“Slowly, slowly, little by little,” said the byraktor’s gendarme.
POSTSCRIPT
IN WHICH IS RELATED WHAT MAY BE FOUND BEHIND THE CURTAIN OF SILENCE WHICH HIDES ALBANIA, ALSO HOW THE MEN OF DIBRA CAME WITH THEIR RIFLES TO TIRANA, AND HOW AHMET, THE HAWK, CHIEF OF THE MATI AND PRESENT PRIME MINISTER OF ALBANIA, SAVED THE BALKAN EQUILIBRIUM.
For me, there has been a sequel to this tale of my first adventures in the Albanian mountains. And if I have transmitted, through the little clickings of my typewriter, something of the interest and charm those adventures had for me, perhaps there will be interest in the few additional things I have learned about the Albanians.
Just a year from the day on which I parted with the byraktor of Shoshi, I came with a friend, Annette Marquis, down the Adriatic on a Lloyd-Triestino boat to Durazzo. As always, a flock of little boats came out to meet the steamer. Dingy, unpainted, rowed by villainous-looking, swarthy men in rags, they seemed indeed the emissaries of a nation of brigands. The nice girl from Boston, who was traveling from Venice to Athens chaperoned by two aunts, looked at us with horrified eyes.
“You aren’t really going into Albania—all alone?” she gasped. “Why—won’t you be killed?” The shipload of passengers crowded the rail to watch us descend the swaying ladder, and gazed as the safe crowd watches the lion tamer, divided between admiration for daring and contempt for such senseless waste of courage. The weight of this mass opinion swayed even my friend, who said, nervously, as we went bobbing across waves of green water: “I wish I hadn’t listened to you in Budapest. I wish I’d brought the gun they told us to bring.”
“Nonsense!” I said, firmly—and would have believed no fortune teller who had told me I was lying—“we’ll be safer in Albania than in New York.” And with irrational, vicarious pride I pointed out to her the many masts of sunken ships around us—remains of Austrian and Italian cruisers impartially sunk by Albanians during the Great War.
As the boat came nearer to the yellow walls of Durazzo I gazed with complacency on the ruins of the palace of the Prince of Wied, the German king forced on Albania by the European Powers just before the Powers themselves leaped at one another’s throats. In 1914 the Albanians rose and drove him out with their rifles; his palace is a ruin now, and the palace grounds are a public park. But all Durazzo is built upon ruins, for it was an ancient city when the Romans built the towers and walls that still surround it, and there are still cafés on the sites of the cafés where Cicero sat with parchment and stylus, writing home to Rome for money to pay his way back—because, as he admitted with some chagrin, he had wasted all his substance in that merry and wicked city. Even for Cicero Durazzo had, in addition to its living charms, the flavor of antiquity, for the Roman city was built on the ruins of the older Albanian seaport.
A year earlier there had been no automobiles in Albania, but now, to our surprise, we found a valiant small Ford waiting at the pier, and engaged it at once to take us to Tirana, forty miles away. Our baggage was a problem until the chauffeur of a government truck, addressing us in French, volunteered on his own responsibility to take it to the capital for us. “Pay? Mais, non!” said he, hurt. “You are Americans, and the stranger in Albania is our guest.”
The road from Durazzo to Tirana crossed the low mountains that, from Trieste to Valona, make the endless monotonous eastern wall of the Adriatic. When you come over the crest of them you see lying before you the green low central valley and the farther blue peaks of the lands of the hidden tribes. And everything accustomed, everything commonplace, everything that reflects ourselves to us, is left behind. Gray water buffalo, flat-nosed, curly-horned, monstrous beasts that seem risen from depths of primeval slime, plod down the road drawing high, narrow wagons of wickerwork on huge wooden wheels. Shaggy, small donkeys carry picturesque folk down the winding road to Shijak, the village by the river where the bridge begins and ends in willow groves.