The rail, a narrow-gauge one with a single train a day, starts from Gravosa at five o’clock in the morning and first ascends the Ombla valley from the sea. Gradually it rises in a series of zigzags over the grey bare rocks and through many tunnels for sixty miles to Gabela, a little mountain town, and then through the dry beds of a series of great lakes, and across barren plateaux until it descends into the valley of the Narenta, which narrows into a series of dark, romantic defiles, while the mountains grow higher and more wild, until Mostar, the capital of Herzegovina, is reached. Mostar is a rather dull little town on the Narenta, still half-Turkish, with its mosques and bazaar where one can obtain inlaid silver work from Livino. But there was certainly nothing to attract, so I pushed on next day to Sarayevo. Between the two capitals the scenery is superb, indeed some of the grandest in the whole of the Balkans. Through the Great Defile, or Gorge of the Narenta, the train slowly wends its sinuous course beneath the high precipices of Velez, and then through the Prenj Mountains, across the Glogosnica valley to the small garrison town of Jablanica, a lonely little place in a very wild district. Twenty miles farther on we came to Konjica, a picturesque little place with a fine old Turkish bridge spanning the Narenta, where the train halts, affording us time to explore the place and take a photograph or two. Then the ascent is so steep that the puffing little locomotive is fitted with cog-wheels to take us through the Trescanica valley up over the ridge of the wild Ivan Planina, the high watershed between the Black Sea and the Adriatic. Progress is slow and halts are frequent. In places there have been landslips, and we creep along the edges of dangerous precipices. But the scenery fully compensates for the many tedious hours and for lack of food—for in our ignorance I had omitted to lay in stores, and the only thing I could obtain during the day was half a dozen apples! The Bosnian frontier crossed, the train traverses the saddle of Vilovac, then descends rapidly through beautiful wooded valleys and along the Bosna and Zeljeznica rivers, until, in the darkness, Sarayevo with its many electric lamps is reached—a railway journey even more interesting than the well-known Gothard route. My fellow-passengers from Mostar were two. One was a Turkish gentleman who removed his slippers and sat cross-legged on the seat fingering his beads until the sundown, when he produced some sandwiches from the tail of his frock-coat, and slowly consumed them after his long fast since four o’clock that morning. The other was a particularly communicative Austrian gentleman, whom I recognised at once to be a spy.