We now wanted to make our way into the Narenta valley over the north-west shoulder of Mt. Bielastica, but were turned out of our course by the deep gorge of the Priesnica, and thought it best to ascend the south-eastern promontory of a largish range known by the name of Mt. Igman—though the title covers a multitude of peaks. The scenery now became more beautiful than ever, though profoundly lonely, save here and there for a beautiful black squirrel leaping from branch to branch, or a huge brown vulture floating through the azure overhead. The steeps up which we now made our way were covered with forest more varied in its composition than those of Troghìr and Vučia. Beech, as there, was the predominant tree; but oaks and thorns, dark firs and pines, glaucous ashes and fountainous birches—often so happily blended and grouped as to transcend the planter’s art—disputed the sole dominion of the queen of the forest. The trees were perhaps hardly so large, as a rule, as those we had seen in the mountains of more northern Bosnia, but we noticed one pine no less than eighteen feet in circumference at a yard from the ground. Another speciality of this forest-mountain was that the trees were not so thickly crowded, and grew more freely. The sovereign beech has no need to gird herself so closely, but can stretch out her queenly arms, and spread far and wide her leafy flounces without fear of her robes being pressed and crumpled by the crowd. Glades are here more frequent, and ever and anon a charming lawny break would open a vista through the trees, and we caught a glimpse of the distant ridge of Bielastica. [Illustration: Mount Bielastica from slopes of Mt. Igman.] We reached two summits of the mountain we were on, the first by our aneroid 4,350 feet above sea-level, the second 4,560. About these summits, which were less wooded than the lower regions, we found a variety of flowers, recalling the flora of our chalk downs—the yellow snapdragon, the scabious, white as well as mauve, and the heartsease, though larger and of a richer purple, much as we remembered them on our own Chilterns; and here, as there, the chalk-hill blue seemed the commonest butterfly. But besides these we noticed rosy sweet-williams and autumn crocus, with its double trinity of lilac petals—iris-like—a design for a gothic window. On one summit, gained earlier in the day, we found a curious bulbous plant with a tall stalk and drooping purple bells, each curving down on a separate stem like a pigmy snake’s head;[267] and some mountain lawns shone blue as the sky above, with a wondrous thistle whose leaves as well as flowers were tinged on their upper surface with a bright azure.