A NIGHT BY THE BYRAKTOR’S FIRE--THE BYRAKTOR CALLS A COUNCIL--REXH TO
THE RESCUE--THE BYRAKTOR’S GENDARME TEARS A PONCHO--MOONLIGHT ON THE
SCUTARI PLAIN.
Then his grandmother made three beds, on three sides of the fire. She
brought a two-inch-thick mat of woven straw and laid it on the floor;
over it she spread a handsome blanket of goats’ hair dyed in stripes
of magenta and purple; under one end of the mat she put a triangular
piece of wood to serve as pillow, and when I lay down she tucked other
blankets over me. Rexh and the Shala man had the other mats, and all
the byraktor’s family went to their own places, leaving the big room
and the dying fire to us three guests.
At four in the morning the house was astir. Out of the darkness yawning
men came to stir the slumbering fire; the byraktor appeared without his
turban, a weird figure with his shaven, skin-white head and long black
scalplock, and began to make the morning coffee; the sheep and goats
were driven out into the rain by the ragged shepherdesses. I sat up and
put on my opangi, and the sleepy Rexh, still streaked with red dye from
his fez, rolled out of his blankets.
“To-day,” I said, “we get to Scutari.” For the pains in my lungs had
returned and I had lain all night half waking, haunted by fever visions
and voices.
“Yes, yes,” said the Shala man. “I swear it! To-day we get to Scutari!”
But the byraktor looked at him, saying nothing, a quizzical look in his
dark eyes, and leisurely went on with his coffee making.
“Rexh,” I said at five o’clock, “why don’t they start?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Lane,” he replied, earnestly. “They will not tell.”
He sat listening to every casual word, and thinking deeply. A dozen
times I had suggested that we should be starting.
“Tell the byraktor we must go!” I said at six o’clock, impatient in the
doorway. For a long time all the world had been a clear gray, shadowed
only by the falling rain. “I pay a hundred kronen for his mule only
because it gets me to Scutari to-night.”
Rexh announced this firmly to the byraktor; the byraktor, listening
attentively, assented with a shake of his head.
At seven o’clock I walked madly up and down the small stone porch. The
byraktor’s gendarme had arrived; he stood washing his face in a stone
basin filled with rain water; at every splash in it he raised his head
and solemnly crossed himself and made the sign of the cross toward the
dawn. Inside the house, the byraktor was deep in conversation with his
grandmother.
“They are talking politics, Mrs. Lane,” Rexh reported. “I do not yet
quite understand, but I think that you will not get to Scutari to-day.”
“Rexh,” I said, “listen to me. I shall get to Scutari to-day. In ten
minutes by my watch I shall start to walk to Scutari, without the mule.
I have waited long enough. Tell that to the byraktor.”
The byraktor came to the door and looked at me kindly. He had put on
his turban; he was a figure of rather awe-inspiring dignity. “Slowly
slowly, little by little,” said he, indulgently, and went back into the
house.
When eight minutes had passed his grandmother came out--I was now
walking restlessly up and down the soaked, corn-stalk-strewn yard--and
led out of the lower part of the house the mule. The mule was the
very smallest donkey I have ever seen, the most bedraggled, the most
violently antagonistic to all the world. The woman tied him to the
wicker fence and brought out a measure of corn. “Slowly, slowly,” said
she to me, triumphantly. “One cannot start until the mule has eaten.”
Then she went back to her talk with her grandson, the byraktor.
A moment later I interrupted them by the most courteous of farewells.
I blessed them and their house and their past and their future, their
families, their tribe, their hospitality, and their mule, and then I
left. The Shala man followed me, protesting; Rexh trudged beside me,
saying nothing, but very disapproving.
“You cannot do such a thing to the byraktor of Shoshi!” said the Shala
man.
“I have done it to the byraktor of Shoshi,” said I, violently, gasping
on the trail. I kept my knees stiff with sheer rage, but on the first
terrace above the byraktor’s house not even that could keep me going,
and I sat down in a heap on the trail to rest.
The sun had not yet cleared the top of the stupendous sweep of striped
rock that soared above the chasm; it could hardly do so before noon.
