After an hour of desperate climbing we stood on the peak from which Cheremi had telephoned. The bishop’s house and the school lay dwarfed beneath our feet, and Perolli, standing on a rock and holding his ears, sent down to them a shrill hail. “Ooeeoo! Monseignor!”
The bishop appeared in his woolen gown, a rifle in his hand, and all the guns in our party went off at once, and again, and again, while fifty miles of sheer rock cliffs barked back at them. My hands were over my ears, but I saw the three answering white puffs from the bishop’s rifle, and while the echoes were dying, still repeating themselves down the valley, we saw him hand it to his servant and protect his ear-drums with his thumbs. His call came up to us, “Go on a smooth trail!”
AN OLD SHEPHERD
Wearing goatskin opangi on his feet, and trousers braided in his tribal pattern.
“Now,” said Perolli, thrusting his revolver back into its holster, “we have said good-by to the bishop. Allons!”
“And to-night,” I said, joyously, “we’ll sleep in a native house.”
Frances and Perolli did not seem enthusiastic about that hope, and as we toiled up trails that were stairways of giant bowlders, or slid down slopes of pale-green shale, above valleys where the clouds swirled beneath us, the discussion continued fragmentarily.
Frances’s reluctance I could ascribe to the shrieking of her muscles, which, if tortured as mine had been by the previous day’s travel, must be screaming with agony at her every step. But Perolli, true Albanian in spite of his years of living in foreign capitals, was as fresh as the crisp air that blew upon us between the gusts of driving rain. He leaped up bowlders, he joined in the singing of the others, who, with sixty-pound sacks on their backs, walked easily up the incredible steeps, their thumbs at their ears, chanting songs of ancient battles with the Turks.
“Don’t you think it safe to stay in a native house?” said I, remembering that he was an officer of the government traveling incognito among unfriendly tribes, and that within sight were the Albanian mountains held by the Serbs who had put a price on his head.
“Safe?” said he, scornfully. “A man is always safe in another man’s house. It has happened not once, but often, in these mountains, that a man has given shelter to a hunted man and found, while the guest sat at his fire, that he was harboring a man who had shot the son of the house not an hour before. The neighbors bring in the body, and the father sits beside it, with the murderer under his roof. And the father gives him coffee and food and drink and rolls cigarettes for him, until the guest is ready to go, and then he accompanies him for an hour’s journey, so that none of the tribe can injure him, and says a courteous farewell to him on the trail. ‘Go on a smooth road,’ he says. ‘There is a word of peace between us for a day and a night because you are my guest. After that I will follow you all my life, until I kill you.’”