“Tell the byraktor we must go!” I said at six o’clock, impatient in the doorway. For a long time all the world had been a clear gray, shadowed only by the falling rain. “I pay a hundred kronen for his mule only because it gets me to Scutari to-night.”
Rexh announced this firmly to the byraktor; the byraktor, listening attentively, assented with a shake of his head.
At seven o’clock I walked madly up and down the small stone porch. The byraktor’s gendarme had arrived; he stood washing his face in a stone basin filled with rain water; at every splash in it he raised his head and solemnly crossed himself and made the sign of the cross toward the dawn. Inside the house, the byraktor was deep in conversation with his grandmother.
“They are talking politics, Mrs. Lane,” Rexh reported. “I do not yet quite understand, but I think that you will not get to Scutari to-day.”
“Rexh,” I said, “listen to me. I shall get to Scutari to-day. In ten minutes by my watch I shall start to walk to Scutari, without the mule. I have waited long enough. Tell that to the byraktor.”
The byraktor came to the door and looked at me kindly. He had put on his turban; he was a figure of rather awe-inspiring dignity. “Slowly slowly, little by little,” said he, indulgently, and went back into the house.
When eight minutes had passed his grandmother came out—I was now walking restlessly up and down the soaked, corn-stalk-strewn yard—and led out of the lower part of the house the mule. The mule was the very smallest donkey I have ever seen, the most bedraggled, the most violently antagonistic to all the world. The woman tied him to the wicker fence and brought out a measure of corn. “Slowly, slowly,” said she to me, triumphantly. “One cannot start until the mule has eaten.” Then she went back to her talk with her grandson, the byraktor.
A moment later I interrupted them by the most courteous of farewells. I blessed them and their house and their past and their future, their families, their tribe, their hospitality, and their mule, and then I left. The Shala man followed me, protesting; Rexh trudged beside me, saying nothing, but very disapproving.
“You cannot do such a thing to the byraktor of Shoshi!” said the Shala man.
“I have done it to the byraktor of Shoshi,” said I, violently, gasping on the trail. I kept my knees stiff with sheer rage, but on the first terrace above the byraktor’s house not even that could keep me going, and I sat down in a heap on the trail to rest.