."

Now the women appeared to us most inoffensive.

Dr. Ob was purple with rage. He stamped his foot.

"But I am a minister," he kept repeating crescendo, till he shouted to
the villagers, "But I am a minister."

It is impossible to take Montenegro seriously. Situations occur at every
corner which remind one irresistibly of "the Rose and the Ring," and we
wondered what would happen next. There were other belated passengers who
had hoped for conveyance, and the Frenchman's carriage had not turned
up. Dr. Ob at last decided to commandeer a cocked hat boat rowed by four
women with which to navigate the river to Rieka, and thence by carriage
to Cettinje if carriages came. It was six p.m., we might reach Rieka by
ten.

We rowed out through the half-sunken trees. At the end of a spit of land
was a man gnawing a piece of raw beef. We shouted to him to ask what he
was doing; and he answered that he was curing his malaria. The two women
in the bow were very pretty, one was a mere child.

There were wisps of sunset cloud in the sky, and soon night came quite
down.

As it grew dark all sense of motion disappeared. The boat shrugged
uneasily with the movement of the oars, the rowlocks made of loops of
twisted osier creaked, but one could not perceive that one was going
forwards. The hills lost their solidity, becoming mere holes in the grey
blue of the sky, a bright planet made a light smudge on the ruffled
water in which the stars could not reflect. As we crept forwards into
the river and the mountains closed in, the water became more calm, and
the stars came out one by one beneath us, while in the ripple of our
wake the image of the planet ran up continuously in strings of little
golden balls like a juggling trick.

The Frenchman turned his head and made a noise like the rowlocks. "Il
faut chanter quand meme," he explained, "pour encourager les autres." Jo
then started "Frere Jacques." Jan and Dr. Ob took it up till the
Frenchman burst in with an entirely different time and key. Then one of
the oar girls began a queer little melody on four notes only, and all
the four women joined, one end of the boat answering the other. They
sang through their noses, and high up in the falsetto. By shutting one's
eyes one could imagine a great ox waggon drawn uphill by four bullocks
and one of the wheels ungreased. Yet it was not unpleasing, this queer
shrill, recurrent rhythm, the monotonous creak and splash of the oars,
the mystery