The cañon was filled with silver light; the rain itself seemed silver;
the rose and blue and white of that great cliff glowed softly through
it, and the greens of the little fields below were soft as mist. I sat
looking at this, and insensibly realizing why time was so little to
these people, and how unimportant, really, all our little hastes are.
Then, coming leisurely across the green, like little toys on a carpet,
appeared the byraktor, his gendarme, and the minute mule. In half an
hour they reached us, calm and unperturbed. The donkey bore a wooden
saddle quite as large as himself; they placed me on this and leisurely
began to climb.
“To-night,” said I, firmly, “I shall be in Scutari.”
Rexh translated this to the byraktor, but the byraktor said nothing.
We proceeded slowly over the mountains. This was wilder going than I
had yet seen, and again the simplicity of these people was borne in
upon me. Coming to places that, to any European understanding, would
be absolutely impassable, the byraktor’s action was simple and direct.
He wrapped around his wrist the steel chain that held the mule by the
neck, and easily, without haste, he went on. The mule came, too; it
could not do otherwise, and when it would have fallen the steel chain
and the gendarme’s firm grip on its tail kept it going until its feet
got their grip again. I was, of course, on the mule’s back, and where
it went I went, too.
The byraktor and the gendarme thought nothing of thus casually carrying
between them a mule with me on its back, and very shortly--so adaptable
is the human mind--I thought little of it myself. I recall sitting
there, comfortable in that armchair of a saddle, taking my smoked
glasses out of my pocket and polishing them; the sun was piercing
through the clouds, and the glare on the snow above was blinding to my
eyes. We were passing along a trail really too narrow for the mule;
my knees grazed a cliff; a glance over my shoulder went straight down
into depths where pine-tree tops looked like a lawn; at every second
the mule’s tiny hoofs slipped and rocks showered downward, the chain
tightened around the byraktor’s wrist and the muscles of his shoulders
knotted as the mule’s weight bore on them. It crossed my mind, as I
settled the smoked glasses on my nose, that two weeks earlier my heart
would have stopped at very sight of that trail, and then, as it dipped
downward and I heard the gendarme bracing his feet and felt the mule’s
weight sag against the strength of that useful tail, I looked up and
forgot everything else in the magnificence of shadow and sunshine on
the snow-piled heights.
I do not mean that I am at all unusual in my attitude to danger. I’m
not, and the prospect of sudden death scares me stiff, as it does
everyone else. I mean that human beings are all chameleons. The stuff
of humanity is always the same, it merely takes on different colors
from its environment; in Albania there is not one of us who will not
become Albanian. There are many morals to be drawn from this; you may
apply the idea to education, or to your attitude toward immigrants or
capitalists or criminals or even to your next-door neighbor; it would
be useful also in considering international politics or religions that
are not yours, or the actions of men in war, but I did not draw any
morals, being immediately engaged in crossing the foot of the largest
waterfall I had yet encountered.
It was so large that the men unsaddled the mule, stripped themselves,
and wrapped their clothes in several bundles before attempting to cross
it. Then they made a living chain of themselves; the byraktor, at its
head, advanced to a water-worn bowlder in the center of the current,
braced himself firmly, and became the pivot on which the chain moved.
The end man carried over the clothes, bundle by bundle, wrapped in
my poncho; then he carried me across--I was soaked in spray, but that
did not matter. Then he put one arm around the donkey and supported it
across, and then the saddle, and then he went back once more and took
the protesting Rexh and brought him over. The water was above their
waists; their white bodies slanted in the glassy current; three yards
below them the water poured in a crystal mass over the edge of the
pool, a second waterfall that struck in roaring foam fifty feet below.
The worst of the current was between me and the central rock where the
byraktor was braced; several times the end man’s feet slipped there,
notably when he crossed with the donkey, which I gave up for lost, but
each time the chain of hands held firm.
Their bodies came blue from the icy water, but they put on only their
cotton underdrawers, for they said we would next go through the snow,
and they did not want to get their beautifully embroidered trousers
wet; for the same reason they left their purple, gold-embroidered socks
and rawhide opangi in the packs, and went on barefoot.
