Here, too, the chief product of the earth is not maize, but tobacco and grapes, and the peculiar character of these crops enables the government to extort a double impost on each. For the tobacco as it stands on the ground, and for the grapes when carried off as must, the tithe-farmers exacts his eighth in his usual arbitrary fashion.[289] But now follows a supplementary extortion. On what remains to the rayah, after paying these eighths, he has to pay _giumruk_, or excise. This, like the former tax, is let out to ‘publicans’ as villanous as the other tithe-farmers, whom they rival in their extortions. They swoop down on an unfortunate village with their gang of retainers and Zaptiehs, and live at free quarters on the villagers. Their business is to find out the quantity of tobacco still growing on the stalk, and the remnant of the wine drawn from the must which has escaped the collector of ‘the eighth;’ and their exactions and insolence are among the grievances on which the insurgents in their appeal to the foreign Consuls lay most stress.[290] These men hold an inquisition on every hearth, and the right which they exercise of intruding themselves into the inmost privacy of the rayah gives them inconceivable opportunities for outrage. Another of the special evils of the Herzegovina is also in a great measure due to the physical aspect of the country. This is eminently a peak-land. The mountains here are higher than in Bosnia, and the strongholds of the old feudal nobility consequently more impregnable. In Bosnia the native Agas and Begs have been to a certain extent brought under the central government. But in the Herzegovina their authority retains much more of its old vitality. Here the wretched rayah has not only to satisfy the Kaïmakàms and Mutasarìfs, who represent the needs of the Osmanlì ruler, but is at the mercy of a haughty aristocratic caste, who eye their Christian serfs with the contempt of a feudal lord for a _villain_, and the abhorrence of a fanatical Moslem for a Giaour.