“The blood feud is not a lawless thing, as strangers sometimes think. Nor has it anything to do with personal strife or hate. It is a form of capital punishment, such as all nations have, and it is governed by most strict laws.
“You must remember that in these mountains we have never been conquered by foreign governments. The Roman Empire claimed to have overpowered Albania, it is true, as later the Turks did, but neither Rome nor Constantinople was able to send its government into these mountains. The people live as they did before the days of Greece, except for the influence of the Church. It is a simple, communistic society, without private property or any organized government. The only law is the moral law, enforced by tradition, by custom, and by common consent. The father of the family becomes the chief of the tribe, but he has no power that conflicts with the moral law, the ancient Law of Lec. There is a tradition that all this group of tribes was once, long ago, given this moral law by a man named Lec, but that is doubtless a myth added to through the ages.
“This Law of Lec is based on personal honor, which is also the honor of the tribe. A man or a tribe must punish an insult to honor by killing the man who has given it. Thus, if a member of a tribe is killed unjustly by a man of another tribe; if a woman is stolen or injured or affronted; if any part of the tribal property is stolen; if a man or a tribe fails to keep a besa (a word of honor) in a matter of land or war or marriage or irrigation—you will find excellent and admirable irrigation systems here—then the crime is punished by death. But if these crimes are committed against a member of the same tribe, then the house of the guilty man is burned, and he is cast off by the tribe and must go into the wilderness and live alone.
“You will see this law working out in the case of Shala and Shoshi. Last week a Shala man crossing the lands of Shoshi—the two tribes having some time ago sworn a besa that they would keep the peace between them—saw a woman of Shoshi on the trail. He said to himself that he would like that woman for his son, who was unmarried, though of marriageable age, because his betrothed had died in childhood. So the man of Shala took the woman of Shoshi to his house for his son, and there she is now.
“Apparently,” said the bishop, dryly, “she did not make any outcry, for her husband was in their house only a few yards away, and it is a question whether she and the son had not previously arranged the abduction. However, the husband was, of course, obliged to avenge his honor, and he went at once to the heights above Shala and shot the son. This was, according to the Law, an unjustifiable murder, since he should have killed the father who was the abductor. Therefore the father waited on the trail above Shoshi and shot the husband.
“It should have stopped there, but Shoshi’s honor is involved as long as a woman of the tribe is held unlawfully in the hands of Shala. So a hot-tempered Shoshi man has shot a man of Shala and it has become a blood feud between the two tribes. As the woman was born in Pultit, some say that Pultit’s honor is also involved. So you see that the affair becomes complicated; I have been told by wise men that no less than sixteen deaths will wipe out the insults on both sides. You perhaps heard telephoning about it as you came in? The mountain sides have been ringing with it. But what can one do? Excommunication, of course. At every mass I tell my people that the anger of the Church will descend on all who take part in the killings, but the Law of Lec holds them, and it is, after all, their only civil law.”
It took time to tell this, what with filling the glasses, serving the food platters of delicious stewed rabbit and bowls of macaroni, a dish the bishop had grown fond of in Rome—and then there were the cups of syrupy Turkish coffee to be ceremoniously served and drunk, and for hours, struggling with an agony of sleepiness, we had implored Perolli in English to make our excuses and let us go to bed, he refusing sternly, since it is the most terrible breach of mountain hospitality for a guest to grow sleepy as early as midnight. But at one o’clock, seeing Alex’s desperate eyes stony with the effort to keep them open, and myself beholding at times two bishops, very small and far away, and at times one, who loomed like a mountain, I managed in Latin to suggest that we were tired. We had, I said—calling upon vagrant memories of Cæsar and using both hands to illustrate—been walking and riding over the trails since five the previous morning. The bishop was interested, and asked my opinion of the mountains in comparison with those of Switzerland and of the United States, and I hope I replied coherently.
The rest I do not remember. Perolli says that I sat up straight, and talked, though sometimes rather strangely. Frances and Alex were dumb, he says, but smiled as though they were enjoying the conversation. How was he to know that we were really tired? He thought we had been joking about it.
CHAPTER III
THE STORY OF PIGEON AND LITTLE EAGLE—THE PREHISTORIC CITY OF POG, AND THE TALE OF THE GOLDEN IMAGE—THE GENDARMES SING OF POLITICS.