fretted with vine-leaves and interlaced devices, which still betrayed their Byzantine ancestry. On the left we passed another landmark of the East—a capacious stone cistern; and at last a turn in the road revealed to us the ex-capital of Bosnia—mosques, minarets, and chalet-like houses harmonizing with the Alpine precipices above; and, in the midst of the town, a craggy acropolis crowned with another castle of old Bosnian kings. We had scarcely entered the town when an observant Zaptieh pounced upon us to know our business; and on our demanding to see the Mutasarìf,[203] or Governor, conducted us to the Konak. The Mutasarìf was at the time absent from the town at his country house—at least so we were informed, though considering the critical state of the country the statement seemed almost incredible. We were therefore obliged to show our credentials to his lieutenant; but this functionary, for some reason, which the small smattering of Italian of which he was master failed to convey to us, at once ‘smelt a rat,’ and, as the best court of inquiry at hand, hurried us off to the telegraph office, where one of the officials spoke French, and then and there put us through a severe cross-questioning as to our route and our objects in travelling. ‘How was it possible,’ he asked, ‘for you to have arrived at Travnik without escort? You say that you come from Tešanj over the mountains, but you don’t expect us to believe that you came on foot! Besides, where is the _pièce de conviction_? Where is your Zaptieh? You say that you are now on the way to Serajevo, but’—and this was regarded as the most damning fact of all—‘we see this order in the Vali’s handwriting was given _at_ Serajevo, and you must therefore be coming from it; at any rate you must have been there, which you deny.’ It was a little embarrassing to know how to convince people who put both postal transmission and pedestrianism beyond the range of human possibilities! However, a circumstantial account of our itinerary, coupled with the awkward fact that they could not deny that our bujuruldu was in the actual autograph of the Governor-General, and that, however we came by it, we had it in our possession, brought our officials to reason, or at any rate to a wholesome perception that we were masters of the situation. So the Mutasarìf’s _locum tenens_ being reduced to express himself satisfied with our explanation, our French interrogator changed his tone to one of apology. He explained that our arrival had been so mysterious that we seemed to have dropped from the clouds, and our being on foot and unattended convinced the authorities that we must be Austrian emissaries sent to excite the Bosnian rayahs to revolt! ‘You see, monsieur,’ he wound up, ‘you come in very delicate times’—and certainly, to judge by the un-Turkish bustle of the telegraph office, the times were ‘delicate’ indeed!