As you wind around the mountain peaks wonderful views of the valley below, dotted here and there with white specks of human beings busily at work, are before you, now on one side, now on the other. The fields resemble square patches of brown or green plush rubbed both ways, according to the angle of light as it falls upon them. Ahead, the railway line seems to be made up of tunnels, great stone arches that bridge deep ravines and cuts and fills which follow one another in rapid succession. On the distant hills you may see the remains of watch towers once used by lookouts, from which were observed the movements of Turkish invaders in the days when the gates of Vienna were threatened by the depredating Mohammedans. A little beyond Uskoplje, as suddenly as you would come into the light from the darkness of a tunnel, is displayed before you, as if molded with clay upon a great flat canvas, a most extraordinary panorama of that part of the Dalmatian coast. Might you have had the uninterrupted view of the engineer you would have seen at first but a narrow defile in the mountains ahead, in the centre of which the rails of the road meet in perspective, like two glossy ribbons, and then seem to shoot out into a blue-vaulted void beyond. By bringing into play a very little imagination you might be willing to believe you were nearing the edge of the earth. But, as you approach, a panorama unfolds itself,—a panorama of that strip of territory which fringes the north-eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea, Austria-Hungary’s only coast line. It is a panorama of an historic land of perennial loveliness. It is a panorama of a land of flowers, of sunshine and deep shadows; a land of wonderful walls and bold bastiles; a land of gayety, where Austria-Hungarian aristocracy, all-appreciative of its charms, sits and looks out upon the amethystine waters by day, and strolls languorously along the sea-parades by night; a land of quaint, fortified cities, jealous of their histories; a land of interesting, picturesque, unsophisticated peasant peoples. Withal it is a new, and, as yet, comparatively an unpenetrated land to the English-speaking traveller, scenery-lover or pleasure-seeker, and I have taken the liberty to coin a new name for it—The Balkan Riviera. From this point in the defile the road twists and turns like a scenic railway, and almost doubles in its tracks as it zig-zags down the precipitous sides of the mountains, the Adriatic ever blending into the gray sky-line in the distance. Finally, after making in its descent many snake-like coils, the train passes the source of the beautiful Ombla, with its swan-dotted lake, and you will have arrived at Gravosa, the port and railway terminus of Ragusa. In three hours, it seems, you have been hustled from a temperate into a tropical climate.