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.
[Illustration: 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.”