The wildness, the savagery and isolation of those mountains seemed to come into the room. A hundred miles to Scutari, a hundred miles of almost impassable mountains between us and any kind of help. There we were, three girls and a boy, alone in the narrow valley beneath the eyes of the Serbs, the Serbs who six months earlier had caught Perolli and condemned him to death.
A chill wind seemed to blow through the room; it was not imagined. Every wide, friendly eye about us had narrowed, every lip tightened a trifle. A thousand currents of antagonism, of distrust, of intrigue, seemed like tangible things in the air; only Padre Marjan remained warm, innocent and smiling.
None of us four, certainly not Perolli, doubted that we had just heard his death sentence spoken. And I felt again the depths below depths in the Albanian mind, in that primitive mind which is so much more complex than ours, as I saw him smile, easily and naturally, and heard him saying, “Long may you live!” to the circle of his enemies.
“And to you long life!” said they, while he offered them cigarettes and they rolled others in exchange. He sat down easily on the bench before the fire; with an unconsidered simultaneous movement we three girls moved forward and sat beside him; the chiefs again took their places on the floor, foremost of a mass of bodies and faces, and Padre Marjan moved in and out and around us all, stirring and seasoning the contents of the pots that bubbled in the fireplace.
“Talk to them, say something!” said Perolli, in a careless tone, offering me a cigarette.
“Thank you,” said I, in Albanian, taking it. “Tell them that I come from California, the most beautiful part of America, and that I have seen the American mountains and the mountains of Switzerland, both famous around the world, and that I have never seen such beautiful mountains as those of the Land of the Eagle. (They will not do anything while we are here, will they?)”
Perolli translated. “They say: ‘Glory to your lips. Do you live among the American mountains?’ (No, not unless they get me alone.)”
“In America we cannot live among such mountains. We cannot climb such trails; we are not strong, like the Albanians. When we go any distance we ride, and we have forgotten how to walk up cliffs. We have rich, soft houses, and we travel everywhere on soft cushions, and all our life is easy. But old men still remember when our life was hard and rugged, as it is here, and I have seen in America houses of stone, like these, with very small windows and pegs on the walls where rifles were hung. For our fathers’ fathers lived hard lives surrounded by enemies, as the Albanians do now, and some old men still remember those days. (Do you want me to keep them talking?)”
“They say: ‘What has made the change? Have you cut down your mountains?’ (Yes. I want a little while to think.)” And he leaned back and crossed his knees and lighted another cigarette.
“Well, America was very much like Albania in many ways,” said I. “We were ruled by another nation, as the Albanians were, and we revolted, like the Albanians. Then our tribes fought, as these tribes fight, among themselves. And life was very hard. But we had a young government of our own, as the Albanians have, and it grew stronger, and after a while all the tribes stopped fighting. Then when they were not fighting they used all their strength to make life easy, and it became very easy, and all the houses had windows, because there were no more enemies to shoot through them, and we made great wide trails that were easy to travel, and we made and carried all kinds of goods on them, and became very rich, just as Albania will do.”