Peaks of Shala

Rose Wilder Lane

THE ROLLER THAT IS SMOOTHING THE NEW BOULEVARD IN TIRANA

Peaks of Shala

By
Rose Wilder Lane

Profusely Illustrated by Photographs taken on a Special Expedition to Albania

Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
MCMXXIII

Peaks of Shala

Copyright, 1923
By Rose Wilder Lane
Printed in the U.S.A.

D-X

To My Mother
Laura Ingalls Wilder

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

I would not have this book considered too seriously. It is not an attempt to untangle one thread in the Balkan snarl; it is not a study of primitive peoples; it is not a contribution to the world’s knowledge, and I hope no one will read it to improve the mind. It should be read as the adventures in it were lived, with a gayly inquiring mind, a taste for strange peoples and unknown trails, and a delight in the unexpected.

Here I give you only what I saw, felt, and most casually learned while adventuring among the tribes in the interior northern Albanian mountains. It is not even all of Albania, that little country too small to be found on every map. It is simply a fragment of this large, various, and romantic world, sent back by a traveler to those who stay at home.

R. W. L.

Annette Marquis accompanied the author on her trip through Albania and it is to her skill that the photographs are due.

Peaks of Shala

CHAPTER I

SHADOWS ON SCUTARI PLAIN—THE VOICE IN THE CHAFA BISHKASIT—THE LANDS OF THE HIDDEN TRIBES—A WOMAN OF SHALA.

When the sun rose over the blue, snow-crested mountains that are the southernmost slopes of the Dinaric Alps, it made, on the Scutari plain, a pattern of our shadows; shadows of four small wooden-saddled ponies, each led by a mountaineer with a rifle on his back, of two tall, ragged gendarmes, and of a small trudging boy in a red Turkish fez—all moving single file across an interminable plain shaggy with blossoming cactus.

The wooden saddles were three-sided boxes made of peeled branches; padded beneath with sheepskins, they fitted over the ponies’ backs. On top of them our blankets were packed; saddlebags hung from the four corners; enthroned in the midst we rode, comfortable as in an easy-chair, sitting sidewise, our knees crossed, smoking cigarettes and rocking gently with the ponies’ pace. And all this was to me an enchantment suddenly appearing above the surface of well-arranged days, as new South Sea islands rise before a mariner in hitherto familiar waters.

Three days earlier the mountains of Albania, indeed, Albania itself, had been unknown to me, and disregarded. I had meant to go by Scutari as a hurried walker brushes by the stranger on the street. Scutari had been merely a place to pass on the way from Podgoritza to Constantinople. And now, in this brightening dawn upon the Scutari plain, I was riding to unknown adventure among the hidden tribes of Dukaghini.

This was the doing of Frances Hardy. That impetuous and efficient girl had seized upon me and my small affairs as six months earlier she had seized upon the refugee situation in Scutari, taking control, making adjustment, creating a new pattern. A thin, athletic, sun-browned girl, so full of energy that her very finger tips seemed to crackle electrically—that was Frances Hardy. An Albaniac, I called her at our first meeting, perceiving that one might disagree with her, argue with her, even poke fun at her, and still be her friend. She had seized on the word with delight—the perfect word, she said—and had returned at once to her attack.

“Constantinople’s nothing. Everyone goes to Constantinople. But if you don’t see Albania, you’re wasting the chance of a lifetime. Up in those mountains—right up there in those mountains, a day’s journey from here—the people are living as they lived twenty centuries ago, before the Greek or the Roman or the Slav was ever known. There are prehistoric cities up there, old legends, songs, customs that no one knows anything about. No stranger’s ever even seen them. Great Scott, woman! And you sit there and talk about Constantinople!”

“But if nobody goes there, how can we do so?” I said.

“How does anyone ever do anything? Simply do it. Hire horses, get on them, and go.”

“Carrying our own guns?”

“Oh, we’ll be safe enough! We may run into a blood feud or two, and get our guides shot up, but nobody ever harms a woman. Nobody even shoots a man in her presence.”

“She means no Albanian ever does,” said Alex.

“Bless ’em!” said Frances, and added, in Albanian, “Glory to their feet!”

I had the vaguest notion of Albania. I knew it was the smallest and newest member of the League of Nations; I knew it was in the Balkan wars, and I knew that recently the Albanians had driven from their shores the Italian army of occupation. If some one, testing my intelligence or psycho-analyzing, had said to me, “Albanians,” I should have replied, “Bandits.”

But Frances Hardy is irresistible in more ways than one. Therefore, on this spring morning, while mists rose slowly from the blue waters of Lake Scutari and the shadows of the mountains retreated from its shores, we were riding northward toward the lands of the mountain tribes.

There were four of us, not counting our retainers. No, five, for at the last moment small, chubby-cheeked Rexh,[1] in his red Mohammedan fez, had gravely engaged Frances Hardy in argument as to the desirability of his accompanying us. Twelve years old, a stanch Mohammedan, self-adopted father of seven smaller refugee children for whom he maintained a family life in a hut he had found, he had made all arrangements for the trip without consulting us. He said that he had never seen the mountains and that he thought it necessary to learn about them as part of the education of a good Albanian. He pointed out that he spoke excellent English, which he had learned in some three months of association with Miss Hardy, and that he would be valuable as an interpreter. It was true that we had one interpreter, but there were six men and many saddlebags; he would keep an eye upon them all. The care of his children he had arranged for; as to the Mohammedan school in which he was a pupil, it taught him nothing; he would take a vacation from it. He would be of use to us upon the trip; the trip would be of value to him. Having said this, he gravely awaited Miss Hardy’s decision. When she said, “All right, Rexh,” he permitted himself to smile and looked over the packs, suggesting some changes that would make us more comfortable. He now walked behind Miss Hardy’s pony, a pistol and a knife in the belt of his American pajama coat.

Our interpreter was also a friend; Rrok Perolli, secretary to the Albanian Minister of the Interior. He was on a vacation, he said, but as the northern interior tribes were antagonistic to the new government, it might be as well not to mention who he was. We were going very near to the Serbian lines; he had recently escaped from sentence of death in a Serbian prison; there was a price on his head in Serbia. It would be easy for one of the tribes to hand him across the line. They could not kill him in our presence, of course, but, once out of our sight, they could in ten minutes find Serbians who would do it for them.

He was a care-free young man, black haired, dark eyed, dressed in the smartest of English tweed suits, with a businesslike revolver and one of the handiest of daggers swinging in leather holsters at the belt. His father was a merchant in Ipek, rich territory now held by the Serbs; the son had been educated in London, Berlin, and Paris, and spoke their languages as well as his own Albanian, also Serbian, Italian, Turkish, and Greek. He enlivened the morning with songs in all these languages, illustrating a running discussion of comparative music. Swaying gently on his pony’s back, he sniffed the sweet air, cool from the waters of Lake Scutari; he gazed cheerfully at the blue hills beyond the lake, held by the Serbian armies; he was altogether the happy office man off for a lazy vacation. Just the same, I wondered a bit, taking everything into consideration. It cannot be said that I was entirely unprepared for the interesting developments before us.

Fourth in our party was Alex. Sunshiny hair, softly fluffed; wide blue eyes; and that complexion of pink and white, like roses painted on a china plate, that drives a dagger of envy into every feminine heart and makes the fortunes of cosmetic makers. She wore a purple tam, a leaf-brown sweater with a purple tie, and the trimmest of riding trousers; she looked like a magazine cover. She was in reality the most hard-headed, soberly sensible of girls; to her finger tips an anti-Potterite. She and Frances were going into the mountains to decide where to establish three schools. They had themselves collected in America the money for them, and this was their vacation from Red Cross work.

At about noon we left the plain, and almost at once our ponies began to stand up like pet dogs begging for cake, their hind legs supporting their weight while front hoofs pawed for foothold above on the stairlike, rocky trail. An Albanian held each of us tightly by elbow or knee, ready to save us from squashy death if the pony lost its balance, and as the little animals strained, clambered, gathered their feet together for desperate leaps, a sudden long high wail broke forth ahead. The two gendarmes were singing.

Walking easily up a trail that I could have overcome only on hands and knees, carrying their rifles and twenty pounds of canned goods on their backs, they were merrily singing. Thumbs pressed tightly against their ears, to prevent the air pressure of their lungs from bursting ear drums, they sent far over the crags the long, shrill, high notes, like nothing human I had ever heard. Frances Hardy, lying almost perpendicular along her pony’s back, her chin on what would have been the saddle pommel had there been one, looked downward at me, similarly extended.

“They’re making a song to the Chafa Bishkasit, the Road of the Mountaineers,” she said. “That’s the Chafa up there. We’re going over it to-day, and then we’ll be in the mountains. Aren’t you happy?”

I could find no word emphatic enough for reply as I gazed up at the tiny notch in a wave of snow-crest that curled against the sky five thousand feet above us.

The sun swung to its highest and sank again while we climbed. It was low in the sky—it seemed on a level with us—when we made the last interminable hundred yards up into the Chafa Bishkasit. We were in the sky; there is no other way to say it, and no way in which to describe that sensation of infinite airiness. Forty miles behind and below us Lake Scutari lay flat, like a pool of mercury on a gray-brown floor. At each side of our little gay-colored cavalcade a gray cliff rose perhaps two hundred feet, too sheer to hold the snow that thickly crusted its top. These cliffs were the posts of a gateway through which we looked into the country of the hidden tribes.

I had never seen or dreamed such mountains. Like thin, sharp rocks stood on edge, they covered hundreds of miles with every variation of light and shadow, and we looked across their tops to a far-away wave of snow that broke high against the sky. The depths between the mountains were hazy blue; out of the blueness sharp cliffs and huge flat slopes of rock thrust upward, streaked with the rose and purple and Chinese green of decomposing shale, and from their tops a thousand streams poured downward, threading them with silver white. A low, continuous murmur rose to us—the sound of innumerable waterfalls, softened by immeasurable distances.

