“All that is true, Mrs. Lane. But I think it best for me to come with you,” said Rexh, inflexibly. And because I really had no strength for combating such determination, I got up and went on, the Shala man going before, with my pack protected by a poncho on his back, and Rexh following after.
We climbed up cliffs and lowered ourselves down them; we slipped and slid and jumped down more little waterfalls; we waded knee-deep streams and struggled over decomposed shale that clutched at our feet like sand; we came down a switchback trail to the banks of the Lumi Shala, and the Shala man carried me across it, on top of his pack. It was all like a nightmare, of which I remember clearly only my thirst. Though I was as wet as anything that lives in the sea, I could not get enough to drink, and every one of the millions of springs invited my drinking cup. Rexh, whose endless task was to fill it for me, protested. “In the rains, the water makes you sick,” he said. “It turns to knives inside you. You will be sick, Mrs. Lane.”
He was the funniest figure you can imagine, in a suit of striped American flannelette pajamas and the red fez that poured a dozen little wavering streams of dye over his forehead and down his cheeks.
If I were in France, I knew, the doctors would put me in a hot room with all the windows closed, and insist that I must not have much water. In America I would be given fresh air and water, and bathed to keep down the fever. Well, I was in Albania, and I reasoned that, if I was to have pneumonia, I might as well have it on the mountain trails as in a cold, wet house, and when I got to Scutari I could be as ill as I liked, with very little bother to anybody.
“If the water makes me sick, Rexh, and if I become gogoli, with a wild spirit of the mountains entered into me, you are not to mind,” I said. “You are to get me down to Scutari somehow; above all things, do not let me stay in a native house.”
“Yes, Mrs. Lane.” Then we began to climb up the next mountain, and, kneeling on a bowlder above me to help pull me up its side, Rexh said: “Your hand is like a hot coal, Mrs. Lane, and this is not such a very big bowlder. I think we must get a mooshk.”
“What is a mooshk?”
“He is what you ride on. I forget the English word—with long ears and very little feet.”
“A mule?”
“Yes, that is it. We must get a mule for you to ride.”