pines formed a canopy of green, and the music was furnished by the birds
and the murmuring sea. Here we seemed a world away from the waiting
armies and the great gray battleships, from the quarrels of Latin and
Slav. It was the first real peace that I had known after five years of
war, and I should have liked to remain there longer. But Montenegro,
Albania, Macedonia, all the unhappy, war-torn lands of the Near East lay
before me, and I turned reluctantly away. But my thoughts keep harking
back to the little town beside the turquoise bay, to the restfulness of
its old, old buildings, to the perfume of its flowers, and the
whispering voice of its turquoise sea. So some day, when the world is
really at peace and there are no more wars to write about, I think that
I shall go back to where

"Far, far from here,
The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay
Among the green Illyrian hills."




CHAPTER III

THE CEMETERY OF FOUR EMPIRES


We stood on the forward deck of the _Sirio_ as she slipped southward,
through the placid waters of the Adriatic, at twenty knots an hour. Less
than a league away the Balkan mountains, savage, mysterious, forbidding,
rose in a rocky rampart against the eastern sky.