About two hours and a half from Mostar the pass opened, and our way lay across a broader part of the Narenta valley, overlooked by the mountains at a more respectful distance. Here, passing a cottage, we noticed the poles of the fence that surrounded the adjoining maize-field adorned with an array of equine skulls. I cannot doubt that these were set up for the same reason as induced the ancients to set up the skulls of cattle among their corn-fields—namely, as an amulet against blight.[286] The superstition survived in mediæval Italy, and Boccaccio tells an amusing story of a lady who, by turning the two asses’ skulls on her garden fence in a certain direction, telegraphed to her lover that her husband was out. At a solitary hut called Potoci, about two hours distant from Mostar, we took leave of our Kiradjì, who would not trust his beast any further, since any horse that showed itself in the neighbourhood of the Herzegovinian capital was sure to be requisitioned. Opposite the hovel at Potoci was a small stone building, which, on enquiry, we found to be a church. It laid no more claim to architectural elegance than a barn, and, with its loop-holed windows, and even these hermetically boarded up, and a door carefully barred, seemed at present more fitted for withstanding a siege than for the celebration of divine service. Perchance, in these troubled times, the congregation preferred to seek the high places of nature for their worship. Indeed, whilst passing through the more precipitous gorge of the Narenta, we had caught the solemn cadence of a Christian hymn, chanted, may be, by some shepherd on the mountain side; but whoever poured forth the ‘plaintive anthem’ was hidden by distance and intervening rocks from our view; nor were the tones the less impressive that their rudeness was thus softened, and that the singer was ‘but an invisible thing, a voice, a mystery.’