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.

The body of the rod had fulfilled its destiny in attracting the lightning, while the telegraph wire, not being able to carry the load brought to it, had discharged it into the magazine.

And, when I saw it, the wire was still inviting another disaster.

I found in Eshref Pasha a most interesting and amiable personage, out of his place completely in the management of a turbulent and really hostile Christian population, with whom his very best qualities were a disqualification.