Njegush, the village in which the Prince was born, was a collection of
a score or more of stone cottages of two rooms on the ground floor,
with two or three--of which one was the house of the Petrovich
family--of two stories, simple as the people we saw moving about, the
women carrying heavy loads on their backs, and a few ragged children
peeping round the corners of the houses at the foreigners passing
through. Suspicion was on every face, for the foreigner was still an
enemy. We had taken the trouble to send word to Cettinje that we
were coming up on that day, and the coming of a correspondent of the
"Times" apparently had some importance to Montenegro, for we had found
and made friends with, in the market-place where our baggage horses
were to be hired, a senator of the principality who had _accidentally_
come down from Cettinje, and we did not suspect that he had been sent
down to see if there was danger in our visit or not; and so suspicious
was the little community that every Montenegrin set himself, without
orders and by the instinct of danger, to watch every stranger within
the gates.
The road from Njegush to Cettinje, at present replaced by a good
carriage road, was worse than that from Cattaro, a craggy climb over
which it would have been hardly possible to ride a mule, had I had one
to ride; but from the crown of the pass over which we had to go, there
is one of the finest wide views I have ever seen, over the plains of
Northern Albania and the Lake of Scutari, with the mountains of Epirus
in the extreme distance.
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