“Good! If we’re crossing the snow fields already, we’ll surely be in
Scutari by to-night,” I said. But I was joyful too soon, for when we
reached the first of the snow the party stopped. The byraktor sat down
on a rock and lighted a cigarette; the gendarme, without a word, began
to climb a tall cliff that overhung the trail. What did it mean? Rexh
did not know, and I sat impatiently on the mule, which began nosing
through the snow for some bite to eat.
Then overhead the high, keen telephone call rang out, answered by far,
thin voices that sounded as though the crystal air itself had been
tapped, far away, by a giant finger. Even while the voices called and
answered in the sky, silent men began to appear, suddenly, without
my having noticed their approach. It was startling to see a strange,
turbaned head beside my elbow, to find that between two glances a
dignified, half-naked man was sitting on the rock beside the byraktor.
Rexh came and led the mule to a little distance. The figure of the
gendarme, against the sky, raised its rifle, and I put my hands over my
ears just in time to dull the echo crash. “It is polite to go away for
a little distance, Mrs. Lane,” said Rexh. “The byraktor has called a
council of all chiefs of Shoshi.”
In half an hour twenty men surrounded the byraktor. They were all, like
the byraktor and his gendarme, in cotton underdrawers, barefooted,
and naked above the waist, many of them wearing on their heads only
the tiny round white cap that covered their scalplocks. Each of them
carried his rifle on a woven strap slung over his shoulder, and all had
an arsenal in their sashes. They sat on small rocks, on the snow-filmed
ground, in a group about the byraktor’s bowlder.
We were at the mouth of the highest pass. All around the little open
space towered cliffs heavy with snow, only to the east the mountain
ranges fell away, one beyond the other, to the just-suggested chasm
of the Lumi Shala Valley, and beyond it they rose again, purple and
blue and gray, to the foot of the great wave of snow that touched the
sky--the wave that Alex and Frances and Perolli were climbing, if they
had left Shala. A black cloud hanging over the pass they were to take
told that they were traveling in a storm.
The council lasted half an hour, three quarters of an hour, an hour.
It concerned grave matters; the earnestness of those intent bodies and
keen faces said that. Meantime Rexh and I talked in low tones.
“I am not paying the byraktor a hundred kronen to sit here while he
holds a council,” said I. “Do you think he intends to get me to Scutari
to-night?”
“I do not think so, Mrs. Lane. But if you want to get there, it shall
be done. We must consider many things.” Rexh used his fingers to check
them off. “First, the byraktor must be thinking a great deal about the
new Tirana government. You remember that he asked the Shala man about
Rrok Perolli. Also he talked a long time with his mother’s mother,
and that was about politics. Second, the byraktor holds a council.
Therefore he is going to do something that concerns the tribe. The
byraktor, you know, is the war chief; he is the one who leads the
tribe to war. Shoshi is in blood with Shala, and Shala has sworn a
_besa_ with the Tirana government. We must think of all these things.
Now I think that the byraktor is also in blood with some of the tribes
along the Kiri River, between here and Scutari. I think that he has
hired you the mule so that he can travel in safety with you through
those tribes and get to Scutari, where he will inquire about the Tirana
government and whether it intends to join Shala in war against Shoshi.
That is what I think.”
I looked at that twelve-year-old lad in amazement and admiration.
“Well, Rexh,” I said, humbly, “I must leave it to you to get me to
Scutari to-night, somehow. You think the byraktor intends to stop along
the way?”
“Yes, Mrs. Lane. Also I think that the Shala man does not want to reach
Scutari to-night. He swears earnestly, but I think he is a serpent with
a forked tongue.”
I sat there on the donkey, appalled. “But, Rexh, you know that I must
get to Scutari to-night. Tell them I have said it. I am of the American
tribe, and what Americans say they will do, they do. To-night I get to
Scutari!”
“Yes, Mrs. Lane. But one must not tell all one thinks. We will say
nothing. We will see.”
