Owing to the farce of Austro-Russian reform, and other reasons, Gusinje was apparently just then in a supersensitive frame of mind. I gave up Gusinje reluctantly, and planned to see Berani on a market day. The valiant Boshko was reluctant. "We must go without a revolver," he said, "and I do not know the road." "We go freely to market," said I. "O Boshko, thou art afraid." "I am not afraid," said Boshko indignantly, "but I dare not." So I consented to his engaging a second man, and relieved his mind. When the moment for departure came, he divested himself mournfully of his beloved six-shooter, hung it on a nail next my spare skirt, and looked ridiculously nude and ashamed. We rode with a long string of pack-beasts on a good track down the valley of the Lim. Before we had been going an hour, grey clouds swept down upon us and rain began; but everyone vowed it would be fine, and I foolishly pushed on. A guard of dirty Nizams cowered at the entrance of a loopholed shanty, and a Turkish "kula" (blockhouse) was perched on the hill on either side of the valley. The telegraph wire, which had hitherto run trim and straight between upright and regular poles, now drooped in limp festoons from one crooked "clothes-prop" to another. We were in Turkey. No place looks really jolly in the rain, but in many lands rain means new life, hope, and plenty. In Turkey it is grey desolation; the untilled land, the wretched Christian peasantry, the squalid huts, sodden and soaked, seem all rotting together in a land whereon the sun will never shine again. We splashed on. No one took any notice of us, for we were going to market. The Turkish blockhouses, "half an hour apart" along the frontier, were left behind us. We slopped past a yellow guard-house and more gaunt Nizams and rode into Berani, a small town of, for the most part, crooked houses of timber and mud, a wide main street, a large market-place, two wooden mosques, and a fortress.