There I learned that
there was a great assemblage of refugees at Grahovo, a remote corner
of the principality, which could best be reached from the Bocche; and
enlisting the agent of the Austrian Lloyds as guide and interpreter, I
went by way of Risano and the country of the Crivoscians, a Slavonic
tribe who gave great trouble to the Romans in their day, and to
their successors in that part of the world, the Austrians, whom
they defeated disastrously in 1869. The Crivoscians contributed an
important element to the forces of the insurrection; they were held to
be great thieves, but greater Turk fighters, and on the way to Grahovo
we met many of them coming home wounded, or carrying their booty from
the recent battles (one amongst them had forgotten whether he was
seventy-five or seventy-six), for there had been serious fighting in
the corner of the Herzegovina adjacent.
Then we came into the long procession of refugees, mostly women and
children, a dribbling stream of wretched humanity, carrying such
remnants of their goods as their backs could bear up under, with a few
old men, too old to fight, all seeking some hiding-place until the
storm should be over,--wretched, ragged, worn out by the fatigues of
their hasty flight from "the abomination of desolation," for it seemed
as if he that was on the housetop had not gone down to take anything
out of his house, and woe had been pronounced upon them that were with
child and them that gave suck in those days.
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