We chuckled at the expense of Hilmi Pasha, and drew visions of his wrath; he would permit us to see no more of the interior for ourselves. We grew bold here and planned to march on foot across Macedonia, from Uskub east to Djuma-bala, and from there on the Bulgarian border to Drama near the sea, a distance, all told, of three hundred miles, and you shall see whether we carried out this resolution. The inhabitants of Pschtinia, many bandaged and limping, gathered round us and kissed our hands, thinking we were foreign Consuls come to inquire into their grievances. After the fight the Turks had passed through Pschtinia on their way back to barracks at Koumanova, stopped and beaten the peasants for having harboured the insurgents (which they protested they had not), and carried off the headmen to prison at the town. The old men insisted on showing us the welts on their backs and bruises on their legs, inflicted by the Turks with heavy sticks, and said that the villagers worst mauled had been taken to Koumanova to the doctor, and were now in the gaol there. When we had eaten of the eggs and brown bread, and drunk of milk provided by different villagers, we climbed to the battlefield with two guides who had escaped mauling. It was a forlorn place for a last stand against overwhelming odds--a vast gravel dome, barren but for dwarfed yellow shrubs, and out of sight of every human habitation, even the village it sheltered. The band had been discovered some distance to the north, and chased by an ever-increasing pack of pursuers until driven to bay at this high peak. The insurgents attempted evidently to reach a forest on a neighbouring height, but the Turks cut them off before they could reach it. Little piles of stone a foot high, showing the haste with which they had been thrown together, were still standing, behind each a dark brown spot, a bloody rag or two, a scattering of empty Mauser cartridge-cases. On the slope of the dome we picked up Martini cases. ‘Turk,’ said the peasants. That was evident. The calibre was stamped in Turkish characters. Holes in the pink earth, with bits of cast iron firmly embedded in the rock, marked the places where the dynamite bombs had struck at the last charge, when the soldiers stormed the crest and the end of the insurgents was a matter of seconds.