FOOTNOTES:
[1] Rexh—pronounced Redge.
CHAPTER II
TRAILS OF THE MOUNTAINEERS—THE MAN OF IPEK KILLS HIS DONKEY—THE HOUSE OF THE BISHOP OF PULTIT—MARRIAGE BY THE LAW OF LEC—THE BLOOD FEUD BETWEEN SHALA AND SHOSHI.
Darkness was creeping up the slopes like a rising flood from the valleys, and it had engulfed the trails long before we made the descent into the village of Gjoanni, which I may as well say at once is pronounced Zhwanee. Not that we were thinking about such far-away things as written words. Everything that makes our ordinary lives was already as far from us as another planet. It was as though we had dropped through a hole in time and fallen into the days when men were wild creatures in the forests.
One reads in books of dizzying trails twelve inches wide, on which travelers cling precariously between the sky and sudden death. Long before dense darkness had risen to meet the shadow of the mountain wall between us and the rest of the world we would have welcomed a twelve-inch trail as though it were the Champs-Elysées. We were in a land where a twelve-inch trail is to the people what the Twentieth Century Limited is to America.
My memories become incoherent here. I recall a thousand-foot slide of decomposed shale, the color of an American Beauty rose. The flakes of it were as large as a thumb-nail, and the mass of them tilted at surely thirty-five degrees, sloping to a sheer cliff that dropped I cannot say how far. The stone houses looked like children’s blocks at the bottom of it. Across this we made our way on foot, and at every step a considerable quantity of the shale sped away beneath the pressure and plumped over the edge. The fourth time I slipped I remained on my hands and knees; it seemed simpler. And for something like a century I had the sensation a squirrel must have in a revolving cage—steadily clawing upward and making no progress in that direction. But sidewise, crablike, I did eventually come out on the other side and into the waterfall.
The waterfall was called a river. It was about two thousand feet long, and stood on end. About every three feet it struck a bowlder as large as an office desk, and leaped into the air until it hit the next one. The shale was wet with spray for several yards. The water between three bowlders, where we crossed, was a little more than knee deep, and there was nothing whatever leisurely about its progress. I try to be calm about it; I tried to be calm then.
The horses went across first, four men to each horse. One gripped a rope tied about its neck, one firmly held the tail, two stood downstream and leaned their weight against the saddle. Then the men carried across the packs and their trousers, which they had taken off so that they should not get wet. Then they quite simply picked us up, slung us across their shoulders, and took us over.
It is a strange sensation, being a bag of meal hanging over a muscular back, clutched firmly around the knees, green water roaring at toes and chin, white spray choking and blinding you, and a thousand feet of hungry bowlders waiting below for your bones. In the middle my man stopped, braced himself, and shifted me to his other shoulder. Then he shouted, and another man came out above us and held his free hand to steady him through the worst of the current.