An Observer in the Near East

by William Le Queux

“Rok, here, is of the Skreli, a fearless fighter of the Turks and one of my best friends,” Salko went on to explain. “I have told him of your earnest desire to go and see our country; that you are neither Austrian nor Italian, but English and not a spy. Our friend is returning to-day, and has promised to speak to Vatt Marashi, our chief, on your behalf.”

“Tell the honourable Englishman that if he comes to us he must be prepared for a rough life. We live in the mountains,” Rok said through the interpreter, laughing pleasantly as he lit the cigarette he took from my case.

Coffee was brought, and we sealed our compact of friendliness.

If Vatt Marashi, the renowned chieftain who so often held travellers to ransom, and whose influence was so dreaded by the Turks, consented to allow me to visit him, then Rok would return, he promised, and be my guide.

For half an hour we chatted and smoked. Then the burly mountaineer rose, slung his rifle over his shoulder, touched chin and brow again, grasped my hand warmly, and stalked out on his three days’ tramp to the wild region in the mountain mists that was his home.

I waited on in Skodra, and, to my great delight, he one morning reappeared with a message from his chief that, providing I took only Palok, and had no escort, he would be pleased to welcome me and show me all the hospitality in his power. I need fear nothing, it was added. I was to be guest of Vatt Marashi, chief of the Skreli. He had issued the order to the tribe. Any who dared to insult or injure me should pay for it with their life. Therefore I should be given safe-conduct, and need not have a moment’s anxiety.

By this, Palok, who had been entirely opposed to the attempt, became reassured, and soon after noon, with a mule packed with my lightest baggage, we set our faces out across the great rolling plain that lies between the town and the high wall of blue distant mountains—the wildest corner of all Europe. They are a series of fastnesses, in which any small army would at once be massacred and where a large one would starve.

We were a merry trio as we marched forward in the bright autumn sunlight, but about a kilometre beyond the town the road ended in a ford, where we crossed a wide shallow river, and then straight across the plain and past several tumuli to where a defile showed in the mountains. The ancient Bridge of Messi, built under the Venetian dominion, was crossed, and then we had our first experience of the road in Albania—a rough, narrow way gradually ascending, almost too bad even for mules.

Nobody who has not visited Northern Albania can have any idea of the wildness of those bare grey rocks, of the roughness of the tracks, or the savagery of life there. Northern Albania is to-day just as it was under the Roman Empire. The might of Rome has waned, the Servian has come and gone, the Venetian has been swept away, and the Turk is now nominally master. But the country has never, through all the centuries, been annexed, and those wild tribes, descendants of the savage people who inhabited those fastnesses before the days of Greek dominion, have never been tamed. The Northern Albanian is the last survivor of mediæval days. He has no written language—indeed, his alphabet, with its many soft and hard “ssh” sounds, has never yet been determined—therefore he has no literature and no newspaper. Thin, wiry, and muscular, he wears raw-hide slippers, in which he moves with cat-like, stealthy tread—a habit survived from prehistoric days—while his very dress is protective, rendering him at a short distance difficult to discern, so like is he in colour to the rocky background. He looks as though he had just stepped down from a mediæval Florentine fresco, with his head half-shaven, hair long at the back and cut square across the shoulders.

He is entirely unchanged ever since the Turk found him, except that of late he has adopted the breech-loading rifle and a particularly heavy pattern of revolver. The black furry bolero which he wears, without exception, is the sign of mourning for his great prince, Skender Beg, who died in 1467, after being at war with the Turks for over twenty years; therefore with him fashions do not easily change, and “latest novelties” in dress are unknown. Great are the changes that have come over the world during the past thousand years or so, but Northern Albania has remained unaffected by them, and is still in a measure in the lowest depths of barbarism. The Turk does not rule. The wild, inaccessible country is under the various independent tribes, ruled by a chieftain according to unwritten laws which have been handed down orally from remote ages, and one of the fiercest and most independent of these chiefs was Vatt Marashi, the man whose guest I now was to be.