“May you live long!” said we.
“How could you?” He meant, “How could you get here?”
“Slowly, slowly, little by little,” we replied.
“Are you a man?” said Perolli.
“I am a man of Pultit, of the village of Plani, of the house of Marke Gjonni,” said the boy. “In our house there is always a welcome for the stranger. The door of the house of Marke Gjonni is open to you.”
“Glory to your lips and to your feet,” said Perolli, and to us in English: “His father has sent him to ask us to come to his house. What do you think?”
“Is anyone going to think?” we cried. “There’ll be a fire, won’t there?”
We followed the boy up the mountain side, our lungs sobbing and our feet slipping on the trail dimly lighted by the torch, and so steep that the palms of our hands were bruised by climbing it. Out of the ceaseless swishing murmur of falling water that had surrounded us all day one note rose above the rest; flying spray was like a mist on our faces; we were following the edge of a waterfall hidden by the dark. Then the trail turned; we stood on a level ledge; and suddenly all the rifles in the world seemed to go off not ten feet away.
“It’s all right!” Perolli’s shout came up from the darkness beneath our feet. “They’re only welcoming you!” But I have never felt so defenseless, so nakedly exposed to sudden death, as I did standing there, clutching Frances and Alex, while sharp flashes darted out of the blackness and deafening explosions contended with more deafening echoes. All the household of Marke Gjonni stood on the trail, every man firing his rifle until it was empty. Then a woman appeared with a torch, her beautiful face and two heavy braids of hair painted on the darkness like a Rembrandt, if Rembrandt had ever used a model from ancient Greece, and we made our way through a jumble of greetings (“May you live long! May you live long!” we repeated), and up a flight of stone steps along the side of a blank stone wall, and through a low, arched stone doorway.
The stone-walled room was large—as large as the house itself—and low ceilinged, and filled with shadows. Near the farther end, on the stone floor, a bonfire burned in a ring of ashes. In the corner near the door several goats and two kids and two sheep stopped their browsing on a heap of dry-leaved branches, and looked at us with large eyes shining in the torchlight. Five or six women came out of the shadows to greet us, and behind us the men were coming in, reloading their rifles, hanging them on pegs, closing and bolting the heavy wooden door.