand, and as yet uncontaminated with the impurities of cities; the remoteness and solitude of its origin adds to the peculiar charm.

My guide now, applying his hands to his mouth, gave a loud holla, and four wild, uncouth-looking men were seen descending a bushy hillock from a cottage, holding torches of pines in their hands; leaving our horses, we went up a sterile waterless valley till we came to a hole in the rock not larger than would admit one person; and one of the Morlacks, of tall stature, doffing his greasy red cap, took out of it a flint and steel, and striking a light, he entered the cave, and taking my hand, I followed. The others then lighted their pitch-pine torches until they blazed up, and following several turnings, windings, and descents, I perceived that I was in a natural hall, of which curious stalactites were the columns, with the fresh pendicles glistening and gleaming. The fantastic shapes stalactites take are endless; and the successive chambers have all names from the resemblance of their rocks to various objects, one being the chamber of the bull, another of the tomb, and so on.

I was bewildered as I walked further and further, for the caverns are certainly many miles in extent. To these chambers, with a comparatively level ground, succeeds a chaos of up-heaved rocks and dark abysses, which compel the traveller to grasp firmly the arm of his guide, for assistance in progress and safety from danger, while the flicker of the pines is almost lost in the surrounding gloom. Not a sound is heard but the echo of our voices and the melancholy drop of the moisture that in darkness has slowly reared those columns and fretted those crypts of nature. These caves have never, I believe, been fully explored; and Lovrich says that he was informed, by persons who had attempted to go to their furthest extremity, that to go and to come would be a day’s journey. In the midst of the cavern is a considerable river, which glides through these dark recesses, and is unquestionably the invisible source of the waters which form the Cetigne.

I now retraced my steps, and again found myself in the welcome light of day. […]. The Dinara, 5669 Italian, or about 6000 English feet above the level of the sea, was on my right, and a continuation of the Caprarius on my left. There is no sharp ridge separating the two valleys, but a table-land almost devoid of vegetation; and as I looked up to the Dinara, which presents a face of 4000 feet of rock very little out of the perpendicular, the thought often struck me that a huge section had been rended from its front by some great convulsion of nature, and falling over the whole breadth of the valley, had provided an everlasting roof to the caves I had visited (pp. 23-26)”.