“No,” I said. “No, we aren’t. But what aren’t we?”
“Drangojt,” replied Perolli, and broke into careless song. There were times when I could have boxed that young man’s ears, for nothing is more irritating than a sense of humor which is not yours. And the Albanians have a sense of humor which is never idle, and seldom comprehensible to the foreigner.
“Drangojt means the people with wings, Mrs. Lane,” said Rexh, and thought that all was clear. “You know, the people born with little wings under their arms,” he elaborated, when I regarded him blankly. “The people—I don’t know how other to say it, Mrs. Lane. Wings, you know—what the birds fly with—wings. Under their arms. Don’t you have people born with wings in your country?”
I said that if we had I knew nothing of it, and Rexh’s forehead wrinkled with perplexity. “But perhaps——Of course you are not a drangue, you would not know the American drangojt,” he concluded, his face clearing. “You can usually tell them, though, by their running to their houses whenever it rains. First, you hear the dragon on the mountains; then, you see all the drangojt running to houses. That is the way you tell them; except, if you are their mother, then you see the wings when they are born. But if you are not their mother, you cannot see the wings, and you only know they are drangojt when they run to their houses in the rain.”
“Are they afraid they’ll get their wings wet?” said I, with great interest.
“Oh no! They are not afraid of anything. When the weather is thundering, that is the dragon fighting with the drangojt. So when they hear the dragon, all the drangojt go quickly to their houses to be ready if they are called to fly and fight the dragon. Even the babies fly home with their cradles. There is no drangue so young that it could not anyway scratch the dragon.”
That was the charm and delight of those days and nights, all too few, which I spent in the Albanian mountains. Around every turn in the trail the unexpected awaited us.
We gazed with new interest upon the gray clouds that struggled among the mountain tops. The dragon and the drangojt were fighting up there, then? Yes, indeed, said Rexh. When the drangojt had defeated the dragon, then he would go away and we would see the sun again. All the world, he said, would be taken by the dragon, and we would never see the sun again, if it were not for the brave drangojt. Once the dragon had almost taken the world—that was when the waters fell and the seas were born—and only the drangojt of Dukaghini had saved it then. That was long ago. “Long, long years of years ago,” said Rexh. “I guess, even before these tribes of people and drangojt were ever called Dukaghini.” At that time, the dragon had lost his three heads, and that was why there never since had been such a battle in the skies.
“How do you know all this, Rexh?” we asked, respectfully.
“It was told in the songs,” said he.