Cattaro

“Cattaro, intrenched behind grim walls, hums with early morning life, and the markets and bazaars swarm with Montenegrins and Albanians driving bargains with Herzegovinians and swarthy Turks, for Cattaro is a focal point in West Balkan life. […].

On a moody afternoon - sunshine alternating with deep shadows and flecks of rain - we drove up the Cettinje road. Until this century the only road connecting the Montenegrin capital with the coast wound in sharp zigzags down the flanks of the Pestingrad and ended in the ravine behind the castle of Cattaro. Sixteen years ago the Austrian government, recognizing the impracticability of this old road, constructed a new one, a triumph of road-building, so wonderfully engineered that, though it mounts to an altitude of 4,000 feet in a distance of twenty miles, horses can trot up nearly all its grade, and Cettinje, thirty miles away, can be reached in five or six hours. 

We first ascend between the walls of vineyards, but soon gain more open vistas. Oaks and dark-green laurels and feathery olive-trees grow among the granite rocks. Pomegranates on golden trees burst their thick peels and spill their crimson fruit, spoiling to be plucked. But soon the trees are left behind and only dry moss clings to the bare cliffs. The diligence from Budua comes rumbling down the road, drawn by well-groomed horses, a trim vehicle in a fresh coat of yellow paint, with a smart coachman on the box. Girls pass by astride of little mountain ponies; women troop townwards, bearing great bundles of fagots on their heads; and now another caravan comes into view, this time the Montenegrin coach from Cettinje, a dingy, rattle-trap affair full of people and followed by a mail-wagon and an extra horse, a deplorable contrast to the bright Austrian stage we had just passed. A court personage in an antiquated landau follows close behind” (pp. 116-119).