t of St. Mark's in Venice,
with superb mosaics of gold and semi-precious stones; the carved lions'
heads, _bocca del leone_, for receiving secret missives; the delicate
tracery above the doors and windows of the palazzos, and all those other
architectural features so characteristic of the City of the Doges. There
is no questioning what these Istrian coast-towns were or are. They are
as Italian to-day as when, a thousand years ago, they formed a part of
Venice's far-flung skirmish line. But penetrate even a single mile into
the interior of the peninsula and you find a wholly different race from
these Latins of the littoral, a different architecture (if architecture
can be applied to square huts built of sun-dried bricks) and a different
tongue. These people are the Croats, a hardy, industrious agricultural
people, generally illiterate, at least as I found them in Istria, and
with few of the comforts and none of the culture which characterized the
Latin communities on the coast. In short, the towns of the western coast
are undeniably Italian; the rest of the peninsula is solidly Slav.

The interior of Istria consists, in the main, of a barren, monotonous
and peculiarly unlovely limestone plateau known as the Karst, a
continuation of that waterless and treeless ridge, called by Italians
the Carso, which stretches from Trieste northwestward to Goritzia and
beyond. With the exception of the Bukovica of Dalmatia and the lava-beds
of southern Utah, the Istrian Karst is the most utterly hopeless region,
from the standpoint of agriculture, that I know. It is dotted with many
small farmsteads, it is true, but one marvels at the courage and
patience which their peasant owners displayed in their unequal struggle
with Nature. The rocky surface is covered with a stunted,
discouraged-looking vegetation which reminded me of that clothing the
flanks of the mountains in the vicinity of the Roosevelt Dam, in
Arizona, and here and there are vast rolling moors, uninhabited by man
or animal, as desolate, mysterious and repelling as that depicted by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle in _The Hound of the Baskervilles_. The Karst, like
the Carso, is dotted with curious depressions called _dolinas_, some of
them as much as 100 feet in depth, the floors of which, varying in
extent from a few square yards to several acres, are covered with soil
which is as rich as the surface of the surrounding plateau is worthless.
Because of the fertility of these singular