bare bit of rock strewn with treacherous loose stones, and now a sharp
curve with an ugly slant towards the precipice.

About half an hour after the storm first broke upon us it had become
night, indeed it was so dark that we could hardly see a pace in advance.
The repeated flashes of lightning helped us to make out our position
from time to time, and we trusted to the horses mainly to get us along
in the safe middle course. At moments when the heavens were lit up, I
could see the swaying branches of the fir-trees high above us battling
with the wind, for we were still in the forest. The sound of many waters
around on every side forcibly impressed us with the notion that we must
be washed away--a result not by any means improbable, for the road we
traversed was little better than a watercourse.

I have experienced storms in Norway, and in the Swiss and Austrian Alps,
but I never remember anything to equal this outburst of the elements.

To stop still or to go forward was almost equally difficult, but we
struggled on somehow at the rate, I should think, of a mile and a half
in the hour. The horses were thoroughly demoralised, as one says of
defeated troops, and stumbled recklessly at every obstacle. The driver
was a stupid fellow, without an ounce of pluck in his composition, and
declared more than once that he would not go on, preferring to stop
under such shelter as the trees afforded. We were of another mind, and
insisted on his pushing on. One of us walked at the horses' heads, and
thus we splashed and blundered on for three mortal hours, wishing all
the time that we had slept at Milanovacz. The route became so much worse
that I declared we must have missed the track. We were apparently in a
deep gully, traversed by a mountain torrent hardly a foot below the
level of our road; but the Servian said he knew we were "all right," and