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.