'Entering Dubrovnik' -- Excerpt

Here is an excerpt from Eric Whelpton's Dalmatia, describing his thoughts and observations while journeying on a train from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik. 'Dubrovnik' and 'Ragusa' are the same city; the former is the modern, Slavic-derived name (meaning, 'the wooded place'), and the latter name the original Latin title.

With a few slight adjustments for technological change, I imagine that a caravan or a party of travellers approaching Ragusa by land in 1325 would see very much the same things . . .

'When the train moved off after a twenty minute wait, darkness had fallen quickly and rather unobtrusively, without a touch of the long lingering twilight of the North. The mountains stood out in black masses against the deep violet of the sky. The brightly twinkling stars seemed at once very near and very far away. Rivers, sunk far below us in the valleys, were patched with silver reflections of the nascent moon. The coaches bumped and jogged in a purposeful way like horses nearing the home stables. Already we could sense the sophistication and graciousness of the coast. Only an hour back we were passing through towns and villages where men could hunt the chamois, the lynx and the bear; where until recently races and clans had fought against each other with the greatest fierceness. By way of contrast, the peoples of the Adriatic shore are the heirs of all the civilizations that flourished in the Mediterranean -- the Greeks, the Minoans, the Illyrians, the Phoenicians and the Romans and many others besides. Each has left monuments and some half-hidden racial traits, which appear quite unexpectedly and account perhaps for the great beauty of the women in the villages near Dubrovnik. Hidden in bays and gulfs are vanished cities of the past whose mosaic floors and marble walls can be seen quite clearly when the sea is still. Embedded in the walls of many houses are Corinthian columns and the limbs of stone gods taken heedlessly from the neighboring fields. Often the ploughman as he drives his share turns up the coins of strange and distant lands, of ages remote in history.

'The track rose rather steeply for a few miles, then to our right, we caught glimpses of what looked like a huge lake or an inland sea with lights -- single or in village clusters -- twinkling along its shores. It was in fact the valley of the Ombla, an inlet sex or seven miles deep, that stretches a little to the north of Dubrovnik. It is not more than a couple of miles wide, but the dark magnified its breadth, just as it magnified the height of the hills massed on either side. The night gave enchantment and beauty to a landscape that is at all times beautiful, but is at its best in the soft radiance of the young moon.

'Suddenly the train pulled up with a jerk. We had arrived at Gruz (Gravosa), the terminus, some four miles from the old town of Dubrovnik. The air was cool, but touched with a southern mildness, and we drove swiftly along the coast road, past the quays with their lines of streamers and schooners moored to the wharves that face the landlocked bay of Lapad and its hilly peninsula, over a steep rise and down to the outskirts of the city where palm trees and oleanders grow luxuriantly in the gardens of large villas and hotels.

'The car swerved into a drive and stopped in front of the hotel. A welcoming porter ushered me up to my bedroom, and I drew the curtains and went out on to the balcony. The wind was rustling palm fronds and the leaves of the evergreens, the sound of lapping waves came to me from the beach of the old port only four or five hundred yards away, and on my left I could see the solid grey ramparts of the old town.'

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