Huge haystacks dotted the plain, and the population seemed prosperous.

We pushed on to the frontier post at Dobrilovina through glades of fir-trees with pasture intervening, as the soil was rocky or fertile, and reached the margin of the Tara late in the afternoon, a good day's ride from Aluga.
The Tara has cut itself a caon like those of the Yellowstone, and on a little space of alluvial land at the bottom lies the convent, a building of the Servian Empire, curiously spared by the Turkish invasions.

We descended 2500 feet, measured by my aneroid, to the flat, where the monks made us most welcome.

We walked along the river, a rapid and shallow stream filled with trout, which refused to take any lure I could show them,--and the monks said that they ate only the crayfish which abounded in the river.
We went to sleep, to be awakened at midnight by the scouts who came in to tell us that the Turks were out from Kolashin, and that some thousands of Albanians of the Rascian country were raiding in advance, and had already thrown their left far beyond us.

Had they known we were there, we might have been taken in a trap from which only fleet fugitives would have escaped.