While our fellow-travellers were squabbling, arguing, shouting, and cursing the wild, dirty mob who now filled the Custom House, we, with our baggage—canvas bags, specially made to sling on mules for mountain travelling—ascended into the mustard-coloured conveyance and were driven along a country lane, very English in its appearance, with bramble hedgerows and ditches; yet the high, thin minaret of a mosque before us, and the carefully latticed windows of a house, preventing the women-folk from being seen from the roadway, and giving the place an air of mystery, showed us to be in the land of His Majesty the Sultan—in Albania the Unknown.
CHAPTER II
WHERE LIFE IS CHEAP
Fired at in the street of Skodra—My comfortless inn—Panorama of life—Armed bands of wild mountaineers in the streets—The Sign of the Cross—Scutarine people—The fascination of Skodra—In the den of my friend Salko—Making purchases—Short shrift with swindlers—Some genuine antiques—Ragged and shoeless soldiers of the Sultan—Men shot in the blood-feud—“It is nothing!”
I had not been in Skodra half an hour before a man fired at me with his revolver.
It was my welcome to Albania, and I confess that I drew my own weapon from my belt, prepared to defend myself.
I had arrived at the han, or inn, a poor place dignified by the name of Hôtel de l’Europe, washed, and descended to the street, when, on emerging from the doorway, somebody fired his pistol right in my face. The flash startled me, and in an instant I was on my guard with my back to the wall. In that brief second all that I had heard of the insecurity of Albania flashed back.
My assailant—a tall, ragged-looking, middle-aged Turk in a scarlet fez—laughed in my face and uttered some words that I did not understand. He saw my weapon shining in the dim light, and pushed it away with a laugh. His manner struck me as friendly, so I dropped my arm; whereupon another man, in passing, also fired, then another and another, until, ten seconds later, everybody in the street was firing indiscriminately, and bullets were flying in all directions.
In Skodra.