In Podgoritza, in Cettinje, in Skodra, and in Djakova I had heard terrible stories of this fighting race, and of Vatt’s fierce hatred of the Turks. Yet everyone had told me that, the chief having invited me, I need have not a moment’s apprehension of my personal safety.
So I went forward, reassured, to meet my host.
Half an hour later I came face to face with real brigands—brigands who looked like an illustration out of a boy’s story-book—the men who had so often held up travellers and compelled the Turkish Government to pay heavy ransoms.
They were about twenty, certainly the fiercest and most bloodthirsty gang I have ever set my eyes upon. Dressed in the usual skin-tight white woollen trousers with broad black bands running down the legs, a short white jacket, also black-braided, the sleeveless woolly bolero of mourning, hide shoes with uppers consisting of a network of string, and small white skullcaps, each man carried in his belt a great silver-mounted pistol of antique type and a silver-sheathed curved knife, while around both shoulders were well-filled bandoliers, and in the hand of each a rifle. Like Rok, the heads of all were shaved, leaving a long tuft at the back in the mediæval Florentine style.
With one accord they all raised their rifles aloft and shouted me welcome, whereupon one man stepped forward—a big, muscular fellow with handsome face and proud gait—the great chief Vatt Marashi himself.
Attired very much as his followers, his dress was richer, the jacket being ornamented with gold braid. The silver hilt of his pistol was studded with coral and green stones, probably emeralds, but he carried no rifle. Jauntily, and laughing merrily, he approached me and bent until his forehead touched mine—the Skreli sign of welcome.
And all this in Europe in the twentieth century!
Was I dreaming? Was it real? I was the guest of actual brigands, those men about whom I had read in story-books ever since those long-ago days when the weekly Boys of England formed my chief literature.
Vatt Marashi, holding my hand the while, addressed me. What he said was interpreted into Italian by Palok as—
“You are welcome here to my country—very welcome. And you are an Englishman, and have travelled so far to see us! It is wonderful—wonderful! You live so far away—farther than Constantinople, they say. Well, I cannot give you much here or make you very comfortable—not so comfortable as you have been down in Skodra. But I will do my best. Come—let us eat.”