Frances asked questions in Albanian. Yes, this house had kept for a time a refugee child on his way from the American house in Scutari to the lands of his tribe, and he had insisted on washing his bed and his clothes; he had hated lice with an astonishing hatred; he said they were small devils who would grow to be large devils, and the woman did not think this was true, but she had washed all the beds, also all the house, and now it was like an American house and had no lice.
“But that isn’t what she meant. She meant that she doesn’t see why we are washing,” said Alex, lifting her dripping face above a pool and rubbing it with one hand. It isn’t easy to wash in a waterfall, with no place to lay the soap.
“We do this every morning,” Frances explained in Albanian. “It is American custom.” The woman looked as though she thought it rather foolish, still, if it were the custom——
“Also,” said Frances, “every morning we wash the children and the babies, all over, from head to foot.”
“Yes?” said the woman, indifferently. “Here babies stay in their cradles. Children go into the water when they are old enough to swim. Then only in the summer, when it is not cold.”
Frances gave it up. We came back from the waterfall, on a path that was like a terrace of heaven overlooking all the world of mountains and valleys and swirling clouds. We were already wet to the skin with rain, but that did not matter, for we had before us the day’s walking in it, and our indifference to wet clothes and feet was already quite Albanian. And the morning, and the mountain air, and the water-gushing range after range of mountains, seemed to us glorious. We thought that it would be fun to herd goats among these peaks and to live forever in a stone house with a fire on the floor and a pan of corn bread baking in the coals. No dusting, for there was no furniture; no making of beds, for there were no beds; no curtains to keep fresh, for there were no windows; no trouble with clothes, for centuries saw no change in fashions; no work except hand weaving and embroidery and the washing of linen in a brook. No haste, no worry, no struggle to invent new needs that one must struggle to satisfy. All that simplicity and leisure our ancestors traded for a rug on the floor, a trinket-covered dressing table, for knives and forks and kitchen ranges, fountain pens and high white collars and fashion books. It seemed to us, on that morning, a trade in which we had been cheated.
And even now I wonder, sometimes, about the value of the centuries that have given us civilization.
We had no doubt at all about their worthlessness that morning, when we set out again—after a cup of Turkish coffee, each—to walk another twenty miles over the Albanian mountains, through the Wood of the Ora and the tribal lands of Plani and over the Chafa Bosheit to the next village.
CHAPTER VI
THE SONG OF THE FLIGHT OF MARKE GJLOSHI—THE HUNTED MAN OF SHOSHI—THE WAY THROUGH THE WOOD OF THE ORA—A WOMAN WHO BELIEVES IN PRIVATE PROPERTY.