There were four of us, not counting our retainers. No, five, for at the last moment small, chubby-cheeked Rexh,[1] in his red Mohammedan fez, had gravely engaged Frances Hardy in argument as to the desirability of his accompanying us. Twelve years old, a stanch Mohammedan, self-adopted father of seven smaller refugee children for whom he maintained a family life in a hut he had found, he had made all arrangements for the trip without consulting us. He said that he had never seen the mountains and that he thought it necessary to learn about them as part of the education of a good Albanian. He pointed out that he spoke excellent English, which he had learned in some three months of association with Miss Hardy, and that he would be valuable as an interpreter. It was true that we had one interpreter, but there were six men and many saddlebags; he would keep an eye upon them all. The care of his children he had arranged for; as to the Mohammedan school in which he was a pupil, it taught him nothing; he would take a vacation from it. He would be of use to us upon the trip; the trip would be of value to him. Having said this, he gravely awaited Miss Hardy’s decision. When she said, “All right, Rexh,” he permitted himself to smile and looked over the packs, suggesting some changes that would make us more comfortable. He now walked behind Miss Hardy’s pony, a pistol and a knife in the belt of his American pajama coat.
Our interpreter was also a friend; Rrok Perolli, secretary to the Albanian Minister of the Interior. He was on a vacation, he said, but as the northern interior tribes were antagonistic to the new government, it might be as well not to mention who he was. We were going very near to the Serbian lines; he had recently escaped from sentence of death in a Serbian prison; there was a price on his head in Serbia. It would be easy for one of the tribes to hand him across the line. They could not kill him in our presence, of course, but, once out of our sight, they could in ten minutes find Serbians who would do it for them.
He was a care-free young man, black haired, dark eyed, dressed in the smartest of English tweed suits, with a businesslike revolver and one of the handiest of daggers swinging in leather holsters at the belt. His father was a merchant in Ipek, rich territory now held by the Serbs; the son had been educated in London, Berlin, and Paris, and spoke their languages as well as his own Albanian, also Serbian, Italian, Turkish, and Greek. He enlivened the morning with songs in all these languages, illustrating a running discussion of comparative music. Swaying gently on his pony’s back, he sniffed the sweet air, cool from the waters of Lake Scutari; he gazed cheerfully at the blue hills beyond the lake, held by the Serbian armies; he was altogether the happy office man off for a lazy vacation. Just the same, I wondered a bit, taking everything into consideration. It cannot be said that I was entirely unprepared for the interesting developments before us.
Fourth in our party was Alex. Sunshiny hair, softly fluffed; wide blue eyes; and that complexion of pink and white, like roses painted on a china plate, that drives a dagger of envy into every feminine heart and makes the fortunes of cosmetic makers. She wore a purple tam, a leaf-brown sweater with a purple tie, and the trimmest of riding trousers; she looked like a magazine cover. She was in reality the most hard-headed, soberly sensible of girls; to her finger tips an anti-Potterite. She and Frances were going into the mountains to decide where to establish three schools. They had themselves collected in America the money for them, and this was their vacation from Red Cross work.
At about noon we left the plain, and almost at once our ponies began to stand up like pet dogs begging for cake, their hind legs supporting their weight while front hoofs pawed for foothold above on the stairlike, rocky trail. An Albanian held each of us tightly by elbow or knee, ready to save us from squashy death if the pony lost its balance, and as the little animals strained, clambered, gathered their feet together for desperate leaps, a sudden long high wail broke forth ahead. The two gendarmes were singing.
Walking easily up a trail that I could have overcome only on hands and knees, carrying their rifles and twenty pounds of canned goods on their backs, they were merrily singing. Thumbs pressed tightly against their ears, to prevent the air pressure of their lungs from bursting ear drums, they sent far over the crags the long, shrill, high notes, like nothing human I had ever heard. Frances Hardy, lying almost perpendicular along her pony’s back, her chin on what would have been the saddle pommel had there been one, looked downward at me, similarly extended.
“They’re making a song to the Chafa Bishkasit, the Road of the Mountaineers,” she said. “That’s the Chafa up there. We’re going over it to-day, and then we’ll be in the mountains. Aren’t you happy?”
I could find no word emphatic enough for reply as I gazed up at the tiny notch in a wave of snow-crest that curled against the sky five thousand feet above us.
The sun swung to its highest and sank again while we climbed. It was low in the sky—it seemed on a level with us—when we made the last interminable hundred yards up into the Chafa Bishkasit. We were in the sky; there is no other way to say it, and no way in which to describe that sensation of infinite airiness. Forty miles behind and below us Lake Scutari lay flat, like a pool of mercury on a gray-brown floor. At each side of our little gay-colored cavalcade a gray cliff rose perhaps two hundred feet, too sheer to hold the snow that thickly crusted its top. These cliffs were the posts of a gateway through which we looked into the country of the hidden tribes.
I had never seen or dreamed such mountains. Like thin, sharp rocks stood on edge, they covered hundreds of miles with every variation of light and shadow, and we looked across their tops to a far-away wave of snow that broke high against the sky. The depths between the mountains were hazy blue; out of the blueness sharp cliffs and huge flat slopes of rock thrust upward, streaked with the rose and purple and Chinese green of decomposing shale, and from their tops a thousand streams poured downward, threading them with silver white. A low, continuous murmur rose to us—the sound of innumerable waterfalls, softened by immeasurable distances.