The horizon broadened around them, rising up on either side. Below, the plains stretched out far as the eye could reach. The road was like a thread lying along the ground. By this road, at their feet, they would come back from the excursion. Ethel looked with interest at this pathway of so many invasions. The rude mountaineers of Albania had followed it to the sea, and more than once invaders had filled it with the flashing of their swords. Who could know whether Morgania was not to pass again through such a period of disaster? There was now no living wall to stay the waves.
The wagon went up and up in endless turnings. Suddenly, as they crossed a plateau where ragged grass was growing, a chant arose, monotonous and solemn, and repeated by the echoes. On every side they seemed to hear lamentations and groans issuing forth from the earth or falling from the clouds.
“Where are we?” asked Ethel, stirred from her reverie. “I see no one.”
“It is the shepherds over there,” said Helia.
Ethel perceived, in the midst of a lean flock, beside a fire whose smoke mounted straight upward, a group of shepherds singing. It was one of the prismés which they sing from one mountain to the other. Ethel was greatly impressed by these spontaneous chants of the desert. In them, hoarse cries alternated with sharp, high cadences and a quickening measure. An impression of grandeur was left behind by this singing in the solitude. Ethel thought with pity of the old untuned piano in the castle, and of the sound of the banjo, thin as the humming of flies among the massive pillars of the throne-room. The castle itself,—what was it compared with these huge natural towers overlooking the road, with their giant steps made of rocks that had slid down?—or to these ravines, like somber courtyards,—to these measureless caverns opening like vaults, in the depths of which the schist rock shone like stained-glass windows? And still they mounted up, turning around these strongholds of a country made for liberty. They were approaching the grotto of the sorceress.
A joyful burst of laughter drew Ethel from her reverie. Behind her, seated astride a package, Suzanne was in an ecstasy of delight.
“The ballet!—oh, Miss Rowrer, the ballet is beginning—look at the danseuses!”
Suzanne was choking, stuffing her handkerchief into her mouth not to let herself be heard.
The two soldiers, won by the music’s enthusiasm, were leaping in time with sharp cries, now squatting to earth and now brandishing their rifles, swaying right and left, and twirling their legs while their fustanella skirts stood out straight. Like monkeys drunk with cocoa-milk, they gave inarticulate cries—“Yoo! yoo!”
“Encore!” cried Suzanne.