Suddenly, clear and very far and thin, a call came out of the spaces. It was like a fife, and yet not like it. Instantly our guides were still, attentive. A moment of silence, and farther and thinner, hardly to be heard above the beating of blood in our ears, there was an answer. Then the first note began again and went on and on; there seemed to be a pattern to it, not a tune—words? I looked at the others.

Rrok Perolli was motionless, a cigarette between his lips, his hand arrested in the act of striking a match. Little Rexh, his round face intent beneath the red fez, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide and blank, was an image of concentrated listening. The two gendarmes stood alert, like dogs straining at a leash, scenting something. Our four guides, in their long white trousers, black jackets, colored turbans and sashes, were like men frozen in attitudes of interrupted talk.

THE CHAFA BISHKASIT
The “Road of the Mountaineer”—the gateway to the northern lands.

The voice ceased. The other one came back like an echo, so faint I thought I imagined it. Then—Bang! Bang! Bang! The very mountains lifted up their voices and roared. It was like the cataclysm at the end of the world; mountain striking against mountain, the air smashed like glass and falling, clattering. Rrok Perolli lighted his cigarette. The others shifted their rifles, tightened their sashes, said “Hite!” to the horses, and we started on. All around us the echoes were still contending, striking and breaking against one another like ore in a mill.

“What was it?” I cried to Perolli, whose horse was slipping down the trail ahead, kept from going headlong by its owner, who held it by the tail, bracing his bare feet on every foothold.

“Telephoning,” said Perolli. “It’s the way they send news through the mountains. A man on one of the peaks calls, and another one somewhere hears him and answers. You’ve seen ’em hold their ears and throw their voices. That’s it. And three shots to show that the talk’s ended.”

“What was he saying?”

“Something about Shala. Shala and Shoshi are in blood, evidently.”

“Do we go through those tribes?”

My horse slipped just then and a man snatched me from the saddle. The horse, held by the tail, floundered on the trail, striking sparks from his hoofs, shod with solid thin plates of steel; the packs went over his head. My man set me on a shoulder-high rock and dashed to aid the rescue. It looked for a moment as though they would all go down upon Perolli below, but the horse got his footing and stood trembling, his head covered with streaming blankets.

I said then that I would walk, but it was not walking. It was jumping, scrambling, dropping. Those mountains were evidently created to be looked at, not to be walked upon. Bathed in perspiration, I stopped from time to time to eat a bit of snow, and twelve-year-old Rexh looked at me with compassion. He had walked nearly twenty miles that day and was still gay and fresh; the men were still singing.

“In a minute, Mrs. Lane, we will come to a resting place,” the pitying Rexh encouraged me, and in perhaps half an hour my trembling legs brought me around a bowlder to see the two gendarmes stopped in the trail, crossing themselves. A wooden cross, blackened by storms and years, leaned forward above them, supported by a pile of stones on a small grassy knoll. Alex and Frances dropped from their ponies to lie panting beside me on the grass, while the guides, smiling at our whim, stopped also. Each of them crossed himself before sitting down, for the mountain tribes have been Catholic almost ever since St. Paul preached in the Balkans, and missionary priests have put the cross at each resting place on the trails, to bring thoughts of God to weary men.

Below our feet the cliffs fell away, down into blue haze; above us were forested slopes, and above them sheer, great cliffs throwing shadows across a dozen valleys. Our small grassy knoll was white with daisies and with fallen petals from a blossoming apple tree that arched above the cross. On it our men lay at ease, beautiful, graceful animals, their rifles swung from their shoulders and laid ready to their hands.

“Why are Shala and Shoshi in blood?” Frances asked, casually, biting idly at the stem of a daisy. Perolli did not know; he had gathered only the fact that there was a feud.

“Do we go through both tribes?” I wanted to know.

“Through Shala. Shoshi’s farther down the river. We’ll go around it.”

“Are our men Shala or Shoshi?”

Perolli glanced at them. “Shala, by the pattern of the braiding on their trousers. So we won’t have any troub——Hello! That’s a Shoshi man coming up the trail, now.”

It was Alex who acted quickest. She was sitting on a rock beside me, her arms clasped about her knees; she rose instantly and, flinging out a hand in the gesture of greeting, cried in her most feminine voice those Albanian words that sound like, “Tune yet yetta!” and mean, “May you live long!”

The Shoshi man’s hand was on his rifle, but his step had not faltered. He replied, coming on steadily, and the appropriateness of the greeting struck me, for if it had not been uttered by a woman he would at that moment have been dead. Our Shala men, with perfect courtesy, went through the formalities of greeting on the trail, and this is the form, translated to me by Rexh:

“Long life to you!”

“And to you, long life!”

“How could you?” meaning, “How could you get here?”

“Slowly, slowly, little by little.”

No one who has ever seen those trails can doubt it.

The Shoshi man sat down, our men offered him cigarettes, and up the trail came a woman of Shoshi. She wore a tight, bell-shaped skirt of horizontal black and white stripes, made of cloth heavier and thicker than felt, the twelve-inch-wide marriage belt of heavy leather studded with pounds of nails, and a jacket covered with three-inch-thick fringe. Two heavy braids of black hair hung forward on her breasts, a colored handkerchief was bound around her head, and her face, smoothly weather browned, large eyed, delicately shaped, was the most beautiful that I had ever seen. On her back, held by woven woolen straps that crossed between her breasts, was a cradle tightly covered by a thick blanket; in one hand she held a bunch of raw wool, and from the other dangled a whirling spindle. Her feet were bare, and as she came up that trail which had exhausted me she sang softly to herself, dexterously spinning thread from the bunch of wool.

Cheremi, our gayer gendarme, rose quickly and went to meet her. He took her by the hand and laid his cheek caressingly against hers. He was like a child, Cheremi, with his happy face, deep wrinkled with laughter, the mischievous twinkle in his eyes, his bursts of wit and song. But he looked all of his forty years as he gazed tenderly at the woman of Shoshi.

“She is a woman of my people,” he said, leading her gallantly to us.

“Are you a woman?” said Frances Hardy, correctly, in Albanian.

“I am born of Shala, married in Shoshi,” she answered. Her voice was soft, and her hands and feet would have been madness to a sculptor. In any Paris restaurant those slender fingers, almond nails, and delicate wrists, aristocratic, well bred, would have been a sensation.

We admired the baby, excavating it from five folds of blankets to do so. How they live beneath the smothering I do not know; a Western baby would die in three hours. We asked the mother how old she was. Eighteen, she said, and she had been married three years.

“And have you been home since?”

“Ah no,” she said, with a wistful smile.

“Born in Shala,” said Cheremi. “But she was married in Shoshi, and in Shoshi she will die.”

“I wonder what she thinks of us,” I said, for, though she must have felt great curiosity about these strange beings, dropped apparently from the sky upon her well-known trails, she did not reveal it by the flicker of an eyelash, and she asked no questions. It was we who were so rude.

“How old do you think we are?” Frances asked her. She looked at us candidly beneath her long lashes.

“How can I say?” she answered. “I cannot read or write; I am stupid; I gather wood.”

The Shoshi man now rose, slinging his rifle back on his shoulder, and said farewell. “Go on a smooth trail,” said our men, his blood enemies, who must have killed him at sight if no woman had been there, and he went on up the trail without turning his head, the woman following him.

“Well, we must be getting on,” said Perolli. “We’ve a long way to go, and we ought to get in before dark.” And he showed us, far away across the darkening valley, the white dot that was the priest’s house where we were to spend the night.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Rexh—pronounced Redge.

CHAPTER II

TRAILS OF THE MOUNTAINEERS—THE MAN OF IPEK KILLS HIS DONKEY—THE HOUSE OF THE BISHOP OF PULTIT—MARRIAGE BY THE LAW OF LEC—THE BLOOD FEUD BETWEEN SHALA AND SHOSHI.

Darkness was creeping up the slopes like a rising flood from the valleys, and it had engulfed the trails long before we made the descent into the village of Gjoanni, which I may as well say at once is pronounced Zhwanee. Not that we were thinking about such far-away things as written words. Everything that makes our ordinary lives was already as far from us as another planet. It was as though we had dropped through a hole in time and fallen into the days when men were wild creatures in the forests.

One reads in books of dizzying trails twelve inches wide, on which travelers cling precariously between the sky and sudden death. Long before dense darkness had risen to meet the shadow of the mountain wall between us and the rest of the world we would have welcomed a twelve-inch trail as though it were the Champs-Elysées. We were in a land where a twelve-inch trail is to the people what the Twentieth Century Limited is to America.

My memories become incoherent here. I recall a thousand-foot slide of decomposed shale, the color of an American Beauty rose. The flakes of it were as large as a thumb-nail, and the mass of them tilted at surely thirty-five degrees, sloping to a sheer cliff that dropped I cannot say how far. The stone houses looked like children’s blocks at the bottom of it. Across this we made our way on foot, and at every step a considerable quantity of the shale sped away beneath the pressure and plumped over the edge. The fourth time I slipped I remained on my hands and knees; it seemed simpler. And for something like a century I had the sensation a squirrel must have in a revolving cage—steadily clawing upward and making no progress in that direction. But sidewise, crablike, I did eventually come out on the other side and into the waterfall.

The waterfall was called a river. It was about two thousand feet long, and stood on end. About every three feet it struck a bowlder as large as an office desk, and leaped into the air until it hit the next one. The shale was wet with spray for several yards. The water between three bowlders, where we crossed, was a little more than knee deep, and there was nothing whatever leisurely about its progress. I try to be calm about it; I tried to be calm then.

The horses went across first, four men to each horse. One gripped a rope tied about its neck, one firmly held the tail, two stood downstream and leaned their weight against the saddle. Then the men carried across the packs and their trousers, which they had taken off so that they should not get wet. Then they quite simply picked us up, slung us across their shoulders, and took us over.

