and without signs to warn the travelers of their condition, we more than
once barely saved ourselves from plunging through the gaping openings to
disaster. The vast traffic of the fighting armies had ground the roads
into yellow dust which rose in clouds as dense as a London fog, while
the waves of heat from the sun-scorched plains beat against our faces
like the blast from an open furnace door. Despite its abominable
condition, the road was alive with traffic: droves of buffalo, black,
ungainly, broad-horned beasts, their elephant-like hides caked with
yellow mud; woolly waves of sheep and goats driven by wild mountain
herdsmen in high fur caps and gaudy sashes; caravans of camels, swinging
superciliously past on padded feet, laden with supplies for the interior
or salvaged war material for the coast; clumsy carts, painted in strange
designs and screaming colors, with great sharpened stakes which looked
as though they were intended for purposes of torture, but whose real
duty is to keep the top-heavy loads in place.

Though the slopes of the Rhodope and the Pindus are clothed with
splendid forests, it is for the most part a flat and treeless land,
dotted with clusters of filthy hovels made of sun-dried brick and with
patches of discouraged-looking vegetation. As Macedonia (its inhabitants
pronounce it as though the first syllable were _mack_) was once the
granary of the East, I had expected to see illimitable fields of waving
grain, but such fields as we did see were generally small and poor.
Guarding them against the hovering swarms of blackbirds were many
scarecrows, rigged out in the uniforms and topped by the helmets of the
men whose bones bleach amid the grain. In Switzerland they make a very
excellent red wine called _Schweizerblut_, because the grapes from which
it is made are grown on soil reddened by the blood of the Swiss who fell
on the battlefield of Morat. If blood makes fine wine, then the best
wine in all the world should come from these Macedonian plains, for they