I would not have this book considered too seriously. It is not an attempt to untangle one thread in the Balkan snarl; it is not a study of primitive peoples; it is not a contribution to the world’s knowledge, and I hope no one will read it to improve the mind. It should be read as the adventures in it were lived, with a gayly inquiring mind, a taste for strange peoples and unknown trails, and a delight in the unexpected.
Here I give you only what I saw, felt, and most casually learned while adventuring among the tribes in the interior northern Albanian mountains. It is not even all of Albania, that little country too small to be found on every map. It is simply a fragment of this large, various, and romantic world, sent back by a traveler to those who stay at home.
R. W. L.
Annette Marquis accompanied the author on her trip through Albania and it is to her skill that the photographs are due.
Peaks of Shala
CHAPTER I
SHADOWS ON SCUTARI PLAIN—THE VOICE IN THE CHAFA BISHKASIT—THE LANDS OF THE HIDDEN TRIBES—A WOMAN OF SHALA.
When the sun rose over the blue, snow-crested mountains that are the southernmost slopes of the Dinaric Alps, it made, on the Scutari plain, a pattern of our shadows; shadows of four small wooden-saddled ponies, each led by a mountaineer with a rifle on his back, of two tall, ragged gendarmes, and of a small trudging boy in a red Turkish fez—all moving single file across an interminable plain shaggy with blossoming cactus.
The wooden saddles were three-sided boxes made of peeled branches; padded beneath with sheepskins, they fitted over the ponies’ backs. On top of them our blankets were packed; saddlebags hung from the four corners; enthroned in the midst we rode, comfortable as in an easy-chair, sitting sidewise, our knees crossed, smoking cigarettes and rocking gently with the ponies’ pace. And all this was to me an enchantment suddenly appearing above the surface of well-arranged days, as new South Sea islands rise before a mariner in hitherto familiar waters.
Three days earlier the mountains of Albania, indeed, Albania itself, had been unknown to me, and disregarded. I had meant to go by Scutari as a hurried walker brushes by the stranger on the street. Scutari had been merely a place to pass on the way from Podgoritza to Constantinople. And now, in this brightening dawn upon the Scutari plain, I was riding to unknown adventure among the hidden tribes of Dukaghini.