“Only once—a year or two ago. I discovered three of your compatriots poking about in the rocks and chipping little pieces off. I had them captured, and brought to me. At first I thought I would hold them to ransom and make the Turks pay. But they were evidently poor fellows, for their clothes were worn almost to rags, and they had very little money. So I gave them their money back and sent them with an escort down to the plain, forbidding them to enter our country again. I wonder why they came, and why they were chipping the rocks?”
I told him that they were evidently mining prospectors; that Englishmen travelled all over the world to discover minerals; and that a mine in his country would be a source of great wealth. But my explanation did not appeal to him. He could not see why they were chipping off those pieces of rock. It was not flint, otherwise they might have wanted them for gun-locks. No, the trio were distinctly suspicious characters, and he was glad that he had expelled them.
“Have you ever held Englishmen to ransom?” I inquired.
“One. Five years ago. He came here shooting—after bears, I think. He was evidently a great gentleman, for his guns were beautiful. The Turks paid promptly.”
“Because he was an Englishman—eh?”
“Most probably,” he laughed. “Are they afraid of you English as they are afraid of us?”
And soon afterwards he bade me good-night, and left me to throw myself down upon my mattress of leaves and listen to the snoring of Palok and the assembled family in the adjoining room.
I had thought Skodra barbaric, but here I was in an utterly unknown corner of the earth, in an absolutely savage land—a land that knows no law and acknowledges no master; a land that is the same to-day as it was in the days of Diocletian and of Constantine the Great—Albania the Unchanging.
Among the Skreli: Lûk (first on the right) and his friends.