It is a strange sensation, being a bag of meal hanging over a muscular back, clutched firmly around the knees, green water roaring at toes and chin, white spray choking and blinding you, and a thousand feet of hungry bowlders waiting below for your bones. In the middle my man stopped, braced himself, and shifted me to his other shoulder. Then he shouted, and another man came out above us and held his free hand to steady him through the worst of the current.

After we were all over, the men clasped their ears, sent an exuberant call out through the twilight, were answered from the far distances, fired all their guns several times in joyous unison, and then, slinging them back on their shoulders, went on blithely.

They went on blithely into such a rain as I had never supposed could be. Around the shoulder of the mountain we walked into it, as one walks into a shower bath—scattering drops on the fringes of it so few that they did not break the shock of its impact. Water fell upon us suddenly; our piteous gasps and small cries of protesting misery were muffled by the sound of its pouring on the rocks. In an instant rivulets of chilly water were wandering over shrinking skin from soggy mufflers to filling shoes, and there was no longer gayety in the world. Even the Albanians were gloomy, occupied with the task of keeping the slipping horses on the trail. In a few moments we had left their struggles behind us.

We climbed doggedly, in silence. Only the swishing of the relentless rain and the clicking of our staffs on the rocks made little noises against the distant roaring of waterfalls. By some trick of light reflected from peak or cloud, the trail and the valley below it were visible in a green-gray ghost of daylight, which made us seem unreal even to ourselves. And we climbed, interminably, forever, putting one foot before the other with the patient deep attentiveness of trudging animals, while rain dripped unheeded from forehead to cheek to chin. We climbed, absorbed in detail of slippery shale and stubborn bowlder, till Perolli’s exclamation shocked us as though a rock had spoken.

We must wait for our men, he said, and we dropped where we stood and sat soddenly. To light a cigarette was as impossible to us in that rain as to a swimmer under water. We sat and looked at one another, and laughed aloud, and were silent again. The horses came past us at last, each held by halter and by tail, and slowly they struggled over the crest of the mountain and disappeared. We should go on, Perolli said, and we murmured assent, but still we sat. When a stranger appeared on the trail against the gray sky we moved only our eyes to look at him.

He was a young man, dark eyed and handsome, but haggard. Besides the rifle on his back was strapped a small baby. The little head, uncovered, streaming with water, appeared above the thick woolen-fringed collar of the man’s black jacket. The baby’s mouth was open, drawn into a square of misery, but no sound came from it. The man’s jacket had been darned and darned again, till no thread of the original weaving was visible; his white homespun woolen trousers, hung low on the hips, were worn so thin that the darns no longer held together, and tatters fell around his bare ankles, above feet wrapped in rags. The remnants of black braiding on his trousers were of a pattern I had not seen before; I could not guess his tribe. Behind him a shapeless bundle of household goods moved slowly on the tiny hoofs of a donkey, and the little beast’s drooping ears and nose almost touched the trail.

“Long may you live!” And when he had returned the greeting we continued the courteous formula. “How could you get here?”

“Slowly, slowly, little by little.”

“Are you a man?”

“I am a man of Kossova, of the district of Ipek,” he answered, and it was not necessary to say more, for the Serbs hold Ipek. The memory of their taking it moved like a darkening shadow over his face, and it is best to ignore such memories.

Yet there was a little hope in his vague voice. He was going, he said, in search of a farm on which he could live. He had tried to live in the Shala country, but it was impossible there. There was too little land for the tribe of Shala, and the making of land is slow among mountains where stone walls must be built to catch the little earth that remains when rain melts limestone. He had heard that in the valley of Scutari there was soil, as there had been in Kossova, and his voice sank into silence as though it were a burden too heavy to lift.

But he tried to make the baby smile for the American zonyas. The baby, too exhausted to cry any longer, was equally unable to smile, and this last baffled effort suddenly became rage. It was only a twist of the haggard face, an explosion in the depths of the man’s spirit, and, like an explosion, it was over before we saw it, leaving on our eyeballs a picture of something that no longer existed.

“He has a beautiful smile,” the father said, apologetically, “very beautiful,” and he took up his rifle.

“Long may you live,” we said. “Go on a smooth trail.”

In a moment the rain had blurred the figures of the man and the tiny donkey, moving slowly down the mountain side.

We wiped the streaming wet from our faces with water-withered hands, picked up our staffs, and drove our bodies again to their task of climbing. The burden of the world’s helplessness in misery was heavier on our spirits than the weight of water-soaked woolen on exhausted muscles. Why should man toil over such heart-breaking trails, endure and struggle through such sufferings, only to keep alight a little fire of life, when life means only suffering and painful effort? The rifle-shot which interrupted the question seemed an answer to it. We stopped, and the same thought was in all our eyes while we waited for the echoes of the shot to roll away like thunder among the cliffs.

Then Cheremi pressed his thumbs tightly against his ears and sent down the trail the wild high note of the “telephone call.” He waited, repeated it, repeated it once more. An answer came.

The man of Ipek had killed his donkey. It had slipped from the trail; it would not try to get up. And there on the mountain side, five hours from shelter, with night upon them, he had killed it.

“I wish you blind!” Cheremi called through the rain, and fired his rifle to end the talk.

We must help the man, we said. We must do something. But Cheremi and Perolli, in whom also weariness had become anger, went on over the ridge of the mountain, and we followed them. It was true; what could we do? We could not carry the donkey’s pack, the only goods left to the man of Ipek.

In half an hour we met a beautiful girl. Her hazel eyes and chestnut hair shone through the grayness of the rain, a wide silver-studded marriage belt held the dripping tatters of a Shala dress about her slender body, and her ankles were white above delicate feet bruised by the trails. She drove before her six starveling goats that constantly tried to evade her; they were traveling strange trails and wanted to turn homeward.

“Long may you live!” she murmured, anxiously urging them forward with her staff, while we climbed the bowlders above the trail to let them pass. Cheremi bent to take her hand and lay his cheek against hers, and for an instant there was a beautiful smile on her lovely troubled face. When she was gone we continued to sit, gazing into the valley. Far below us, below jagged cliffs as vague as clouds, below tortured trees from which every bough had been hacked to feed hungry flocks, below slopes of bowlders which ran down into darkness, lights were already gleaming. A thousand feet above them on the other side of the valley the white speck of the priest’s house promised us rest and warmth.

“But we must wait here,” said Perolli, surprised by our impatience. “The woman is the wife of the man of Ipek, and she is a Shala woman. He has killed his donkey; it may be that he is mad and will kill her, too.”

Cheremi’s childlike smile was gone. His rifle lay across his knees, his profile was set and stern, cruel. He was a man of Shala, and, though he had never before seen this woman, he would avenge her if there were need for vengeance, for she had been born in his tribe. So we waited for the crash of a second shot. But only the rushing sound of the waterfalls came up to us from the darkening valleys.

With staffs and aching feet we found the trail when we went onward. Unseen bowlders bruised our knees, unseen rocks rolled when we stepped on them. We went for two hours down a slide of shale, slipping at every step and clutching the empty darkness. At its bottom we came to wide rapids, and this time the men put us on the little horses, and the horses crossed by jumping from bowlder to bowlder; this seemed cruelty to animals, but we were too weary to protest, and already we had become Albanian in one thing—an absolute indifference to danger.

When, an hour later, one of my pony’s hind legs went over the edge of a crumbling trail and only my man’s grip on his tail kept him from quite going over, the incident interrupted for only a second my enjoyment of the wild, weird scene; a hundred miles of mountain tops fighting with their shadows the light of the moon.

At ten o’clock we fell from our saddles in the walled courtyard of a ghostly white house, and a tall figure in the hooded robe of a Franciscan father lighted us across it with a flaming pine torch.

We really were in the Middle Ages, or in some century perhaps even earlier. An hour after our greeting by the Bishop of Pultit we had forgotten even to realize it; so adaptable are human beings that we quite forgot that modern civilization had ever been.

The hooded priest lighted us with his torch up a flight of worn stone stairs and into a low, beamed room on the second floor of the bishop’s house. There the bishop, rising from a wooden bench, welcomed us in Albanian and Latin. He wore a rough, homespun woolen robe; his bare feet were in wooden sandals; a rosary of wooden beads hung on his chest. He was perhaps fifty, rotund, jovial, dignified. Perolli bent one knee and kissed the episcopal hand; little Mohammedan Rexh, in his red fez, gravely saluted; Cheremi, the ragged gendarme, put his rifle in a corner and knelt for the bishop’s blessing.

We sat, Alex, Frances, and I, in a row on a wooden bench in the chilly bare room. A servant came in, barearmed, barelegged, clad in one piece of brown cloth that reached his knees, and the bishop gave orders; the servant returned with a hammered copper tray holding an earthen cup and a wooden bottle of rakejia. Now rakejia is a cousin to vodka and one of the strongest drinks that ever turned the imbiber’s blood to liquid fire. We girls had debated about it; what should we do when courtesy required us to drink it? We had decided that Perolli should explain that we came from America and that in our tribe it was forbidden to drink intoxicants. But after sixteen hours of travel in the Albanian mountains we did not hesitate. One by one we took the cup that the servant filled, and drained it dry. From that time onward we drank the stuff like water, and it had no visible effect upon us, though in a Paris restaurant one glass of mild wine will make me realize that a second would be unwise. I don’t explain this, I simply note the fact, and it gives me a different point of view on the chronicles of hard-drinking past centuries.

We sat there, talking, for an hour or more. The bishop said that he had never been out of the mountains except for a trip long ago to the Vatican in Rome; he had been there a year, and had conversed with his brother priests in Latin. Then he had come back to the mountains and had lived there ever since. His diocese included all the northern tribes, and he visited them from time to time, riding wherever a donkey could carry him, and walking where it could not. Ten years earlier he had had another foreign visitor, a Miss Durham of England; he had heard that she later wrote a book in which she told about the visit, and if he could have afforded it he would have liked to send for that book.

