Four men of Marke Gjonni’s household went with us to carry the packs, so we left the stone house peaceful on the cliff below our upward-climbing path, not disturbing it with any parting volley when we paused for our last glimpse of it. A faint haze of blue smoke hung over it, seeping through the slates of the roof; there was no other sign of life about it, and only the smoke distinguished it from the natural rocks. Beside us the stream, which was the waterfall, roared and glittered in the sunlight as it fell into the depths; following with our gaze its narrowing ribbon of silver and searching for the blue smoke haze, we found the house, and I would have had Cheremi fling down to it the keen high call of farewell, ended by six times three shots, that we had sent back to the bishop.
But no; there were only women left in the house, and how could I be so crude as to imagine that one greeted women with rifle-shots?
We went on for a time over sunshiny uplands, and I remember that day as a succession of sun and shower, of small grassy plateaus and quick dips down cliffsides, and struggles up again, beside and through waterfalls that drenched the rocks with spray for yards around. Our muscles were now accustomed to the exercise; they complained hardly at all, and with occasional pauses for rest beneath the wooden crosses set at long intervals along the trail we went gayly, accompanied by the shrill songs of the men.
“Marke Gjloshi is putting on his jacket,” sang the leading man.
“Marke Gjloshi is putting on his jacket,” repeated Cheremi, for this was a song he knew well, a song of Shala made in the days of the Turks, and, repeating each line alternately, they sang:
“Marke Gjloshi is putting on his jacket.
He goes to the Pasha and makes complaint:
‘The Mohammedan has cursed the cross of my Christ!
He has cursed it, and I draw my pistol,
My death-spitting pistol, I draw it
And blow him to bits. He is scattered,
He is scattered like leaves on the rocks.’
The Pasha is angry, the Pasha is crazy,
The Pasha goes mad and the bugles blow
And the guns are out, the gendarmes are out!
Marke Gjloshi is away on the road,
Away on the road a long way,
All the long way through the six tribes.
The Arabian Sea stops him, the Arabs stop him,
Arabs of the sandy sea, black Arabs.
There he stands, there he fights with the gendarmes.
‘O Marke Gjloshi, what will you tell the nations?
What will you tell the Five Nations?’
‘I will tell the consuls the Sultan is to blame,
I will tell to God the Sultan is to blame.
But they will not free me,
But they will not let me go
Back to my tribe, back to my own tribe.
They tear me in pieces, they send me far away,
Far away to the other side of the sea.
My greetings, my greetings, to the lost six tribes!’”
So in the mountains they sing the tales of the men who have been driven from them, to become khedives of Egypt, pashas, themselves, of Turkey, political leaders in Italy, great surgeons of France. From all these countries men are coming back now to make the new free government of Albania, and here among the mountaineers we were walking with Perolli, an agent of this government, who dared not say who he was, for danger of death.
“I ask myself sometimes why God did not make me born in a happier land,” said Perolli, as we looked out over scores of miles of valleys inclosed by the sky-touching mountains, dotted meagerly with the tiny stone houses. “But then I think, He has made me an Albanian, and given me the most beautiful and the most unhappy land in all the world, for His own purposes.”
And he spoke of roads through these mountains, railroads, mines, great power plants, all feeding the people, giving them comforts and luxuries and knowledge. For all of Albania, beneath six feet of upper soil, belongs to the government, as well as all the water power, and we walked on, seeing even with our untrained eyes that the “white coal” of those thousand streams is enough to turn every wheel in a reorganized Europe, and dreaming—dreams that will never be realized.
Then we saw the men stopping on the trail ahead, stopping with quick hands on their rifles, and, remembering in a strange kind of panic that no one could be killed in the presence of a woman, I flung myself gasping up the slope, crying with my last half breath, “Long may you live!” to two strange men who appeared before us.