The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume IIStillman, William James
History
The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II
Stillman, William James
Journalists -- Biography; Stillman, William James, 1828-1901
has neither the capital nor the appliances to profit by its position.
A company had proposed to the Prince to build a port and construct
a hotel and all necessary appurtenances if he would give, in
compensation, the right of establishing gaming-tables, after the
fashion of Monte Carlo, but the Prince, awake to the importance of
maintaining the respect of Europe so fairly won, refused the offer.
From Dulcigno the road I had to take to Scutari was a plunge into the
unknown. I hired two horses, one a pack-horse for the baggage and the
other a poor hack for riding. The roads were fetlock deep in mud,
and the whole region so inundated that we often had to take across
country, profiting by the ridges to avoid fording the unconjecturable
depths of water in the ancient roads. At one point we had to pass a
deep ditch, over which I forced my horse to jump, but the baggage
horse refused it until pushed to it by main force, when he plumped
in over head, ears, and baggage, and we had very great difficulty to
extricate him, as the water was at least four feet below the bank.
But I reached Scutari fortunately before night, wet, bedraggled, and
muddied from head to foot, my clothes in tatters from the tenacious
wait-a-bit thorn hedges we had had to force our way through, and all
my baggage soaked, more or less as the water had had time to penetrate
to it. Not an inhabited house did we pass on the way, such had been
the terror of the border warfare still not dissipated. But from
Scutari south there were other dangers. The Albanians were in a state
of incipient revolt, and the country was unsafe for a Turkish escort,
if even such protection were not to me a greater danger, and I found,
not I confess without a little trepidation, that the only protection I
could count on was the consular postman who rode with the mail-bag to
San Giovanni di Budua, the first point at which the Austrian Lloyd
steamers called. We met with no annoyance, however, and though we had
at some points curious looks we encountered nothing more offensive,
but I decided to give up the remainder of the land journey till more
propitious times. San Giovanni seems to have been an important Roman
port and there are interesting remains of the Imperial epoch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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