No, the Church had not very greatly altered the ancient customs of the people. They were all good Catholics, and attended mass. But they still buried the dead uncoffined, with three apples on the breast, and when they put a stone or a wooden slab above the grave they often carved on it, not only the cross, but also the sun. One would note, too, that at the rising and setting of the sun they made the sign of the cross to it.

He was not too intolerant of these things. After all, beyond the sun was always the good God. It was not strange that what I had heard of the marriage customs had baffled me, he said; I should not look for traces of marriage by capture or marriage by purchase; the basis of the tribal ceremonies is fire worship.

On the day of the wedding the bride, elaborately dressed, is carried, screaming and struggling, from her father’s house, and by her brothers is delivered to the husband’s family at a place midway between the lands of the two tribes. Since each tribe is technically a large family, claiming a common prehistoric ancestor, it is forbidden to marry within the tribe. The bride carries with her from her home one invariable gift—a pair of fire tongs. When she arrives at her husband’s house she takes a humble place in the corner, standing, her hands folded on her breast, her eyes downcast, and for three days and nights she is required to remain in that position, without lifting her eyes, without moving, and without eating or drinking.

“Though I believe,” said the bishop, smiling, “that she takes the precaution of hiding some food and drink in her garments, and no doubt the mother-in-law sees that she is allowed to rest a little while the household is asleep.” And he explained that this custom remains from the old days when the father of each house was also the priestly guardian of the fire, and anyone coming to ask for a light from it stood reverently in that position, silent, before the hearth, until the father priest gave it to him. The bride, newcomer in the family, is a suppliant for the gift of fire, of life, of the Mystery that continues the race.

On the third day she puts on the heavy belt that means she is a wife, and thereafter she goes about the household, obeying the commands of the elders, always standing until they tell her to sit, and for six months not speaking unless they address her. And it is her duty to care for the fire, and with her fire tongs to light the cigarettes smoked by any of the family, or by their guests. Sometime, when it is convenient, she and her husband will go to the church and be married by the priest. Usually she has not seen her husband until she comes to his house, since she is of another tribe and the marriage is arranged by the families.

“We have tried to prevent the betrothing of children before they are born,” said the bishop, smiling ruefully, “and in many centuries we have had some effect. Children now are usually not betrothed until they are two or three years old. Even that we combat, of course, yet I cannot say that the custom makes much unhappiness. Husbands and wives are good comrades; they almost never quarrel and they are devoted to their children. But you will see all that for yourself. Yet occasionally there is something like this Shala-Shoshi affair, which I fear will lead to much bloodshed. But the dinner is ready and my servant will show you your room and bring water to wash your hands.”

The servant led us to the bishop’s own bedroom, furnished by a mattress laid on a raised platform of boards. Our saddlebags and blankets had been piled on the rough wooden floor, and Rexh held the torch while the bishop’s servant poured cold water from a wooden bucket over our hands. Then he offered us a beautifully hand-woven towel of red-and-white striped linen, and when we had dried our hands he led us down a stone stairway, through a kitchen crowded with villagers, where an old woman tended cooking pots over a fire built on the earthen floor, and into the dining room.

There was a long, rude table covered with hand-woven linen, rough benches on each side of it. The bishop sat at its head, on a stool, and served the soup. The Franciscan brother and a meek little priest in black sat humbly near the foot of the table, and did not speak. There was nothing in the stone-floored, plaster-walled room except the table, the benches, and a rain-stained photograph on the discolored wall—a picture of a gathering of Albanian priests, taken many years ago in Tirana.

“The feud between Shala and Shoshi looks very bad,” said the bishop. “I fear there will be many deaths. We do what we can to prevent it, all the authority of the Church is used against these feuds, but——”He shrugged his shoulders. “It is their way of enforcing their law, the Law of Lec, which has come down to them from prehistoric times. And the Albanians are very tenacious of their own customs.”

He filled our glasses with red wine. “You must not mistake my people,” he said. “The blood feud is bad, very bad, but it is their only way of enforcing laws, which are, in general, admirable.

“The blood feud is not a lawless thing, as strangers sometimes think. Nor has it anything to do with personal strife or hate. It is a form of capital punishment, such as all nations have, and it is governed by most strict laws.

“You must remember that in these mountains we have never been conquered by foreign governments. The Roman Empire claimed to have overpowered Albania, it is true, as later the Turks did, but neither Rome nor Constantinople was able to send its government into these mountains. The people live as they did before the days of Greece, except for the influence of the Church. It is a simple, communistic society, without private property or any organized government. The only law is the moral law, enforced by tradition, by custom, and by common consent. The father of the family becomes the chief of the tribe, but he has no power that conflicts with the moral law, the ancient Law of Lec. There is a tradition that all this group of tribes was once, long ago, given this moral law by a man named Lec, but that is doubtless a myth added to through the ages.

“This Law of Lec is based on personal honor, which is also the honor of the tribe. A man or a tribe must punish an insult to honor by killing the man who has given it. Thus, if a member of a tribe is killed unjustly by a man of another tribe; if a woman is stolen or injured or affronted; if any part of the tribal property is stolen; if a man or a tribe fails to keep a besa (a word of honor) in a matter of land or war or marriage or irrigation—you will find excellent and admirable irrigation systems here—then the crime is punished by death. But if these crimes are committed against a member of the same tribe, then the house of the guilty man is burned, and he is cast off by the tribe and must go into the wilderness and live alone.

“You will see this law working out in the case of Shala and Shoshi. Last week a Shala man crossing the lands of Shoshi—the two tribes having some time ago sworn a besa that they would keep the peace between them—saw a woman of Shoshi on the trail. He said to himself that he would like that woman for his son, who was unmarried, though of marriageable age, because his betrothed had died in childhood. So the man of Shala took the woman of Shoshi to his house for his son, and there she is now.

“Apparently,” said the bishop, dryly, “she did not make any outcry, for her husband was in their house only a few yards away, and it is a question whether she and the son had not previously arranged the abduction. However, the husband was, of course, obliged to avenge his honor, and he went at once to the heights above Shala and shot the son. This was, according to the Law, an unjustifiable murder, since he should have killed the father who was the abductor. Therefore the father waited on the trail above Shoshi and shot the husband.

“It should have stopped there, but Shoshi’s honor is involved as long as a woman of the tribe is held unlawfully in the hands of Shala. So a hot-tempered Shoshi man has shot a man of Shala and it has become a blood feud between the two tribes. As the woman was born in Pultit, some say that Pultit’s honor is also involved. So you see that the affair becomes complicated; I have been told by wise men that no less than sixteen deaths will wipe out the insults on both sides. You perhaps heard telephoning about it as you came in? The mountain sides have been ringing with it. But what can one do? Excommunication, of course. At every mass I tell my people that the anger of the Church will descend on all who take part in the killings, but the Law of Lec holds them, and it is, after all, their only civil law.”

It took time to tell this, what with filling the glasses, serving the food platters of delicious stewed rabbit and bowls of macaroni, a dish the bishop had grown fond of in Rome—and then there were the cups of syrupy Turkish coffee to be ceremoniously served and drunk, and for hours, struggling with an agony of sleepiness, we had implored Perolli in English to make our excuses and let us go to bed, he refusing sternly, since it is the most terrible breach of mountain hospitality for a guest to grow sleepy as early as midnight. But at one o’clock, seeing Alex’s desperate eyes stony with the effort to keep them open, and myself beholding at times two bishops, very small and far away, and at times one, who loomed like a mountain, I managed in Latin to suggest that we were tired. We had, I said—calling upon vagrant memories of Cæsar and using both hands to illustrate—been walking and riding over the trails since five the previous morning. The bishop was interested, and asked my opinion of the mountains in comparison with those of Switzerland and of the United States, and I hope I replied coherently.

The rest I do not remember. Perolli says that I sat up straight, and talked, though sometimes rather strangely. Frances and Alex were dumb, he says, but smiled as though they were enjoying the conversation. How was he to know that we were really tired? He thought we had been joking about it.

CHAPTER III

THE STORY OF PIGEON AND LITTLE EAGLE—THE PREHISTORIC CITY OF POG, AND THE TALE OF THE GOLDEN IMAGE—THE GENDARMES SING OF POLITICS.

I came back to full consciousness for an instant, stumbling up the stairs, and gathered that we were going to bed. By the torchlight my wrist watch said a quarter past two. Frances and Alex do not remember even that. Rexh awakened us at eight by shaking us, and we were rolled in blankets on the floor of the bishop’s room. Outside was the pouring sound of a steady rain.

As soon as we were fully roused the bishop’s servant brought us tiny cups of Turkish coffee. That was breakfast. Afterward we rose with groans, opened the heavy wooden shutters of the window space, and looked out. Through a rain that poured almost as solidly as a waterfall we saw a low-walled courtyard and a schoolhouse.

Beyond the schoolhouse there lay some fifty miles of the wildest beautiful mountain country—blue peaks, fifteen-hundred-foot slanting rocks, soft pink and rose and purple and green; brighter green masses of young foliage in the valleys, bronze-brown and bright-brown bare forests above them, and here and there snow drifts flung up among smoky-gray clouds. Thirty-two waterfalls I counted from that window, veining the mountains with wandering streaks of silver. But our gaze came back and fastened upon the school.

“I didn’t know they had one in the mountains!” exclaimed Alex, thinking of her Mountain School Fund. “I thought our school at Thethis would be the first one!”

“Padre Marjan certainly said so when he walked down to ask us for it,” said Frances.

“Perhaps this isn’t a school,” said I. Though it looked like one, the little square stone house through whose open doorway we saw rows of benches, and boys sitting on them, barefooted, wearing the long, tight, white trousers braided with black that hang low on the hip bones, the gorgeous sashes, and the short black jackets thick with fringe, that were white centuries ago, but were changed to mourning when Scanderbeg died for Albanian liberty.

