"If you ask me," I returned, "I don't believe anything has happened in this world of yours."
"Much has happened. But the Gypsy is always the same—and so likewise, it seems, is the Pomak. God, but it felt good to kick that pig!"
I regarded my friend with a recurrence of that amazement which he had stirred in me several times before. The quiet, self-contained musician, the artist, the efficient subaltern of the Foreign Legion, the cultured man-about-town had been replaced by an arrogant forest princeling, savagely contemptuous of all but his own kind.
The Pomaks gave us a wide birth, and early as we were afoot in the morning, they were off before us; but we heard from them again. We were threading a forest defile, where the pine-trees grew thick to the cliff edges, when we heard a shout overhead, I looked up at a stocky man in a brown uniform, with a round fur cap, emblazoned with a rampant lion. He held a rifle in his hands.
"A Bulgarian forester," muttered Nikka.
Wasso Mikali climbed up to the forester's perch, and held a brief conversation with him, at the conclusion of which he dug something bright out of his sash and dropped it in the forester's hand. Then he slid down into the ravine again, and we resumed our journey. The Pomaks had complained to the forester that we were smuggling rose-water essence, but he readily admitted that we were going the wrong way to be handling such a traffic. The lefa piece in his hand was to salve his conscience for not reporting the stabbing of the Pomak by Nikka.
As we progressed that day the mountains became wilder and more barren. Once we saw a lumber-camp on the lower slope of a ridge we traversed. Again, in the early afternoon, I saw what I took to be a castle perched atop of a huge crag miles away across a tumbled mass of peaks. But Nikka explained that it was one of those fortified monasteries which kept the fires of learning alight during the gloomy centuries when the Turk's rule ran as far as the Danube.
The path we followed was eccentric in the extreme. In fact, there was no path. We climbed a succession of gullies and ravines opening out of one another, and at dusk emerged upon a sheltered valley, buried deep between precipitous slopes draped in a virgin covering of conifers, chestnut and beech. A little rivulet foamed down the middle, dammed at the foot by a crude barrier of rocks. Horses and mules and a few sheep and goats grazed on the banks. Against the mountain-wall on either side were built a number of rough log-shelters, part houses, part caves. Children, naked for the most part, played about. Women were washing in the brook or tending several open fires. A dozen men were lying or sitting on the ground.
"They don't seem surprised to see us," I commented to Nikka, whose brooding eyes were drinking in the picture.
"They know we must be friends," he answered. "Else the lookouts down the path would have signaled them we were coming—and we should not have come," he added with a flitting smile.