He and the Shala man ate cold meat and corn bread and goat’s-milk cheese, beside a fire on the earth floor of one of the houses, and it was there that a violent-looking man, with a scarred face, clothed in the merest fragments of rags, tried to terrify me into giving him an order on the Red Cross in Scutari for clothes. He was a guest in the house; he had been driven from his own village by the Serbs; his wife and all his children had been killed around him; and I think he was a little mad.
“Give me clothes!” said he, thrusting his horrible face almost against mine, one hand on the wooden-handled knife in his grimy sash. “You Americans have given clothes to others! Give them to me!”
“Tell him that all the American clothes are gone, all of them have been given away, and there are no more. And tell him that in any case I am not of the Red Cross and cannot give him an order. I am very, very sorry.”
“Write! Write me clothes on your pieces of paper!” the man snarled, and if Rexh had not sat so calmly beside me I would have thought he meant to strike me with the knife he drew. The incident was like the horror in a nightmare.
“Tell him I can write on paper,” I said, shrugging, “but the paper will not get him clothes.” So he sat down, muttering. I was glad when Rexh said we would go on, for I did not, like the Shala man, delight in receiving courtesy at the hands of these people who so gladly would have killed him.
We went on over the trails, driven by the unflagging Rexh. His quiet persistency really maddened the Shala man; it was like that of a fly. He drove the Shala man onward without a pause, up and down cliffs, over bridges of logs just missed by roaring cascades, through streams where currents made him stagger. Surely half the time Rexh demanded that the Shala man carry me; the rest of the time the two were pulling me upward, or letting me downward, by both hands, as though I were a bundle. And just as the light was failing we stood on the brink of the most magnificent cañon of which I have ever dreamed.
There were depths below depths of it, falling away from narrow green terrace to terrace, and far down, at the edge of a drop that looked as though it were a crack sheer to the center of the world, there was a stone house. From the other side of the chasm a tilted slab of rock rose up into the clouds—a stupendous great sweep like a wing of the Victory of Samothrace, and it was striped in jagged lines of green and gray and rose and white, hundreds of stripes, each as wide as the stone house down in the blue distance.
We knew it was a large house; we could hardly have seen it if it had been a small one; it looked as large as a match box.
“The byraktor of Shoshi lives there, Mrs. Lane, and I think we had better stay with him to-night,” said Rexh. “There is a priest, but he is four miles farther down the valley, and we would have to come back in the morning, for this is where the trail begins to cross the mountains to Scutari. Also, if there is a mule in Shoshi, the byraktor will know him.”
So we began dropping down to the house, the Shala man much pleased by the adventure of calling upon his enemies’ war chief. We went easily, for the way was a gigantic staircase of cliff and terraced green field. Each field had its little house of stone; the trails down the cliff were broadened and held up by walls of stone. True, the centers of the trails were running ankle deep in water and springs gushed from every wall, but the effect was of ease and order and fresh green things, and before we reached the house of the byraktor my head was clearer and my breath no longer stabbing pains.