It was a school. The pale, meek priest in black, who is the bishop’s ecclesiastical household, showed it to us with pride; he is the teacher. The Turks and the Austrians had blocked all attempts to bring schools into the mountains, he said, and the people, not knowing that schools existed, were naturally not eager to have them. But now the Land of the Eagle was said to be free, after so many centuries of Turkish rule in the valleys, and refugee children who had fled before the Serbs were coming back to their tribes and telling about the American school in Scutari, so that all the people wanted their children to learn to read and write. The chiefs themselves, hearing that there was a Tirana government, and not being able to write or read letters about it, or to learn from newspapers (oh, simple-minded, mediæval people!) the truth about European politics, saw what education meant.

The people had taken rocks from the mountains and made the schoolhouse. They had cut precious trees and made the benches and the desks. They had made a slate of a slab of the native rock, set in a rough wooden frame; they wrote upon it with softer rocks. From Italy, across the Adriatic to Durazzo, up to Tirana, to Scutari, and into the mountains—a two weeks’ journey by donkey and river ferry—the bishop had got three copy books and a bottle of ink. Pens had been made from twigs. The priest had one book printed in Albanian.

Since the boys must herd the flocks in the mountains, they could not spend the day in school. There is so little land that the goats and sheep are fed from trees. The shepherd climbs a tree, carefully cuts the tender branches, and throws them down to the nibbling beasts that eat the young buds and strip off the juicy bark. There is no tree in all the mountains that the shepherds have not climbed; not a tree that is not a branchless, gnarled trunk.

So the school was open from six to nine in the mornings, and the boys came to it, some from ten, twelve, fifteen miles away, and after school they walked back again and took out the flocks. The school had been open six weeks; already the copy books were half filled with beautiful, neat writing, and the boys not only read easily from their one book, but had no difficulty with sentences that Perolli wrote on the slate.

I asked the priest what I could send him from Paris, and his eyes filled with tears as he asked, hesitating a little for fear it was too much, if I could send just a little white paper and half a dozen pencils. The ink was almost gone; they could make more from berries, but he would like the boys to see pencils and learn how to use them. And, of course, when the two copy books were filled, there would be no more paper.

Returning from the dusky schoolroom through the gray slant of the rain, we found in the bishop’s house the most handsome man we had yet seen. Tall and lithe, wearing the tight black jacket, scarlet sash, and snowy woolen trousers braided in black, he amazed us by his animal beauty and grace. His silver chain was of the finest pattern, a ring was on a hand that might have been perfectly gloved on Fifth Avenue, and his quiet air of the aristocrat would have made him remarkable in any company. Beside him was a manly little boy perhaps seven years old. He wore with the same grace a miniature copy of the mountain costume. His manners were perfection of grave courtesy, his eyes were keen and intelligent, and his frank smile was charming.

They were father and son, come to arrange for the boy’s schooling. The father spoke to the boy with the courtesy he would have used to an equal, and the boy replied as one. There was such pride and love in their eyes that it was beautiful to see them together. For a little while the father spoke of his ambitions for his son; he hoped to be able to send him to the American school in Tirana, he dreamed even of a university in Europe. He was proud that he and the boy were mountain men, but he wanted the boy to be wiser, more learned, than the mountain life had let his father be.

“I,” he said, “am Plum [Pigeon], but my son is Sokol [Eagle]. I gave him that name because his wings shall be stronger, his eyes keener, and his flight higher, than mine.”

Having been thus presented to the bishop, Sokol knelt for a blessing, Plum on one knee beside him. Then the two went across the courtyard to the schoolhouse, and I shall not forget the two against the dusky doorway, the father looking down at the boy, and the boy visibly courageous and resolute before the mysteries he was facing.

“Long may you live,” said the father. “Go on a smooth trail.”

“Long may you live,” said the boy. “God take you safely home.” Then he went into the schoolhouse, and Plum followed the trail toward the mountains.

“He is a good man, and brave,” said the bishop, “and little Sokol will be a great one.”

At noon the rain was still pouring from apparently inexhaustible skies, but Cheremi, Rexh, and Perolli assumed, as a matter of course, that we would go on; the difficulty was that there were no mules. There should have been a mule in the village, whose houses were scattered, miles apart, all the way down the deep-walled gorge to the banks of the River Shala, twenty-five miles away, but when Cheremi hastened lightly up a twelve-hundred-foot peak and cried to the farthest house that we wanted mules, the answer came back that there were none since the war.

So he found an aged man—seventy-five years old, he was, but still agile and bright eyed—and put our packs on his back, and at noon we started out on foot, with fresh-peeled staffs provided by Rexh, and new-baked corn bread in the saddlebags.

After an hour of desperate climbing we stood on the peak from which Cheremi had telephoned. The bishop’s house and the school lay dwarfed beneath our feet, and Perolli, standing on a rock and holding his ears, sent down to them a shrill hail. “Ooeeoo! Monseignor!”

The bishop appeared in his woolen gown, a rifle in his hand, and all the guns in our party went off at once, and again, and again, while fifty miles of sheer rock cliffs barked back at them. My hands were over my ears, but I saw the three answering white puffs from the bishop’s rifle, and while the echoes were dying, still repeating themselves down the valley, we saw him hand it to his servant and protect his ear-drums with his thumbs. His call came up to us, “Go on a smooth trail!”

AN OLD SHEPHERD
Wearing goatskin opangi on his feet, and trousers braided in his tribal pattern.

“Now,” said Perolli, thrusting his revolver back into its holster, “we have said good-by to the bishop. Allons!”

“And to-night,” I said, joyously, “we’ll sleep in a native house.”

Frances and Perolli did not seem enthusiastic about that hope, and as we toiled up trails that were stairways of giant bowlders, or slid down slopes of pale-green shale, above valleys where the clouds swirled beneath us, the discussion continued fragmentarily.

Frances’s reluctance I could ascribe to the shrieking of her muscles, which, if tortured as mine had been by the previous day’s travel, must be screaming with agony at her every step. But Perolli, true Albanian in spite of his years of living in foreign capitals, was as fresh as the crisp air that blew upon us between the gusts of driving rain. He leaped up bowlders, he joined in the singing of the others, who, with sixty-pound sacks on their backs, walked easily up the incredible steeps, their thumbs at their ears, chanting songs of ancient battles with the Turks.

“Don’t you think it safe to stay in a native house?” said I, remembering that he was an officer of the government traveling incognito among unfriendly tribes, and that within sight were the Albanian mountains held by the Serbs who had put a price on his head.

“Safe?” said he, scornfully. “A man is always safe in another man’s house. It has happened not once, but often, in these mountains, that a man has given shelter to a hunted man and found, while the guest sat at his fire, that he was harboring a man who had shot the son of the house not an hour before. The neighbors bring in the body, and the father sits beside it, with the murderer under his roof. And the father gives him coffee and food and drink and rolls cigarettes for him, until the guest is ready to go, and then he accompanies him for an hour’s journey, so that none of the tribe can injure him, and says a courteous farewell to him on the trail. ‘Go on a smooth road,’ he says. ‘There is a word of peace between us for a day and a night because you are my guest. After that I will follow you all my life, until I kill you.’”

I began to see the exquisite, infinite complications of that system of law and order, the Law of Lec, which guides these people in all their actions, and I thought, “This goes back beyond the Middle Ages,” remembering the old Bible stories of the time when men lived similarly, under the laws of Moses.

But already the sense of perspective in time was growing dim; we were living in the past, not thinking of it, and the scores of future centuries in which men would spread over Europe, invent private property, build great cities and empires, discover America, and invent machines, became as faint to us as the old memory of a dream. By the next day we had forgotten it all; two weeks later I was to come back to a room with a rug on the floor, a window in the wall, a bed, and a stove, and feel such a sense of strangeness among them that, tired as I was, I could not sleep between the unfamiliar sheets. Now that I am back in my own century, writing of those days in the Albanian mountains, I understand why men so easily slip into the ancient savagery of war and all war’s atrocities. All that we call civilization is like a tune heard yesterday, a little thing floating on the surface of our minds, which sometimes we can keep step to, and then in a moment it is gone so that we cannot remember it.

Upon the trail that day we were barbarians, simple and primitive; we were isolated, small bits of warmth and energy in a hostile universe of stone and rain. And when, out of the gray mist of the trail ahead, another simple barbarian appeared, we greeted him with the unquestioning acceptance of understanding. He was a man of Pultit, bare in the rain save for turban, loin cloth, and opangi. He was bound for the house of the bishop to bring back the boy Sokol, whose father was dead.

Standing around him in the rain, we listened to the news. Three days earlier Plum had sheltered a woman who was leaving a cruel husband, a man of Shoshi. She had slept beneath Plum’s roof one night on her way to her father’s tribe. That morning, as Plum returned after taking his son to school, he had met the husband on the trail, and without a word the husband had shot him down. But as he died Plum had managed to reach his revolver and had killed the husband, saying, “This, from Sokol.” And as Sokol was now the head of his family, he must return from school to the house where the women were mourning his father.

Cheremi thrice made the sign of the cross. “Plum was a good man,” he said.

“And loved his son,” Perolli added. For Plum with his last effort had avenged himself, had closed the account. He left no blood feud to darken the life of the little Eagle. The boy would be known as the son of a hero, and to-day would take his place as a chief and a member of all village councils.

The man of Pultit, having told us this news and wished us long life and smooth trails for our feet, went on down the mountain side, and gripping our staffs tighter in water-soaked hands, we resumed our climbing.

