“He says he thought it would be fun. Because they can’t kill him while you’re here, and he likes to go into their houses and drink coffee,” said Rexh.
I sat for some moments on the streaming bowlder, wiping my streaming face now and then with my hand, and staring at that man with the peculiar sense of humor. So he thought it funny, did he, to bring me through a tribe whose rifles were oiled to kill him, and to sit at their firesides, perfectly safe in my protection? Fastened in my own little affairs like a turtle in his shell, I sat there, black with rage, thinking that I would like to murder him, myself. Then suddenly I put out my head and saw the wide world, and the spectacle of us three, dripping there on that immense and drenched landscape in the middle of Albania—the innocent Shala man who had been delightedly thumbing his nose at Shoshi’s warriors, the small, serious Rexh with a map of tiny red rivers over his face, and me, who looked like a Montenegrin man, all of us so intently solemn——
But the vision was disastrous, for laughter set the knives slashing through my lungs again, and I did not know how much of the rain on my face was tears before I was able to speak.
“Tell him I hope he enjoyed the joke, for it’s over,” I said. “You’re Mohammedan, Rexh, and safe; just call to the house and tell them who I am, and ask if they have a mule. And when they ask us in, tell them glory to their house, but I cannot stop; I have made a vow to get to Scutari.”
The Shala man was so downcast at passing one household he could not crow over, that my harshness would have relented under any other circumstances. But I was convinced that I was in for pneumonia, and every impulse in me concentrated in one obsession—to get to Scutari.
“After this, Rexh, you are managing this party,” I said.
“Yes, Mrs. Lane,” said he, toiling up the trail like a small pajama-clad gnome. And with all the sagacity and resource with which he manages his household of younger refugee children in Scutari, he took charge. The clearest picture that remains to me of that day is that of Rexh, his head tipped back and the staff in his left hand firmly planted, while with his right forefinger he sternly laid down the law to a thoroughly cowed Shala man.
THE SHALA GUIDE
Who took the author through Shoshi for a joke
It was Rexh who decreed that he carry the pack, while the Shala man carried me up the worst of the slopes; it was he who sent a man from one of the houses to climb the nearest mountain and call down the valley that we were searching for a mule; it was he who decided when we should stop to eat.