“Strange,” I said, for I still dimly remembered another way of life, as though, perhaps, I had sometime dreamed it, “chimneys that don’t draw make so much smoke in a room, yet here there is no chimney and a large fire, and we don’t notice the smoke.” And, leaning back on the piled blankets, I gazed up at the pale-blue clouds of it, rising beyond the firelight into a velvety darkness overhead. But I really felt that I had always lived thus, shut off by stone walls from the mountains and the night, ringed around by friendly familiar faces, smelling the delicious odor of corn bread baking and hearing the tinkling bells of goats.
“Where is America?” said our hosts, and: “How large are your tribes? Do they have villages like ours, and mountains? Do you raise corn? How many donkey loads do you raise to a field, and what is your method of cultivating the soil? Have you stone ditches for carrying water from the rivers to the fields?” Rousing ourselves, we tried to give them in words a picture of our cities; we told of horses made of iron, fed by coal, snorting black clouds of smoke and racing at great speeds for long distances on roads made of iron; and I told of the irrigation systems of California’s valleys, and Oregon’s; of orchards plowed by steel-shod plows; of great machines as large as houses, cutting grain on the plains of Kansas; of mountain streams like Albanian mountain streams, which we harness as one might harness a donkey, and how their invisible strength is carried unseen on wires for many, many long hours—as far as an Albanian could walk in two days—and used to turn wheels far away.
Resting comfortably on their heels around the fire, they listened as one would listen to a traveler from Mars, the men opening silver tobacco boxes and deftly rolling cigarettes for us, the women spinning, the children—each given its space in the circle—propping little chins on beautiful, delicate hands and listening wide eyed. The questions they asked—and the elders were as courteous to the children’s curiosity as the children were to theirs—were keen and intelligent, but when it came to explaining electricity I was as helpless as they and could answer only with vague indications of some strange unknown force which we use without understanding it.
A woman, barefooted, barearmed, graceful as a sculptor’s hope of a statue, lifted the cover from the baking-pan, crossed herself, made the sign of the cross over the hot loaf, and took it up. Stooping, with the smoking golden disk between her hands, she stopped, suddenly struck motionless. The long, strange cry came again through the darkness, like a voice of the wind and the mountains and the night.
“Look here, Perolli,” said I, my stretched nerves unexpectedly relaxing into the kind of anger that is part of fear, “what is that? Don’t be an idiot! Tell me!”
“It is an ora, if you must know,” said Perolli, and he looked at me defiantly, as though he expected me to laugh.
“An ora!” said Frances, sitting up. The strange, unearthly call came again, very far away this time; we strained our ears to hear it. Then silence and the roaring of the river. The turbaned men in the circle of firelight, who had understood the word, nodded.
“Holy crickets! Rose Lane, we’re actually hearing an oread!” Frances exclaimed. And Alex said: “Oh no! Undoubtedly there is some natural explanation.”
“How do you know there isn’t what you call a natural explanation for an oread?” Frances demanded, and the wild notion crossed my mind that if Perolli had not been with fellow sharers of the blessings of Western civilization he would have been crossing himself instead of lighting another cigarette. Little Rexh, in his red fez, spoke earnestly: “Do not believe there are no ora or devils in these mountains, Mrs. Lane. There are very many of them.”
“Of course,” said I, and I do not know how much I believed it and how much I assumed that I did, in order to encourage our hosts to talk. “Do you often see ora in this village?” I said across the fire to the many intelligent, watching eyes, and Rexh picked up our words and turned them into Albanian or English as we talked.