We had begun that day with ponchos over our sweaters; our gendarmes had begun it by taking off their jackets and trousers, so that the sluicing rain would not wet them. These garments were in the packs, protected by ponchos, and, barelegged, barearmed, with only the colored sashes about their waists and cloths wound around their heads, the men went up and down the interminable trails as easily as panthers. Now and then they stopped and, kneeling on the trail, reached down a hand to one of us, pulling us up over unusually large and steep bowlders, and from time to time, as we struggled and panted after them, they offered to carry us. With the blood pounding in our heads, blinding and deafening us, our lungs torn with gasping in our aching sides, we refused, and struggled on. Our gloves had become sodden in a moment; we stripped them off, and soon the ponchos which impeded our climbing followed them; and then, as we were wet to the skin, anyway, we discarded sweaters and began to long for the complete freedom of nakedness. At each step our feet made a sucking sound in the water that filled our shoes, but the exertion of climbing and sliding kept our bodies warm, and by degrees, as suppleness returned to our stiff muscles, we began to see the magic country around us. We stood on rocks from which we saw a hundred miles of snow-tipped peaks, blue gorges, bronze-brown forests. White and smoke-colored clouds swirled beneath us, and through rifts in them we saw tiny green terraced fields, the blue hair line of water in stone-walled irrigation ditches, and houses tiny as those on a relief map, made of stone and almost indistinguishable from the native rocks, as large as they, among which they were set.

“I shall not be happy until I stay in one of them,” I said, and at that moment we heard a hail from Cheremi, who stood on the trail thirty feet above our heads. He gestured toward three cone-shaped peaks of solid rock that, rising steeply from the gorge three thousand feet below, rose to some hundreds of feet above the level of our eyes. Little Rexh, silent and watchful as ever at Frances’s side, translated his words.

“There is an old city,” he said, “the city of Pog. He says it was built by his people, men of the Land of the Eagle, a hundred years before the Romans came.”

“Tell him to wait where he is,” we exclaimed, for, looking again at the nearest cone-shaped mountain, we saw on its top traces of old walls, and on its sides what might once have been a circling road, and we clambered up the trail to ask Cheremi about it.

“It is a very old city,” said Cheremi. “It was built before men began to remember.” Standing on the edge of the trail, which was also the edge of the gorge, he looked over perhaps a quarter of a mile of space to the sharp-pointed peak of rock. In one hand he held his rifle, its butt resting on the rock at his feet; the thumb of the other hand was thrust through a fold of the scarlet sash about his loins, and the sun, appearing blindingly at that moment in a rent of the clouds, shone on his wet white skin and made it shimmer like satin. The deep seams worn in his leathery face by forty years of childlike, mischievous mirth became shallow (an unaccustomed look of solemnity had ironed them out) and, looking straight and unwinking at the sun, he said, “The sun is now the only living thing that saw that city built.”

We shaded our eyes with cupped hands and looked at it. The world was suddenly all aglitter, every leaf a heliograph, every giant slope of rock reflecting a thousand rays, and our eyes watered. But, gazing steadily, we saw the fragment of a wall, and below it, curling around the tall, slender cone of the mountain, traces of a road that had been walled, and a broken flight of four broad steps, torn apart by the roots of a tree. It was the only tree we could see on the three-thousand-foot height, but, like all the others of the forests, it was a gnarled, branchless trunk; its young boughs had been cut every spring to feed the goats.

“Does anyone live there now?”

“No,” said Cheremi. “It is the place where the ora love to sit, and sometimes one hears them crying, like trees in a wind, when there is no wind. But no human person lives there.”

“What is an ora?” I asked, when Perolli had translated.

“An ora—a spirit of the forest, soul of a tree or a rock. Nature spirits,” said Frances. “You know the Greek oreads? Well, that’s the Greek name of the Albanian ora; the Greeks got them from the Albanians.”

“And they still live in these mountains?”

“Apparently. Did you ever see an ora, Cheremi?” she asked him, in Albanian.

“No. Very few people see them. But I have heard them singing, and once, in the Wood of the Ora, which we will pass to-morrow, I heard them talking together in the twilight. I heard them say that my cousin would die,” said Cheremi, seriously.

“And did he die?”

“Of course,” said he, surprised by the question. “He was a strong man, but within six weeks, sitting beside the fire one night, he said that he felt a pain in his heart, and in an hour he was dead.” Cheremi crossed himself.

“But about the city of Pog. Does anyone ever go there? Could we go there?”

People sometimes went, he said; the shepherds always went to cut the branches of the trees, which belonged to the tribe of Pultit. How far was it from where we stood? He thought for a time, and said, “Four hours.” Albanians have no measure for distance except the time it takes to walk it, and this time corresponds with no measurement of ours. He had said that our walk of that day would be an hour and a half; we had already been exhausting every ounce of energy and breath for four, and were scarcely a third of the way.

“What does one find when one gets there?”

“Very little. There is the old wall which you see, and on the rock one can follow the lines of the walls of houses, built square and with many rooms, and from the rocks which have fallen they must have been tall houses. That is all, except that on some of the large stones one can see that the sun circle was carved. Everything else has been eaten by the great flocks of years. But there is still treasure buried there.”

“How do you know?”

“I know because I have seen men who have seen it. There is a man of Pultit whom I know. He went to the old city of Pog one day with his goats. There had been a great storm and part of the wall had fallen. Before that day the wall had had a corner, where now you see nothing. Where the wall had fallen there was a golden image of a man, as large as himself, shining in the sun. The man of Pultit forgot his goats in looking at it. It was too heavy for him to carry, so he took a stone and broke off four of its fingers, and with them in his sash he went to get his brothers to help him carry away the image.

“But it was night before he reached their house, and they said it was better not to go to that city until morning. In the morning they went, and where the image had been there was nothing but stones. Afterward, in thinking of nothing but that image, the man went mad, and he now lives alone and naked in the mountains, talking to the ora and begging them to take him again to that image. But before that he sold the fingers to the gold beaters in Scutari, and they said those fingers were of the purest gold and not alloyed, as gold is now. I did not see the fingers, but many did before they were beaten into ornaments.”

“What do you think became of the image?”

“Doubtless it had a bird or snake for guardian, and that spirit came and took it away again,” said Cheremi, and Perolli explained that when one buries a treasure one calls to some creature of the woods and intrusts the hoard to its care. “O spirit of the small gray serpent with poison in thy tooth, guard for me this treasure. Let no man see it for ten times ten years, and then deliver it only to those of my family,” would be a simple formula, but usually more imagination is used. For instance, Perolli knew of a man who called the large magpie to watch him bury his treasure, and he said to the bird, “Let no one uncover this gold until two black mice have dragged three times around this tree a carriage made of an acorn cup, with a small mouse in it.” But his incantation was overheard, and the crafty neighbor caught and dyed and trained the mice and made the carriage, and had them drag it three times around the tree, after which the magpie gave up the treasure. Otherwise it would have disappeared when a hand was laid upon it.

“But does Cheremi really believe these things?” I asked myself, and, looking at his serious face and Perolli’s, I was struck with the startling idea that Perolli believed them, too, in spite of his English suit and European education, and I felt in my own mind something like a soft landslide, uncovering possibilities of wild beliefs in myself. “Anything can happen in the mountains of Albania,” I said, picking up my staff and rising, for the shadows of the western mountains were already climbing up the cone-shaped pinnacle of Pog.

We went on, up and down the trail, over mountain after mountain that at home no one would dream of climbing. The rain fell again, bringing premature night down with the flood of water, and again we came into clear weather and saw all the colors of sunset on the clouds below and around us.

Many times we passed above villages that clung like mud-daubers’ nests on the cliffs below the trail, and once Cheremi stopped at the trail’s edge and, closing his ears firmly with his thumbs, sent out into the interminable miles of air the clear high note of the “telephone call.”

A voice from the depths responded, and, searching with our eyes, we discovered a white-and-black figure among the rocks some hundreds of feet below. Then this conversation ensued:

“Are you a man?”

“I am a woman of Shoshi, married in Pultit.”

“What is the name of your husband?”

“The name of my husband is Lulash.”

“Say to your husband, Lulash, that Cheremi is on the trail. Cheremi goes to Plani with four strangers from far away and with a Mohammedan youth of Scutari. To-night Cheremi will be in Plani. Say to Lulash that he may bring to Cheremi in Plani the hundred kronen which he owes him.”

“I will say to my husband, Lulash, that Cheremi is on the trail. Cheremi goes to Plani with four strangers from far away and with a Mohammedan youth of Scutari. To-night Cheremi will be in Plani. I will say to Lulash that he may bring to Cheremi in Plani the hundred kronen which he owes him.”

“Oo-ee-oo-oo!” The final shrill call came circling back among the peaks like ripples of disturbed water, and up through its circling came the answering call of the woman. Since he had been telephoning to a woman, Cheremi did not fire his rifle three times, for which my ears were grateful.

We went on. And once, as I clambered up the side of a rock pile that the child of a giant might have made in building a tower with blocks, my staff (ah, how grateful I was for that third leg!) dislodged a stone the size of my head, and Cheremi, turning like a cat, flung himself downward and caught it as it tottered on the trail’s edge. Then I looked and saw, far below, the miniature images of a woman and a cradle, set among moving white spots that were sheep, and I saw that the rock would have gone down the slope like a bomb from an airplane and struck the cradle beside which the woman was sitting, and, I thought, spinning.

“One must be careful on the trails,” said Cheremi, and as the men at that moment had finished a song with a joyous fusillade of rifle shots, I asked if people were not sometimes killed by stray bullets. Perolli said that of course it happened now and then, but everyone understood that the killing was an accident and it caused no blood feud. Accidents, he remarked, will happen anywhere, and he spoke of the death toll of automobiles, which at that moment seemed as far from my knowledge as the twenty centuries that separated us from them.

“Through the Land of the Eagle the news is sung,” the second gendarme began a new song, thumbs against his ears and sixty-pound pack on his back, as he ascended the rocks above us. Cheremi took it up, repeating each line as the other improvised it, and under his breath Rexh translated them for me, storing them away in his memory, from which I later transferred them to my notebook. As I listened I glanced at Rrok Perolli, disguised servant of the new government about which they were making the song, but his face wore a cheerful and unconcerned expression, like a mask so perfect that it seems real.

“Through the Land of the Eagle the news is sung——(It has a double rhyme as they sing it, Mrs. Lane, but I do not know the English to make it rhyme in your language),” said Rexh, apologetically.

