I
had to wait a few days for the voyage to Scutari, profiting by the
occasion of the return of some engineers and the French consul at that
place. We found the town flooded, a fisherman by the side of one of
the streets showing us a fine string of fish which he had caught in
the roadside ditch. Decay, neglect, and utter demoralization were
written large on the general aspect of the capital of one of the most
important of the provinces of the Turkish Empire in Europe, i.e.
important to Turkey. The magnificent country around Scutari for miles
on miles square--most fertile ground, producing, beside wheat, the
finest tobacco known for cigarettes generally sold as of Cavalla (and
how many nervous hours I have soothed with it during these campaigns),
and enormous crops of maize--lies a large part of the time every year
under water, as I had found it, for the sole reason that the Drin,
which ought to empty into the sea below the Boyana (the outlet of the
Lake of Scutari, the Moratcha, etc.), has built a bar by its floods
and abandoned its proper course, emptying into the lake a flood which
the Boyana is incapable of managing.
The fortress was a relic of Dushan, little mended by the Turk, and had
been three times struck by lightning, the magazine each time exploding
(once while I was in Montenegro), only because the Turkish government,
in putting up the lightning-rod and finding the supply of rod short,
had pieced it out with telegraph wire.
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