Close on my right and just beyond the old Palace was the monastery, which, owing to the lateness of the hour the evening before, I had been unable to examine. Like the old Palace it is a sort of semi-fortified building, constructed more for safety than for comfort. On the right hand, as the observer looks at it in front, is the church, and next to it a tall, square, and very modern tower erected to the memory of the Vladika Peter, who is buried on the top of a somewhat difficult peak to the south-west of Cettigne and about six miles distant. The body of the monastery comes next, conspicuous by two rows of arched openings placed one over the other, and to the left of them again are the apartments of the Metropolitan. The whole is surrounded by a high wall, enclosing a primitive garden in which are located a large number of beehives, (upwards of a hundred). This wall is pierced by one large gateway, roofed over and secured by a massive door, in front of which is the circular-paved thrashing floor, so characteristic of the East. Every thing about the monastery is of the simplest and rudest construction, and the church is utterly unadorned, not from choice, I am assured, but from necessity.
In the monastery itself are many shady corners that would well repay a few hours spent in transferring them to one's portfolio, and just at the entrance inside the building, is a most extraordinary chasm in the rock, through which a piercing cold wind is constantly blowing, coldest when the weather is hottest; and so intense is the cold in that opening that it is used in Summer as an ice-house for the cooling of wine and the preserving of food. This phenomenon has never been satisfactorily explained, because it is not only that the cavity is cold, but a strong sharp cutting wind rushes out of it. I shall not attempt to account for it, but will leave it as a problem for sharper wits than mine to solve.
As the day waxed older the number of arrivals increased on the plain of Cettigne, till by eight o'clock in the morning it was dotted all over with picketed horses and temporary encampments of all sorts. Having had my simple breakfast of coffee, milk, and toast without butter—which is quite unknown there though cream is plentiful—but accompanied by a good plate of Albanian figs, I went out with Pero Pejovich, who came to fetch me to visit the fair. For this festival of St. Peter offers a double stimulus to the inhabitants of the surrounding country for a visit to Cettigne—a religious ceremony and a considerable fair. And it may be right for me to observe that this St. Peter, Patron of Montenegro, in whose honour this great gathering annually takes place, is a saint _sui generis_—indeed I was on the point of saying, when I detected and checked myself, that he was a saint _extra palum ecclesiæ_; for he is neither St. Peter the Apostle, nor St. Peter the Martyr, nor St. Peter the Hermit, nor even St. Peter Igneus, who in a fit of zeal for the maintenance of the laws relating to the temporalities of the church, walked through the flames at Settimo in the eleventh century, to establish a case of simony against another Peter, one Peter of Pavia, then Bishop of Florence; nor any other canonical St. Peter I ever heard of, but simply St. Peter of Montenegro, the old Vladika Peter I., Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, not yet canonized by any ecclesiastical authority or other licensing body, as I was assured, but simply a saint in virtue of the will of the people, the Plebiscite of Montenegro, who insisted _autoritate nostra_ on having him for their patron saint. He probably deserved to be canonized just as well, and perhaps better than many another saint, and if history tells truth, certainly better than his namesake, the so-called Peter the Martyr, for he wisely, mildly, and virtuously ruled in Montenegro for fifty-three years, viz., from 1777 to 1830, and the mountaineers are fully justified in reverencing his memory.