After this wholesale denudation it was not easy to grow the trees again. Venetian administration was extremely inefficient, and we know not only from Slav complaints but from the furious accusation of the Republic against its own people that vast quantities of timber were purloined by minor officials and put on the market, and that again and again supplies were delivered at the dockyard so far beyond all naval needs that they had to be let rot where they lay. They cut down the Dalmatian forests to get timbers for their fleet and piles for their palaces and they wasted far more than they used. Then the Venetian Republic established its claim, and thereafter its administrators showed the carelessness that egotistic people show in dealing with other people’s property. Then for three hundred years, from about the time of the Norman Conquest to 1420, the Hungarians struggled with the Venetians for the mastery of this coast, and the nations got no further with their husbandry. These the earliest inhabitants of Dalmatia, the Illyrians and Ottomans, axed with an innocent carelessness and the first Slav settlers were reckless too, for they came from the inexhaustible primeval forest of the Balkan peninsula.

That is the meaning of the naked Dalmatian hills. The peasants collect what soil they can from the base of the hills and carry it up again and pack it in terraces but there is not enough soil, and the terraces are often swept away by the torrents. The rainfall sweeps down their slopes in torrents and carries away the soil instead of seeping into it and fertilizing it. And indeed these bald hills mean a great deal of desperation. Tracks lead over this naked rock, but it is hard to believe that they lead anywhere it seems probable that they are traced by desperate men fleeing from barrenness, and doomed to die in barrenness.

The dreariness is so extreme that it astounds like luxuriance, it gluts the mind with excess of deprivation. No weather can make the Northern Dalmatian coast look anything but drear.

The black lamb and the grey falcon