At last we made our escape from the Kaïmakàm, and, escorted by our new Zaptieh, began ascending the Crni Vrch, or Black-Mountain, named, like the Crnagora (Montenegro), not from any blackness of the rock, but from being covered with dark forests, or simply from its savage wildness, ‘black’ being with the Sclaves synonymous with everything harsh and fierce. About an hour and a quarter’s ascent brought us to one of its summits, when we passed a Mahometan woman, who, though veiled, went through the absurd formality—common enough among the Bosniac Mahometans—of squatting against the roadside with her back turned towards us till we had put a sufficiency of road between her and ourselves. Further on we came to a shed such as we had seen in the vale of Ussora, where we regaled ourselves with coffee, and a chubby kind of cucumber, which however our Zaptieh was the only one to fancy. Beyond here the scenery became wilder and indescribably beautiful. On one side rolled out beneath us the Possávina and the winding vale of Bosna, and far beyond the dim ranges of Slavonia; on the other side rose the peaks and shoulders of Vlašić and Troghìr and a tossing sea of low mountains, the nearer billows green with the fine forest growth, into which we now plunged—and to quit the scorching sun of noon for woodlands still fresh with the dewy coolness of night is indeed to take an aërial bath! The beeches amongst which we now steered our course, by a meandering forest-path, were no longer gnarled and stumpy, but tall and queenly, as those of an English park. Amongst them, here and there, towered isolated oaks, champions as it seemed of a lost fight, tough rugged old barbarians, battling every inch with those civilised victorious beeches—hemmed round but unyielding—heroic, taking every attitude of god-like struggle—here a manly, muscular Laocöon, wrestling with serpentine brambles and underwood, that insinuates itself among the knotted limbs—a mighty Hercules, uplifted arm and club as to fell the hundred-headed Hydra—or there sovereign Jove, the Thunderer himself, hurling—so the jagged branches interpreted themselves—forked lightning at the beechlings round! But in vain. The oaks must be content to reign in plain and valley. On these uplands the beeches camp triumphantly, till higher still the pines repulse them from the mountain citadel, and in the great struggle for existence each tree finds its own level.