A glass of milk and a crust of the bread I had brought from the convent made my breakfast, and we pushed on to our next stopping-place, the convent of Piperski Celia. The road lay for the first hour through a forest of beeches and firs, the former the finest, as timber, I ever saw--straight trunks, thirty or forty feet to the first limb; in some places the beech being the exclusive wood, and in others the fir, but all a luxuriant growth. Properly worked, this forest would have made a great revenue for the principality. Before the war it had been leased to a French company, and many trees were lying in all stages of preparation for rafting down the Moratsha. This was succeeded by a forest entirely of firs, also splendid trees, and then we came into a region which was beyond all my experience or imagination,--a wide and barren waste of rock, gray, glistening in the now burning sun, and without a trace of vegetation that could be recognized by the casual vision. There was no soil, and apparently never had been any, and the silvery-gray of the lichenous limestone blinded one with its glare in the sunlight. Midway in it we came on an old Roman road, one of the finest pieces of antique engineering I ever saw. In some places it was cut out of the solid rock like a dry canal, the banks being nearly as high as our heads, and the ruts of the chariot wheels were still there to show that the utter barrenness of the land had existed the same from ancient time. It was probably the great road from Dyrrachium to the upper Danube.