The Shoshi man’s hand was on his rifle, but his step had not faltered. He replied, coming on steadily, and the appropriateness of the greeting struck me, for if it had not been uttered by a woman he would at that moment have been dead. Our Shala men, with perfect courtesy, went through the formalities of greeting on the trail, and this is the form, translated to me by Rexh:
“Long life to you!”
“And to you, long life!”
“How could you?” meaning, “How could you get here?”
“Slowly, slowly, little by little.”
No one who has ever seen those trails can doubt it.
The Shoshi man sat down, our men offered him cigarettes, and up the trail came a woman of Shoshi. She wore a tight, bell-shaped skirt of horizontal black and white stripes, made of cloth heavier and thicker than felt, the twelve-inch-wide marriage belt of heavy leather studded with pounds of nails, and a jacket covered with three-inch-thick fringe. Two heavy braids of black hair hung forward on her breasts, a colored handkerchief was bound around her head, and her face, smoothly weather browned, large eyed, delicately shaped, was the most beautiful that I had ever seen. On her back, held by woven woolen straps that crossed between her breasts, was a cradle tightly covered by a thick blanket; in one hand she held a bunch of raw wool, and from the other dangled a whirling spindle. Her feet were bare, and as she came up that trail which had exhausted me she sang softly to herself, dexterously spinning thread from the bunch of wool.
Cheremi, our gayer gendarme, rose quickly and went to meet her. He took her by the hand and laid his cheek caressingly against hers. He was like a child, Cheremi, with his happy face, deep wrinkled with laughter, the mischievous twinkle in his eyes, his bursts of wit and song. But he looked all of his forty years as he gazed tenderly at the woman of Shoshi.
“She is a woman of my people,” he said, leading her gallantly to us.
“Are you a woman?” said Frances Hardy, correctly, in Albanian.