"Is this a conspiracy? You have sworn to make me die of hunger! Behold the brigands! As if there were brigands! I do not believe in brigands! All the papers state that they are disbanded! Moreover, I am English, and if anyone touched a hair of my head——!"
Mary-Ann was less confident. She leaned on my arm and asked me if I thought that we were in danger of death.
"Of death? No. Of being robbed? Yes."
"Of what importance is that? They are welcome to take all that I carry, if only they will give me my breakfast."
I learned later that the poor woman was subject to a rare malady which the vulgar call canine appetite, and our learned men know as boulime. When hunger assailed her, she would have given her fortune for a plate of lentils.
Dimitri and Mary-Ann each seized a hand and dragged her to the path we had just ascended. The little monk followed her, gesticulating. I was strongly tempted to push forward; but a quick and imperative tone stopped us suddenly.
"Halt! I say!"
I raised my eyes. Two mastic bushes and arbutus-trees were on the right and left of the path. From each bush the muzzles of three or four guns protruded. A voice cried in Greek: "Seat yourselves on the ground!" This operation was exceedingly easy for me, as my knees weakened under me. But I consoled myself with the thought that Ajax, Agamemnon, and the hot-headed Achilles, if they found themselves in a like position, would not have refused the seat offered them.
The guns were lowered toward us. I expected to see them pushed out so far that their muzzles would touch each other over our heads. It was not that I was afraid; but I had never before realized the extraordinary length of Greek guns. The whole arsenal marched out into the path, showing the owner of each.
The only difference which exists between devils and brigands, is that devils are less black than one expects, and brigands more squalid than one supposes. The eight scoundrels who surrounded us were so foul, that I would have preferred to give them my money with pinchers. One could imagine that their bonnets might once have been red; but lye itself could never have found the original shade of their coats. All the rocks of the kingdom had contributed to the color of their percale skirts, and their vests bore a specimen of the different soils upon which they had reposed. Their hands, their faces, and even their mustaches were of a reddish gray like the dirt which they had on their clothes. Every animal colors itself like the house or land it inhabits: the foxes of Greenland are like the snow; lions, the color of the desert; partridges, like the ground; the Greek brigands, the color of the paths.