ll.
Forward an unsavoury group of passengers still slumbered amidst
fruit-peel and expectorations, a few soldiers, some squalid brigands
armed with preposterous red umbrellas, a group of curled-up human lumps
brooded over by an aquiline individual caparisoned with brass like a
horse, his head wrapped picturesquely in a shawl. Benham surveyed these
last products of the "life force" and resumed his pensive survey of the
coast. The sea was deserted save for a couple of little lateen craft
with suns painted on their gaudy sails, sea butterflies that hung
motionless as if unawakened close inshore....

The travel of the last few weeks had impressed Benham's imagination
profoundly. For the first time in his life he had come face to face
with civilization in defeat. From Venice hitherward he had marked with
cumulative effect the clustering evidences of effort spent and power
crumbled to nothingness. He had landed upon the marble quay of Pola and
visited its deserted amphitheatre, he had seen a weak provincial life
going about ignoble ends under the walls of the great Venetian fortress
and the still more magnificent cathedral of Zara; he had visited
Spalato, clustered in sweltering grime within the ample compass of the
walls of Diocletian's villa, and a few troublesome sellers of coins and
iridescent glass and fragments of tessellated pavement and such-like
loot was all the population he had found amidst the fallen walls and
broken friezes and columns of Salona. Down this coast there ebbed and
flowed a mean residual life, a life of violence and dishonesty, peddling
trades, vendettas and war. For a while the unstable Austrian ruled
this land and made a sort of order that the incalculable chances of
international politics might at any time shatter. Benham was drawing
near now to the utmost limit of that extended peace. Ahead beyond the
mountain capes was Montenegro and, further, Albania and Macedonia,
lands of lawlessness and confusion. Amanda and he had been warned of the
impossibility of decent travel beyond Cattaro and Cettinje but this had
but whetted her adventurousness and challenged his spirit. They were
going to see Albania for themselves.

The three months of honeymoon they had been spending together had
developed many remarkable divergences of their minds that had not been
in the least apparent to Benham before their marriage. Then their
common resolve to be as spirited as possible had obliterated all minor
considerati