An Observer in the Near East

by William Le Queux

Another after another—shopkeepers, all of them in the same category as Salko himself—was interviewed. Those who offered rubbish were promptly ordered out. And so, before me, seated upon my box, was unfolded the treasures of the bazaar.

And assuredly some of the curios offered were fit to grace any museum. Seldom does a foreigner visit Skodra, therefore it still contains many real antiques; and there being no sale for them, prices are not exorbitant. It is, indeed, one of the few places left where one can obtain anything worth having.

A long, lean Christian, in his flat round fez and enormous tassel, offered me nine early Greek gold coins that had only a week before been discovered in a tomb. I doubted the tomb part of the story, but I was afterwards shown it half a mile away, and could also have bought the actual vase in which they had been found. I am not a collector of coins, so I declined them. One day, however, those coins will, no doubt, find their way into one of our European national collections, for they were so perfect that they looked as though just fresh from the matrix.

I was turning over in my hand a number of antique gem rings, when of a sudden, just outside, not a dozen yards from where I sat, there was a loud shout, followed by a pistol-shot. Then more shouting, and a little crowd gathered. In alarm I sprang to my feet, and I saw outside a mountaineer, in white felt skullcap, lying in a pool of blood with part of his face blown away.

A man in black-and-white trousers stalked past, flourishing his big pistol and threatening to shoot anybody who dared to stop him. He was the assassin.

“It is nothing, signore,” Palok declared, reseating himself. “Only the blood-feud. The men were in sangue, and have met. In such cases one must always die. The man who shoots first gets the best of it,” and he grinned.

For fully five minutes the man lay in the filthy gutter without a hand being placed upon him to see if life were extinct. Then it occurred to somebody to see. He was pronounced dead, and a couple of men carried away the corpse. No police or guard put in an appearance, and the life of the bazaar went on as though nothing unusual had happened.

But nothing unusual had happened. Such assassinations occur every day, and nobody takes any heed of them. The blood-feud is part of the Albanian creed, both Mohammedan and Christian.

It is not, however, pleasant to have a man shot dead before one’s eyes, nor does it tend to inspire confidence in one’s own personal safety.

This was my first experience of the murderous instinct of the wild Albanian, but ere three days I had still other opportunities of reflecting upon Palok’s remark that Skodra was not so safe a place as it looked.