"MOON COUNTRY"

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 196, 12 April 1932, Page 3

"MOON COUNTRY"

STRUGGLE FOR LIFE IN EAST EUROPE'S MOST BARREN LAND. VISIT TO HERZEGOVINA. The gentlemen who embarked in their steel globe in Mr. Wells' "The First Man in the Moon" could have stayed on earth and seen the same thing in Herzegovina. This country • is unlike the world that other races know; it is lunar, and the race that lives in it seems to belong to another planet, or, at any rate, to a civilisation very remote from our own. Chaldeans or Assyrians in the moon craters would just about fit them. Geologically, the thirty-five hun-' dred square miles of Herzegovina is spoken of as a Karst-like formation. I have forgotten what Karst is, if I ever knew. All I know is that it looks i like a chaos of gigantic gray cliff j and mountains made entirely of pumice. There is no colour, no water, and practically no vegetation, only a few stunted thorn-bushes that seem to grow independently of soil or mois- ' ture from the very rock itself. The' only wild things we saw were some green lizards and a beetle that, with his hind legs, rolled a ball of dirt up , a rock. He also had an idea of the value of soil.

Soil Precious as Gold. Earth is as precious as gold in Herzegovina. Every little pocket, collected through centuries in the rocks, is almost fortified by high walls of stone and cultivated with an almost pathetic eagerness. There is no place too small to he worth while. Every yard is precious. High up in the mountains we would see little squares of corn or millet, hardly bigger than a bedspread, which must have taken ! hours of climbing to reach. . The poor i huts are built of stone, with only one . object in vi'ew, — to obtain a shelter against the blinding white sun, or the rains — when they come ... i Strange people! Later on in the day we saw — oh miracle! — fig-trees . by the road. Fresh figs in this fry- : ingpan of gray rock! We asked a man if we could buy some. He leaped up his wall, filled our hands with the soft, purple fruit. ... I handed him money. He had been laughing, smiling up to that moment, like a great child, but then his face froze. He stepped off a pace and bowed gravely. v "Please!"

' Natural Courtier. A courtier could not have made a more dignified protest. He then jumped the four feet of wall and pressed more figs upon us. This, in a country where every twig, leaf, or grain of wheat is of value — where they shuck the corn in stone platforms so that they do not lose a grain! We drove for hours between sheer walls of rough limestone unreli'eved by one spot of colour, grotesque fields of boulders swept the sky and came out through a niche to look down upon Popovo Polje — one of the strangest sights in the world. . . We * climbed the last sky-line of hills. White forts on their peaks showed that this had been a hard-held ; frontier. To our left loomed the raw mountains of Albania and Montenegro. We shot through the gorge, and there, thousands of feet below, were the green shores of Dalmatia, groves of olives, pomegranates, oranges, and figs, and an old square-rigger coming into the port of Ragusa across the blue lazy sea. — Negley Farson, in "Sailing Across Europe."