“It is the custom, when strangers come, to talk to them,” said Perolli, severely. “Their only way of hearing news, and their only entertainment, is talking to guests. If you want to be rude about eating and sleeping, go ahead; I won’t.”
“Oh, all right,” Frances relented, sadly. “Perolli, do you believe in ora?”
“Well—do you believe in heaven and hell, and God and the devil? There are lots of things in the world that you don’t see or touch. I don’t know——” He said, briskly, “Of course I don’t believe in ora!” He wavered again. “But when you know so many people who have seen them and talked with them—I mean, who think they have——Everyone used to believe such things, long ago, and perhaps, here in these mountains, where the people have changed so little through all the centuries, there may still be things—spirits, phantoms, whatever you like to call them. Understand, I don’t believe it. But there may be something in that myth that’s part of every religion, that there was a time when there were other beings on earth besides men. And if there were once, why then, if we could still see them, they must still be——But of course it must be all imagination.”
“And there was that sound we heard. I never heard anything like it before. Perolli, you said it was an ora.”
He looked badgered. “I meant, whatever it was, it is what these people call an ora.”
“Do the ora ever come into this village?” I demanded at large.
“We hear them in the village at night,” said the coffee maker, quite casually, as he measured a spoonful of brown powder into the tiny pot. “No, we never see them. They call to us, and when we answer they talk, but we cannot understand their language. Always when we speak to them they answer in their own tongue.”
“But, Cheremi, you heard them talking about your cousin’s death,” I said.
“We hear them talking together sometimes, yes,” said the coffee maker. “If you go through the Wood of the Ora at twilight you will often hear them talking in some language you will understand—in Persian or Arabic or Greek or Albanian. Then if you listen perhaps you will hear them speak of you or of some one you know. But if you speak to them, they will be silent, and then they will go on talking together in their own language, which no man understands. It is no doubt the old language of the trees.”
“But you cut the trees,” said Alex.