Niksich was full of smallpox and fever, and, as there was a great abundance of tents captured with the city, I took one, with an extra baggage-horse and his leader, and started for Moratsha. The wide plain into which we entered after leaving the hills above Niksich was a great pasture land, mottled as I never saw land before with mushrooms. The abundance was extraordinary, but nothing would induce a Montenegrin to eat one. We halted for our first night on the edge of a magnificent natural meadow, where a shepherd had built his hut and was feeding his flocks, and we took advantage of his presence to enjoy some security against the wolves, pitching our tent in a little grove close to him and picketing our horses between the tent and his hut. He and his sons were on guard by turns all night, and the howling of the tantalized wolves came clearly to us at times with, at long intervals, the reports of the guns which were fired to keep them at a distance. They were so near at one time that I got up and fired my fowling-piece out of the tent, and we kept lights burning all night to prevent them from attacking our horses. In the course of the night a thunderstorm came up, and, as we had pitched the tent in a hollow to secure freedom from stones in our beds, the rain, washed out our tent-pegs, and the tent came down on us in our sleep. In the morning I sent to the shepherd for a lamb for breakfast for the men, and he sent us what I took for a full-grown sheep, so large and fat was it, and I sent it back, asking for a lamb. He replied that it was a spring lamb, and the smallest he had. The price of it was about two shillings, and for another he offered to dress it for us. From there we sent back the tent, and the following night we slept at Velje Duboko, at the bottom of one of the ravines which make the surprises of traveling in that country so great. You proceed along a rolling plain with no suspicion of the cañon before you, and suddenly find yourself on the verge of a cliff, looking down into a valley hundreds of feet deep. Duboko lay by the river's margin fifteen hundred feet below us, to be reached only by a winding journey of an hour, though the shepherds carried on conversation from cliff to cliff above. Here a momentary surprise by the Turkish bands has now and then been possible, but never an occupation of the country. The picturesqueness of the valley of the Duboko above the village can be rarely surpassed by wild landscape, and the whole section, the centre of which is the stronghold of Moratsha, is of a most interesting character, utterly unlike the Czernagora proper.