“And did he die?”
“Of course,” said he, surprised by the question. “He was a strong man, but within six weeks, sitting beside the fire one night, he said that he felt a pain in his heart, and in an hour he was dead.” Cheremi crossed himself.
“But about the city of Pog. Does anyone ever go there? Could we go there?”
People sometimes went, he said; the shepherds always went to cut the branches of the trees, which belonged to the tribe of Pultit. How far was it from where we stood? He thought for a time, and said, “Four hours.” Albanians have no measure for distance except the time it takes to walk it, and this time corresponds with no measurement of ours. He had said that our walk of that day would be an hour and a half; we had already been exhausting every ounce of energy and breath for four, and were scarcely a third of the way.
“What does one find when one gets there?”
“Very little. There is the old wall which you see, and on the rock one can follow the lines of the walls of houses, built square and with many rooms, and from the rocks which have fallen they must have been tall houses. That is all, except that on some of the large stones one can see that the sun circle was carved. Everything else has been eaten by the great flocks of years. But there is still treasure buried there.”
“How do you know?”
“I know because I have seen men who have seen it. There is a man of Pultit whom I know. He went to the old city of Pog one day with his goats. There had been a great storm and part of the wall had fallen. Before that day the wall had had a corner, where now you see nothing. Where the wall had fallen there was a golden image of a man, as large as himself, shining in the sun. The man of Pultit forgot his goats in looking at it. It was too heavy for him to carry, so he took a stone and broke off four of its fingers, and with them in his sash he went to get his brothers to help him carry away the image.
“But it was night before he reached their house, and they said it was better not to go to that city until morning. In the morning they went, and where the image had been there was nothing but stones. Afterward, in thinking of nothing but that image, the man went mad, and he now lives alone and naked in the mountains, talking to the ora and begging them to take him again to that image. But before that he sold the fingers to the gold beaters in Scutari, and they said those fingers were of the purest gold and not alloyed, as gold is now. I did not see the fingers, but many did before they were beaten into ornaments.”
“What do you think became of the image?”