My horse slipped just then and a man snatched me from the saddle. The horse, held by the tail, floundered on the trail, striking sparks from his hoofs, shod with solid thin plates of steel; the packs went over his head. My man set me on a shoulder-high rock and dashed to aid the rescue. It looked for a moment as though they would all go down upon Perolli below, but the horse got his footing and stood trembling, his head covered with streaming blankets.
I said then that I would walk, but it was not walking. It was jumping, scrambling, dropping. Those mountains were evidently created to be looked at, not to be walked upon. Bathed in perspiration, I stopped from time to time to eat a bit of snow, and twelve-year-old Rexh looked at me with compassion. He had walked nearly twenty miles that day and was still gay and fresh; the men were still singing.
“In a minute, Mrs. Lane, we will come to a resting place,” the pitying Rexh encouraged me, and in perhaps half an hour my trembling legs brought me around a bowlder to see the two gendarmes stopped in the trail, crossing themselves. A wooden cross, blackened by storms and years, leaned forward above them, supported by a pile of stones on a small grassy knoll. Alex and Frances dropped from their ponies to lie panting beside me on the grass, while the guides, smiling at our whim, stopped also. Each of them crossed himself before sitting down, for the mountain tribes have been Catholic almost ever since St. Paul preached in the Balkans, and missionary priests have put the cross at each resting place on the trails, to bring thoughts of God to weary men.
Below our feet the cliffs fell away, down into blue haze; above us were forested slopes, and above them sheer, great cliffs throwing shadows across a dozen valleys. Our small grassy knoll was white with daisies and with fallen petals from a blossoming apple tree that arched above the cross. On it our men lay at ease, beautiful, graceful animals, their rifles swung from their shoulders and laid ready to their hands.
“Why are Shala and Shoshi in blood?” Frances asked, casually, biting idly at the stem of a daisy. Perolli did not know; he had gathered only the fact that there was a feud.
“Do we go through both tribes?” I wanted to know.
“Through Shala. Shoshi’s farther down the river. We’ll go around it.”
“Are our men Shala or Shoshi?”
Perolli glanced at them. “Shala, by the pattern of the braiding on their trousers. So we won’t have any troub——Hello! That’s a Shoshi man coming up the trail, now.”
It was Alex who acted quickest. She was sitting on a rock beside me, her arms clasped about her knees; she rose instantly and, flinging out a hand in the gesture of greeting, cried in her most feminine voice those Albanian words that sound like, “Tune yet yetta!” and mean, “May you live long!”