"Did it ever occur to you," remarked the Italian officer who stood
beside me, a noted historian in his own land, "that four great empires
have died as a result of their lust for domination over the wretched
lands which lie beyond those mountains? Austria coveted Serbia--and the
empire of the Hapsburgs is in fragments now. Russia, seeing her
influence in the peninsula imperiled, hastened to the support of her
fellow Slavs--but Russia has gone down in red ruin, and the Romanoffs
are dead. Germany, seeking a gateway to the warm water, and a highway
to the East, seized on the excuse thus offered to launch her waiting
armies--and the empire reared by the Hohenzollerns is bankrupt and
broken. Turkey fought to retain her hold on such European territory as
still remained under the crescent banner. To-day a postmortem is about
to be held on the Turkish Empire and the House of Osman. Think of it!
Four great empires, four ancient dynasties, lie buried over there in the
Balkans. It is something more than a range of mountains at which we are
looking; it is the wall of a cemetery."

Rada di Antivari is a U-shaped bay, the color of a turquoise, from whose
shores the Montenegrin mountains rise in tiers, like the seats of an
arena. We put in there unexpectedly because a _bora_, sweeping suddenly
down from the northwest, had lashed the Adriatic into an ugly mood and
our destroyer, whose decks were almost as near the water as those of a
submarine running awash, was not a craft that one would choose for
comfort in such weather. Nor was our feeling of security increased by
the knowledge that we were skirting the edges of one of the largest
mine-fields in the Adriatic. But the _Sirio_ had scarcely poked her
sharp nose around the end of the breakwater which provides the excuse
for dignifying the exposed roadstead of Antivari (with the accent on the
second syllable, so that it rhymes with "discovery") by the name of
harbor before I saw what we had stumbled upon some form of trouble.