The flora was entirely new to me.

I rode through a thicket of marguerites so tall that the flowers came up to my face, while the grass came up to my horse's belly.

This is a great hayfield, and the people come from far to cut and store the hay for the winter, when they harness the stacks and drag them bodily to their villages on the snow, which sometimes falls, they told me, to the depth of fifteen or more feet.

To the east stretched the rolling prairie without a house or a village to the Signavina (desolate land) Planina, solitary as the Sahara, for no man would build where a Turkish raid on this disputed land might sweep him and his into one destruction.
That there had been a great population once on these plains was evident from ancient cemeteries with elaborate monuments of an early but unknown people, of whom they are the only remains.

The tombs were rudely worked and decorated in prehistoric manner with devices of war or the chase; one device, which I copied, being of an archer shooting a wild goat, another of a warrior with a long broadsword and large square shield.