But what surprised me most, was to see the Solomon’s seal-like flower, which we had noticed in all the Bosnian forests, bristle up erect and stiff on the breezy mountain summit, after undergoing such a transformation that I should not have known it for the same plant had not I marked the gradual transition. It was now for the first time that I identified the mysterious floral weeping-willow, which had delighted us so often, with an old friend—the autumn gentian. As we descended the mountain we watched the transition with astonishment. The flowers, instead of circling the upright stem in a perfect coronal, crept to the upper side of it as it gradually declined. The leaves and bells grew larger—the stem as much as two feet long—till in the damper parts of the forest the whole was once more transformed into what looked like Solomon’s seal with tall azure cups stretching upwards from the back of its drooping stem—a perfect emblem of hope in sorrow. But a curious feature in the mountain formation began to make itself painfully felt. There was no water. All the streams ran below ground. Vale and mountain were alike pitted with those inverted-conical hollows—the _Dolinas_, which we remembered in the limestone wilderness of Carniola—that terrible Karst. These circular hollows are nothing but swallow-holes, formed by the water in its passage to the caverns of its underground course. And so it happened that we were forced to climb on, hour after hour, through the mid-day heat of a Southern sun, without discovering a drop to drink. Our intense thirst rendered us so desperate that we willingly forsook our proper course to plunge into deep gorges in the forlorn hope of finding water. But it was invariably to find that all our labour had been wasted, and that we must climb upwards once more and seek elsewhere. Three times we thought that we had succeeded, and as many times we were disappointed; twice what we hoped to be drinkable turned out to be a filthy pool, almost too bad for cattle; once, however, we thought to have procured some from a shepherd whose temporary hut had attracted our attention from a height above. The poor man went and fetched us a bucket of liquid, but it was green slime! At last, about four in the afternoon—after eight hours of hard struggle since the coffee which we had quaffed at the roadside shed—almost fainting with drought we found, in a moist part of a track that we had hit on, some mules’ footprints, in which some of the rainwater from the storm of the previous day was still standing. This we eagerly sucked up through a hollow hemlock stem; and, though the beaker was novel, were much refreshed.