APRIL 73 



In laying our plans, we reckoned upon the Albanian 

 time-table being similar to that of Test and Itchen, 

 and prepared for an early start on the morrow. Ah, 

 but we left out of account that influence which has so 

 often and so powerfully swayed the course of European 

 politics during the last two hundred years the vis 

 inertice of Ottoman officialdom. Our passports were 

 presented to the pasha at 7 A.M. ; it was high noon 

 before they were returned to us ; and with them came 

 a Turkish escort, without which we were not to be 

 allowed to land. It was about one o'clock, therefore, 

 before we disembarked on a curving strand of dazzling 

 white limestone shingle at the head of the bay, where a 

 beautiful stream, about the volume of the Itchen at 

 Abbot's Worthy, and as clear, swept out of a dense 

 copse of alder and willow, myrtle and mastick, to pour 

 its waters into the tideless sea. It was a perfect land- 

 scape in the sweet o' the Adriatic year. Red and 

 purple anemones, blue gromwell and periwinkle and 

 golden buttercups, spangled the intense verdure of the 

 glades ; yellow iris and tall creamy spires of asphodel 

 lined the river-banks ; high on the mountain side to 

 the left hung the Mohammedan village of Vannina, 

 with gleaming minarets and sombre cypress; in the 

 background towered the snowy cone of Mount Elias to 

 the height of near five thousand feet. Nightingales 

 gurgled amatively in the brakes; bullfrogs croaked 

 truculently among the reeds ; grey mullet skimmed in 

 shoals through the backwaters ; brimstones and orange- 

 tips, Camberwell beauties and swallow-tail butterflies 

 floated among the flowers ; locusts lurched heavily out 



