“If we stay for that, it means we’ll never start,” said I. “Slowly, slowly, little by little, breakfast will be ready at six this afternoon.”
“But I’m starving!” she wailed.
To Alex and me the cool, sweet morning outside the smoke-filled dark house called more irresistibly than any thought of food. So at six o’clock, accompanied by the gay Cheremi, who had just returned, she and I set out on the twenty-mile walk to Thethis,[3] leaving Perolli explaining that Frances was of a different American tribe, a tribe whose custom was to eat in the mornings.
It was not rain; the sky was like one enormous waterspout. When we came out of the smoky, reeking darkness of the cavelike house it was like plunging into a waterfall. We gasped with the shock of it; water poured down our faces, and in an instant there was not a dry inch of skin on our bodies. But we had been some days in these mountains, walking in the rain, and after the first chill impact our blood rebounded; we were warm, and, clutching streaming staffs in dripping hands, Alex and I followed Cheremi gayly enough. Though when we were separated for a few feet on the trail the figures of the others became blurry and indistinct, like figures seen through ground glass.
We went first down the bed of a small stream that ran steeply from the mountains above to the Lumi Shala below. The water was about a foot deep, but as soon as we got used to the force of the current we went very well. Whenever we came to a sheer drop of three or four feet Cheremi braced himself and swung us lightly down. So we progressed for perhaps a third of a mile, tingling with the exertion. Then we came out on the narrow gravelly banks of the Lumi Shala, and were joined by a strange Albanian, nude to the waist, who was out for a morning stroll.
The proper thing was to offer him cigarettes, but how could one do it beneath that pour of water? However, the difficulty soon solved itself, for we found a bowlder as large as a house, with a natural corridor running through it, and, though its walls dripped and our feet sank to the ankles in little wells, we managed here to produce and light our damp cigarettes.
The little cave was filled with a curious greenish light, like that beneath the sea; at either end of it a gray wall of falling water shut off our view. Dimly we saw through it a vague blur of tawny gravel, and nothing more.
The strange Albanian conveyed to us with effort, in broken Serbian, Italian, German, and Albanian, that this weather was bad for the health, because when it rained the water in the streams was not good, and drinking it caused pains in the lungs.
“Good Heavens!” said we. “Pneumonia!”
Then we went out of the cave, and Cheremi and the stranger carried us across the waist-deep Lumi Shala on their backs, balanced precariously on their shoulders, surrounded by what seemed an infinity of rushing water, milky greenish in color and seeming to snap up at us with millions of white teeth as the violent raindrops struck upon it.