“Long may you live!” she murmured, anxiously urging them forward with her staff, while we climbed the bowlders above the trail to let them pass. Cheremi bent to take her hand and lay his cheek against hers, and for an instant there was a beautiful smile on her lovely troubled face. When she was gone we continued to sit, gazing into the valley. Far below us, below jagged cliffs as vague as clouds, below tortured trees from which every bough had been hacked to feed hungry flocks, below slopes of bowlders which ran down into darkness, lights were already gleaming. A thousand feet above them on the other side of the valley the white speck of the priest’s house promised us rest and warmth.
“But we must wait here,” said Perolli, surprised by our impatience. “The woman is the wife of the man of Ipek, and she is a Shala woman. He has killed his donkey; it may be that he is mad and will kill her, too.”
Cheremi’s childlike smile was gone. His rifle lay across his knees, his profile was set and stern, cruel. He was a man of Shala, and, though he had never before seen this woman, he would avenge her if there were need for vengeance, for she had been born in his tribe. So we waited for the crash of a second shot. But only the rushing sound of the waterfalls came up to us from the darkening valleys.
With staffs and aching feet we found the trail when we went onward. Unseen bowlders bruised our knees, unseen rocks rolled when we stepped on them. We went for two hours down a slide of shale, slipping at every step and clutching the empty darkness. At its bottom we came to wide rapids, and this time the men put us on the little horses, and the horses crossed by jumping from bowlder to bowlder; this seemed cruelty to animals, but we were too weary to protest, and already we had become Albanian in one thing—an absolute indifference to danger.
When, an hour later, one of my pony’s hind legs went over the edge of a crumbling trail and only my man’s grip on his tail kept him from quite going over, the incident interrupted for only a second my enjoyment of the wild, weird scene; a hundred miles of mountain tops fighting with their shadows the light of the moon.
At ten o’clock we fell from our saddles in the walled courtyard of a ghostly white house, and a tall figure in the hooded robe of a Franciscan father lighted us across it with a flaming pine torch.
We really were in the Middle Ages, or in some century perhaps even earlier. An hour after our greeting by the Bishop of Pultit we had forgotten even to realize it; so adaptable are human beings that we quite forgot that modern civilization had ever been.
The hooded priest lighted us with his torch up a flight of worn stone stairs and into a low, beamed room on the second floor of the bishop’s house. There the bishop, rising from a wooden bench, welcomed us in Albanian and Latin. He wore a rough, homespun woolen robe; his bare feet were in wooden sandals; a rosary of wooden beads hung on his chest. He was perhaps fifty, rotund, jovial, dignified. Perolli bent one knee and kissed the episcopal hand; little Mohammedan Rexh, in his red fez, gravely saluted; Cheremi, the ragged gendarme, put his rifle in a corner and knelt for the bishop’s blessing.
We sat, Alex, Frances, and I, in a row on a wooden bench in the chilly bare room. A servant came in, barearmed, barelegged, clad in one piece of brown cloth that reached his knees, and the bishop gave orders; the servant returned with a hammered copper tray holding an earthen cup and a wooden bottle of rakejia. Now rakejia is a cousin to vodka and one of the strongest drinks that ever turned the imbiber’s blood to liquid fire. We girls had debated about it; what should we do when courtesy required us to drink it? We had decided that Perolli should explain that we came from America and that in our tribe it was forbidden to drink intoxicants. But after sixteen hours of travel in the Albanian mountains we did not hesitate. One by one we took the cup that the servant filled, and drained it dry. From that time onward we drank the stuff like water, and it had no visible effect upon us, though in a Paris restaurant one glass of mild wine will make me realize that a second would be unwise. I don’t explain this, I simply note the fact, and it gives me a different point of view on the chronicles of hard-drinking past centuries.
We sat there, talking, for an hour or more. The bishop said that he had never been out of the mountains except for a trip long ago to the Vatican in Rome; he had been there a year, and had conversed with his brother priests in Latin. Then he had come back to the mountains and had lived there ever since. His diocese included all the northern tribes, and he visited them from time to time, riding wherever a donkey could carry him, and walking where it could not. Ten years earlier he had had another foreign visitor, a Miss Durham of England; he had heard that she later wrote a book in which she told about the visit, and if he could have afforded it he would have liked to send for that book.