“What have the men of Tirana been doing?
I am a son of the mountain eagles;
I do not give up my nest while there is life in my claws;
I do not yield to the gendarmes!
I will drown them in their own blood.
Rise, rise, and go to the door.
There is a sergeant with twenty soldiers.
Ho! Ho! Sergeant, I am not the man you think!
I will not bow and be led to the slaughter.
I will not be killed like a lamb for the men of Tirana,
I am a goat and will fight!”

“What do they mean about sergeants and soldiers?” I asked Perolli, and he said, “These tribes do not understand that the new government in Tirana is an all-Albanian government. They don’t think as a nation; they think as tribes. They think the government is a Tirana government, trying to destroy their liberty as the Romans and the Turks and the Austrians and Italians and the Serbs and the Greeks and the Peace Council tried to do. They know that the Peace Conference in Paris arranged to divide Albania into three parts, giving one to Greece, one to Italy, and one to Jugo-Slavia (and would have done it if Greece and Serbia had been strong enough at the moment to grab a third of a hornets’ nest and if we hadn’t driven out Italy). They know there is a connection between the Peace Conference and the League of Nations, so, now that the Albanian government is a member of the League, they think that the men of Tirana have joined their enemies. They were so dangerous that we had to send soldiers up here to burn the houses of the Shala chiefs. But everything will be all right as soon as we can get the government going and begin building schools and roads up here. They just don’t understand yet.”

Political discussion was cut short by one of the men who had run ahead a few miles to inform the village of Plani that we were coming, and who now popped out of the gathering darkness to announce that the priest refused to receive us in his house.

“The macaroni!” cried our men, with a contempt like vitriol. The priest was of Italian blood; no Albanian would have been such a dog, they said. And we sat down on the mountain side to consider what we should do.

“Why won’t the priest take us in?” I asked, shivering in my wet garments, for night had brought chill down from the snow-covered peaks above us. They were still pale fawn color and pink where the clouds left them unhidden, but the valleys were black, and far away on some distant slope there was a small light, red as a ruby—the flare from a charcoal burner’s fire.

“He says he has no servant,” replied the man who had run ahead to tell the priest that we were coming, and even Cheremi, the joyous gendarme, snorted aloud.

“Priest though he is, he is a macaroni!” and, “Only a macaroni would so disgrace our villages!” the Albanians exclaimed, shamed before the strangers by such incredible inhospitality.

“Perhaps he knows who you are and is afraid to take us in?” I said to Perolli.

“No. He doesn’t know who we are, and is afraid to shelter strangers who may be Serbian or English spies. Cowardly Italian!” said Perolli.

“My house,” Cheremi volunteered, hopefully, “is only across two mountain ranges. You would be welcome there.”

CHAPTER IV

WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF MARKE GJONNI—WE HEAR THE VOICE OF AN OREAD—A GUARDIAN SPIRIT OF THE TRAILS.

Concealed by the darkness, we lay back in our wet clothes on the wet rocks and shook with smothered laughter. How Albanian! While Perolli with a hundred honeyed words made excuses for the feebleness of foreign women, already weary with only sixteen miles of mountain climbing. He was still explaining when up the trail came the flare of a torch, and an Albanian boy of perhaps fourteen years appeared, a turban on his head, a rifle on his back, and a silver-hilted knife stuck through his orange sash.

“May you live long!” said he.

“May you live long!” said we.

“How could you?” He meant, “How could you get here?”

“Slowly, slowly, little by little,” we replied.

“Are you a man?” said Perolli.

“I am a man of Pultit, of the village of Plani, of the house of Marke Gjonni,” said the boy. “In our house there is always a welcome for the stranger. The door of the house of Marke Gjonni is open to you.”

“Glory to your lips and to your feet,” said Perolli, and to us in English: “His father has sent him to ask us to come to his house. What do you think?”

“Is anyone going to think?” we cried. “There’ll be a fire, won’t there?”

We followed the boy up the mountain side, our lungs sobbing and our feet slipping on the trail dimly lighted by the torch, and so steep that the palms of our hands were bruised by climbing it. Out of the ceaseless swishing murmur of falling water that had surrounded us all day one note rose above the rest; flying spray was like a mist on our faces; we were following the edge of a waterfall hidden by the dark. Then the trail turned; we stood on a level ledge; and suddenly all the rifles in the world seemed to go off not ten feet away.

“It’s all right!” Perolli’s shout came up from the darkness beneath our feet. “They’re only welcoming you!” But I have never felt so defenseless, so nakedly exposed to sudden death, as I did standing there, clutching Frances and Alex, while sharp flashes darted out of the blackness and deafening explosions contended with more deafening echoes. All the household of Marke Gjonni stood on the trail, every man firing his rifle until it was empty. Then a woman appeared with a torch, her beautiful face and two heavy braids of hair painted on the darkness like a Rembrandt, if Rembrandt had ever used a model from ancient Greece, and we made our way through a jumble of greetings (“May you live long! May you live long!” we repeated), and up a flight of stone steps along the side of a blank stone wall, and through a low, arched stone doorway.

The stone-walled room was large—as large as the house itself—and low ceilinged, and filled with shadows. Near the farther end, on the stone floor, a bonfire burned in a ring of ashes. In the corner near the door several goats and two kids and two sheep stopped their browsing on a heap of dry-leaved branches, and looked at us with large eyes shining in the torchlight. Five or six women came out of the shadows to greet us, and behind us the men were coming in, reloading their rifles, hanging them on pegs, closing and bolting the heavy wooden door.

Rexh and our two gendarmes were already busy unrolling the packs, spreading our blankets over heaps of dried grass on the other side of the fire. In a moment we were sitting comfortably on them, extending wet feet toward the flames, while one of our hosts put a fresh armful of brush on the coals, another hacked slivers of pitch pine from a great knot of it and set them blazing in a small wrought-iron basket that hung from the ceiling, and another, with hollowed-out wooden bowls of coffee, of sugar, and of water around him, began making Turkish coffee in a tiny, long-handled iron bowl set in the hot ashes.

“We’re going to have a night in a native house, after all,” said I, happily, and added, starting, “What’s that?” A long, thin, curiously unearthly sound—hardly a wail, though that is the dearest word I have for it—was abroad in the night that surrounded the stone house. Even the shadows seemed to crouch a little nearer the fire, hearing it, and when it ceased the splashing of the waterfall was louder in the stillness. Then the man with the coffee pot pushed it farther among the coals, and with the little grating noise the movement of the household recovered and went on.

“Are you a man?” said our host, courteously, turning his clear dark eyes on Perolli, and Perolli, silencing me with a glance, folded his arms more comfortably around his drawn-up knees and began the proper conversation of a guest.

By degrees the house of Marke Gjonni grew clearer to our eyes; they became accustomed to the firelight and the shadows and saw the guns hanging on the wall, the browsing goats that, with a little tinkling of bells, worried and tore at the dried green leaves on the oak branches heaped for them, the outlines of a painted wooden chest filled with corn meal, at which a woman worked making a loaf of bread on a flat board. One of the men raked out some coals and set in them a round flat iron pan on legs—the cross and the sun circle were wrought on its bottom. In the midst of the flames he laid its cover to heat. Soon the woman came with the bread, a loaf two feet across and two inches thick, and deftly slid it from the board into the pan, which it exactly fitted; one of the children put the cover over it and buried all in hot ashes.

There were ten or twelve children—little girls half naked, with serious, beautiful faces and long-lashed brown eyes; small boys dignified in little long tight trousers of white wool beautifully braided in black, short fringed black jackets, and colored sashes and turbans like those of their fathers. Two cradles stood near the fire, covered tightly over high footboards and headboards with heavy blankets; presently a woman partly uncovered one and, kneeling, offered her breast to the tiny baby tied down in it. Only the baby’s puckered little face showed; arms and legs tightly bound, it lay motionless and uncomplaining, and when it was fed the mother kissed it tenderly and covered it again, carefully smoothing the many folds of thick wool and tucking the ends tightly beneath the cradle.

Meantime Cheremi was taking off our shoes and stockings and bathing our feet in cold water brought by one of the women. This was proper, since when guests arrive the member of the family nearest to them by ties of blood or affection acts as their servant, and Cheremi, being an Albanian who knew us, was judged to stand in that position. By the time we had drawn on dry woolen stockings from our packs the first cup of coffee was ready. To the boiling water in the tiny pot the coffee maker added two spoonfuls of the powdered coffee, two of sugar, stirred the mixture till it foamed, and poured it into a handleless little cup which he offered Perolli. But Perolli indicated me, and without the slightest revelation of his surprise the host changed his gesture.

RROK PEROLLI

“Beauty and good to you,” said I, in Albanian, prompted by Perolli, and when I had drunk the thimbleful, “Good trails!” said I, handing back the cup. For this is the manner in which one drinks coffee. Do not make the mistake, when next you are in the Albanian mountains, of saying the same things when you are offered rakejia. For rakejia there is a quite different form of courtesies. And as soon as the coffee cup, rinsed and refilled with freshly made coffee, has been given to each guest in turn, you will be offered rakejia.

Alex and Frances and I looked at one another, but we drained the large goblet of colorless liquid fire in turn, without a word of protest. It might have been the water that it looked like, so far as it affected our minds or tongues, for I continue to ascribe to the fire warmth and the blessed sensation of resting after those trails the sense of contentment that filled us all.

“Strange,” I said, for I still dimly remembered another way of life, as though, perhaps, I had sometime dreamed it, “chimneys that don’t draw make so much smoke in a room, yet here there is no chimney and a large fire, and we don’t notice the smoke.” And, leaning back on the piled blankets, I gazed up at the pale-blue clouds of it, rising beyond the firelight into a velvety darkness overhead. But I really felt that I had always lived thus, shut off by stone walls from the mountains and the night, ringed around by friendly familiar faces, smelling the delicious odor of corn bread baking and hearing the tinkling bells of goats.

