“I will say to my husband, Lulash, that Cheremi is on the trail. Cheremi goes to Plani with four strangers from far away and with a Mohammedan youth of Scutari. To-night Cheremi will be in Plani. I will say to Lulash that he may bring to Cheremi in Plani the hundred kronen which he owes him.”
“Oo-ee-oo-oo!” The final shrill call came circling back among the peaks like ripples of disturbed water, and up through its circling came the answering call of the woman. Since he had been telephoning to a woman, Cheremi did not fire his rifle three times, for which my ears were grateful.
We went on. And once, as I clambered up the side of a rock pile that the child of a giant might have made in building a tower with blocks, my staff (ah, how grateful I was for that third leg!) dislodged a stone the size of my head, and Cheremi, turning like a cat, flung himself downward and caught it as it tottered on the trail’s edge. Then I looked and saw, far below, the miniature images of a woman and a cradle, set among moving white spots that were sheep, and I saw that the rock would have gone down the slope like a bomb from an airplane and struck the cradle beside which the woman was sitting, and, I thought, spinning.
“One must be careful on the trails,” said Cheremi, and as the men at that moment had finished a song with a joyous fusillade of rifle shots, I asked if people were not sometimes killed by stray bullets. Perolli said that of course it happened now and then, but everyone understood that the killing was an accident and it caused no blood feud. Accidents, he remarked, will happen anywhere, and he spoke of the death toll of automobiles, which at that moment seemed as far from my knowledge as the twenty centuries that separated us from them.
“Through the Land of the Eagle the news is sung,” the second gendarme began a new song, thumbs against his ears and sixty-pound pack on his back, as he ascended the rocks above us. Cheremi took it up, repeating each line as the other improvised it, and under his breath Rexh translated them for me, storing them away in his memory, from which I later transferred them to my notebook. As I listened I glanced at Rrok Perolli, disguised servant of the new government about which they were making the song, but his face wore a cheerful and unconcerned expression, like a mask so perfect that it seems real.
“Through the Land of the Eagle the news is sung——(It has a double rhyme as they sing it, Mrs. Lane, but I do not know the English to make it rhyme in your language),” said Rexh, apologetically.
“What have the men of Tirana been doing?
I am a son of the mountain eagles;
I do not give up my nest while there is life in my claws;
I do not yield to the gendarmes!
I will drown them in their own blood.
Rise, rise, and go to the door.
There is a sergeant with twenty soldiers.
Ho! Ho! Sergeant, I am not the man you think!
I will not bow and be led to the slaughter.
I will not be killed like a lamb for the men of Tirana,
I am a goat and will fight!”
“What do they mean about sergeants and soldiers?” I asked Perolli, and he said, “These tribes do not understand that the new government in Tirana is an all-Albanian government. They don’t think as a nation; they think as tribes. They think the government is a Tirana government, trying to destroy their liberty as the Romans and the Turks and the Austrians and Italians and the Serbs and the Greeks and the Peace Council tried to do. They know that the Peace Conference in Paris arranged to divide Albania into three parts, giving one to Greece, one to Italy, and one to Jugo-Slavia (and would have done it if Greece and Serbia had been strong enough at the moment to grab a third of a hornets’ nest and if we hadn’t driven out Italy). They know there is a connection between the Peace Conference and the League of Nations, so, now that the Albanian government is a member of the League, they think that the men of Tirana have joined their enemies. They were so dangerous that we had to send soldiers up here to burn the houses of the Shala chiefs. But everything will be all right as soon as we can get the government going and begin building schools and roads up here. They just don’t understand yet.”
Political discussion was cut short by one of the men who had run ahead a few miles to inform the village of Plani that we were coming, and who now popped out of the gathering darkness to announce that the priest refused to receive us in his house.
“The macaroni!” cried our men, with a contempt like vitriol. The priest was of Italian blood; no Albanian would have been such a dog, they said. And we sat down on the mountain side to consider what we should do.