“Tell him to wait where he is,” we exclaimed, for, looking again at the nearest cone-shaped mountain, we saw on its top traces of old walls, and on its sides what might once have been a circling road, and we clambered up the trail to ask Cheremi about it.
“It is a very old city,” said Cheremi. “It was built before men began to remember.” Standing on the edge of the trail, which was also the edge of the gorge, he looked over perhaps a quarter of a mile of space to the sharp-pointed peak of rock. In one hand he held his rifle, its butt resting on the rock at his feet; the thumb of the other hand was thrust through a fold of the scarlet sash about his loins, and the sun, appearing blindingly at that moment in a rent of the clouds, shone on his wet white skin and made it shimmer like satin. The deep seams worn in his leathery face by forty years of childlike, mischievous mirth became shallow (an unaccustomed look of solemnity had ironed them out) and, looking straight and unwinking at the sun, he said, “The sun is now the only living thing that saw that city built.”
We shaded our eyes with cupped hands and looked at it. The world was suddenly all aglitter, every leaf a heliograph, every giant slope of rock reflecting a thousand rays, and our eyes watered. But, gazing steadily, we saw the fragment of a wall, and below it, curling around the tall, slender cone of the mountain, traces of a road that had been walled, and a broken flight of four broad steps, torn apart by the roots of a tree. It was the only tree we could see on the three-thousand-foot height, but, like all the others of the forests, it was a gnarled, branchless trunk; its young boughs had been cut every spring to feed the goats.
“Does anyone live there now?”
“No,” said Cheremi. “It is the place where the ora love to sit, and sometimes one hears them crying, like trees in a wind, when there is no wind. But no human person lives there.”
“What is an ora?” I asked, when Perolli had translated.
“An ora—a spirit of the forest, soul of a tree or a rock. Nature spirits,” said Frances. “You know the Greek oreads? Well, that’s the Greek name of the Albanian ora; the Greeks got them from the Albanians.”
“And they still live in these mountains?”
“Apparently. Did you ever see an ora, Cheremi?” she asked him, in Albanian.
“No. Very few people see them. But I have heard them singing, and once, in the Wood of the Ora, which we will pass to-morrow, I heard them talking together in the twilight. I heard them say that my cousin would die,” said Cheremi, seriously.