“Where is America?” said our hosts, and: “How large are your tribes? Do they have villages like ours, and mountains? Do you raise corn? How many donkey loads do you raise to a field, and what is your method of cultivating the soil? Have you stone ditches for carrying water from the rivers to the fields?” Rousing ourselves, we tried to give them in words a picture of our cities; we told of horses made of iron, fed by coal, snorting black clouds of smoke and racing at great speeds for long distances on roads made of iron; and I told of the irrigation systems of California’s valleys, and Oregon’s; of orchards plowed by steel-shod plows; of great machines as large as houses, cutting grain on the plains of Kansas; of mountain streams like Albanian mountain streams, which we harness as one might harness a donkey, and how their invisible strength is carried unseen on wires for many, many long hours—as far as an Albanian could walk in two days—and used to turn wheels far away.

Resting comfortably on their heels around the fire, they listened as one would listen to a traveler from Mars, the men opening silver tobacco boxes and deftly rolling cigarettes for us, the women spinning, the children—each given its space in the circle—propping little chins on beautiful, delicate hands and listening wide eyed. The questions they asked—and the elders were as courteous to the children’s curiosity as the children were to theirs—were keen and intelligent, but when it came to explaining electricity I was as helpless as they and could answer only with vague indications of some strange unknown force which we use without understanding it.

A woman, barefooted, barearmed, graceful as a sculptor’s hope of a statue, lifted the cover from the baking-pan, crossed herself, made the sign of the cross over the hot loaf, and took it up. Stooping, with the smoking golden disk between her hands, she stopped, suddenly struck motionless. The long, strange cry came again through the darkness, like a voice of the wind and the mountains and the night.

“Look here, Perolli,” said I, my stretched nerves unexpectedly relaxing into the kind of anger that is part of fear, “what is that? Don’t be an idiot! Tell me!”

“It is an ora, if you must know,” said Perolli, and he looked at me defiantly, as though he expected me to laugh.

“An ora!” said Frances, sitting up. The strange, unearthly call came again, very far away this time; we strained our ears to hear it. Then silence and the roaring of the river. The turbaned men in the circle of firelight, who had understood the word, nodded.

“Holy crickets! Rose Lane, we’re actually hearing an oread!” Frances exclaimed. And Alex said: “Oh no! Undoubtedly there is some natural explanation.”

“How do you know there isn’t what you call a natural explanation for an oread?” Frances demanded, and the wild notion crossed my mind that if Perolli had not been with fellow sharers of the blessings of Western civilization he would have been crossing himself instead of lighting another cigarette. Little Rexh, in his red fez, spoke earnestly: “Do not believe there are no ora or devils in these mountains, Mrs. Lane. There are very many of them.”

“Of course,” said I, and I do not know how much I believed it and how much I assumed that I did, in order to encourage our hosts to talk. “Do you often see ora in this village?” I said across the fire to the many intelligent, watching eyes, and Rexh picked up our words and turned them into Albanian or English as we talked.

“We do not see the ora,” said a tall man with many heavy silver chains around his neck. “Do you see the ora in your country?”

“I do not think they live in the West,” said I. “I think that they are very old, like the Albanians, and, like you, do not leave their mountains. This is the first time I have ever been where they live, and I should like to meet one.” But I doubt if I should have said that if I had been outside those solid stone walls.

“Perhaps you will hear them talking when you go through the Wood of the Ora,” said a woman whose three-year-old daughter was going to sleep in her lap.

“Very few people have seen them,” said the coffee maker, licking a cigarette and placing his left hand on his heart as he offered it to me. I fitted it into my cigarette holder; he lifted a burning twig from the fire and lighted it. “Now my father was accompanied by an ora all his life, but he was the only one who saw it, and he told no one about it until just before he died.”

“Did he ever talk with her?”

“No, but she always walked before him on every safe trail. He was sixteen when he first saw her; he was watching the goats in the mountains. She appeared before him, standing on the trail. He said that he knew at once that she was not of our kind, because she was so beautiful. She was about twelve years old, wearing clothing not like ours, but of a white and shining material—my father said that it was like mist and it was like silk and it was like fire, but he could not say what it was like. Her hair was golden. She stood on the trail and with her hand she made a sign to him to stop, and he stopped, and they looked at each other for a long time. Then he spoke to her, but she did not answer. She was not there. And my father went on, and found on the trail he would have taken a great rock that had just fallen, and he knew that the ora had saved his life.

“He came home, and said nothing. The next morning when he went out with the goats the ora was waiting outside the door, and she went before him all that day. Always after that, whenever he left the house, she went before him on the trails.

“My father was a strong man and very wise; he married and had many children; he fought the Turks and the Austrians and the Serbs and the Italians. He had a good life. But he never went anywhere unless the ora went before him. In the morning when he left the house, if she was not there he returned and sat by the fire that day. Often on the trails he was with many people, but none but him ever saw the ora. She remained always the same, always the size of a twelve-year-old child, always very beautiful, shining white and with golden hair.

“When she turned aside on the trail, my father turned also, and the people did as he did, though he did not say why. My father was known as a very wise man. Many times he saved the lives of many people by following the ora.”

Several of the older men in the intently listening circle shook their heads, as though they remembered this, and when I asked them with my eyes they said, “Po! Po!” which means, “Yes.”

“When my father was sixty-five years old, strong and healthy, one day the ora did not come. She did not come the next day, nor the next, nor the next, for many days. Then my father knew that she would not come again and that it was his time to die. So he arranged all his affairs and died. Just before he died he told us about the ora; he told us so that we would know why he was making ready for death, and it was because his ora had left him.”

CHAPTER V

THE UNEARTHLY MARRIAGE OF THE MAN OF IPEK—FIRST NIGHT IN A NATIVE ALBANIAN HOUSE.

There was a moment of contemplative silence. Beyond the circle of firelight the goats still tore and worried the dried leaves from the oak branches. A woman came leisurely forward and put an iron pan on the coals. When it was hot she brought scraps of pork and laid them in it. Rexh, the little Mohammedan, turned his head so that he should not smell that unclean meat. Frances said to Perolli, in a ravenous voice, “How much longer will it be before we can eat?”

He looked at her reprovingly. “In Albania it is not polite to care about food.”

“But it’s past midnight and we’ve had nothing to eat since noon!” Frances mourned.

“Slowly, slowly, little by little,” said Perolli, soothingly. For myself, I curled more comfortably among the blankets, too contented to ask for anything at all. It was as though I had returned to a place that I knew long ago and found myself at home there. I had forgotten that these people are living still in the childhood of the Aryan race and that I am the daughter of a century that is, to them, in the far and unknown future. Twenty-five centuries had vanished, for me, as though they had never been.

“That lady ora was no doubt betrothed to one of her own people,” said a man who had not previously spoken. “Now in my lost country of Ipek—may the Serbs who are murdering her feel our teeth in their throats!—I know a man who was married to an ora.”

A woman, barefooted, wearing a skirt of heavy black and white wool, a wide, silver-studded leather belt and a blouse of sheer white, her two thick black braids of hair falling from beneath a crimson headkerchief almost to her knees, came out of the shadows beyond the fire and lowered from her shoulder a beautifully shaped wooden jar of water. She held it braced against her hip, and, stooping, poured a thin stream over our outstretched hands. We laved them, the water sinking into the ashes around the fire, and another woman handed us each a towel of hand-woven red-and-white-plaided linen. Then we sat expectantly, but only a wooden bowl of cheese was set on the floor before us.

It was goat’s-milk cheese, rather like the cottage cheese of home, except that it was hard, cut in cubes, and of an acrid, sourish flavor. We each took a piece, nibbled it.

“Oh, Perolli, can’t you tell them we’re starving? It’s almost one o’clock in the morning!” cried Frances, pathetically.

“Be patient,” said Perolli. “How many times must I say that it isn’t polite in Albania to be so greedy?”

“But it’s eleven hours since any of us had a bite!” Frances protested. “Don’t tell me Cheremi and our other men aren’t starving.”

“Albanians don’t care so much about food,” said Perolli. “I’m not hungry.” He lit another cigarette, and, seeing the circle of politely incurious but keen eyes fixed on us, I said, “Tell them that we are very much interested in the story about the ora, and that we want to hear about the man who married one.” And I surreptitiously prodded Alex, who, sitting bolt upright with her eyes open, was obviously asleep with fatigue.

The man who had spoken of that unearthly marriage rolled and licked a cigarette, offered it to Alex with his hand on his heart, rolled himself another, lighted both with a blazing twig, settled comfortably on his heels, and began.

“This man was my friend, well known to me and to all the families of Ipek. A strong man, a good fighter, and respected by all. But his life was not complete, for the girl his father had chosen for him had died, and he was not married. There were many girls he might have had, girls of Montenegro and even of Shala and Shoshi and Kossova, but he said that he did not wish to marry. He came to his thirty-seventh year and was not married.

“One night he was sitting alone in his house, making a cup of coffee in the ashes of the fire, when the door opened. He looked, and there was a woman who had come out of the darkness. She was no woman of our tribe, nor of any other tribe of man, though she was dressed like our women. My friend looked at her and said to himself that he had never known women could be so beautiful. Men could be as beautiful as that, yes, but not women. And he knew, though he did not know how he knew, that she was not of our kind.

“He said to her, ‘Long life to you!’ and she replied, ‘And to you long life!’ She came and sat by his fire, and he gave her the cup of coffee one gives a guest. She drank it and returned the cup to him, saying, ‘Good trails to your feet!’ Then they looked at each other for some time without speaking.

“Then she said to him, ‘Am I not beautiful?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ She said to him, ‘Have you ever seen a woman more beautiful?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And after she had been silent for a long time she said to him, ‘Will you marry me?’ And he said, ‘No.’

“She said to him, ‘Do you think you will find a woman more beautiful than I?’ He looked at her between the eyes and said, ‘I know that I shall never see a woman so beautiful.’ She said, ‘Then will you marry me?’ And he said, ‘No.’