When the council was ended we went on leisurely through the pass, and
down into valleys, and up again over other mountains. At two o’clock we
left behind the last glimpse of the wall of snow to the east, the last
sight of the interior mountains of northern Albania, the most beautiful
mountain country in the world. At three o’clock we saw, glimmering on
the far-western horizon, the silvery edge of Lake Scutari, and far to
the right, deep between two ranges, the valley of the tribe of Pultit,
and the white house of the bishop, the tiniest of specks to my eyes;
but the Albanians saw it plainly, and distinguished it from any other.
At four o’clock we began the tremendous descent into the Kiri Valley
and I was obliged to dismount. “The gendarme says he cannot hold the
donkey by the tail here, Mrs. Lane. He is afraid the tail will break.”
And for two miles we swung downward bowlder by bowlder, exhausting
travel to the arms and shoulders; but the mountain women came up that
way with cradles on their backs. The mule made it by little leaps.
“Now the road is good,” said the Shala man, and, indeed, the two-foot
path, no steeper anywhere than the steep trails on Tamalpais, seemed
a boulevard to me. Only twenty miles more to Scutari! And I thought
of getting off the clothes in which I had slept for three nights, and
a shampoo shone before me like a bright star. Rexh had been borrowing
trouble, I thought; there was still light on the western slopes and
twenty miles was nothing to these people. And just as I was thinking
this the byraktor halted.
“We will go this way, now,” he said, “to the village where we stay
to-night.”
Why was it so necessary that I reach Scutari before I slept? I do not
know. But the idea had become fixed, an obsession; I was irrational,
for the moment a monomaniac. There was nothing I would not have
sacrificed to satisfy that imperious desire.
“Tell the byraktor that I must get on to Scutari,” I said. “I am
sick and must get quickly to a doctor. I cannot stay in any village
to-night; I must be with my own people.”
“Yes, Mrs. Lane,” said Rexh, and, having talked for some time, he
explained, “I have told him that you have had word from your father,
who is the chief of your tribe, and that the word said you must go to
Durazzo and take a boat to your own country.”
“Very well. What does he say?”
“He says that you stop in this village to-night. It is a good village,
and you will be rested in the morning.”
“I will be in Scutari in the morning,” I said. “Tell him again that I
must go to Scutari. If he cannot go himself, will he let me take the
mule?”
“But he says the roads are dangerous and it will be dark.”
“Tell him I am American and there is no danger that stops an American.”
The byraktor looked at me, puzzled, but with a little humor in the
depths of his dark eyes. He had put on his turban; below its white
folds the silver chain dangled on his bare breast; above it the muzzle
of his rifle caught a glint of the western sunlight.
“He says it is not a question of your safety; it is a question of his
honor. I was right, Mrs. Lane; he says that he is in blood with the
tribes through which one goes to Scutari. If he travels through them
by night he will be killed, and in the darkness no one will know who
has done it. He does not mind being killed, but to be killed by some
one his tribe cannot know and kill afterward would be black dishonor to
him. It is true, Mrs. Lane, and he is a great byraktor--the byraktor of
five hundred houses.”
“But he need not go with me. You and the Shala man will go with me. I
only want his mule. Is he afraid for his mule? I will give him a paper,
and if I am killed and the mule is stolen he can get another mule from
the Red Cross house in Scutari.”
I said this quite innocently, but the words taught me what blazing eyes
are. One hears of them; one seldom sees them. But the byraktor’s eyes
seemed actually to kindle into flame, and involuntarily I shrank back
when he turned them on me.
“He does not think of the mule, Mrs. Lane. He thinks only of his honor.
You must not say such things. He says you cannot go on without him;
you are traveling under his protection, and it is his honor that is
concerned if anything happens to you.”
I looked at the ring of utterly savage-looking men, half naked, with
shaven heads and scalplocks, surrounding me in those wild mountains,
and suddenly I struggled not to laugh. If a magic vision could have
shown me then to my friends at home, how they would have prayed that I
escape alive, while the real difficulty was that these savages wanted
only too embarrassingly to protect me.
“But, Rexh, it is absurd. I did not ask for his protection; I simply
hired his mule. Tell him that he has brought me so far safely, so far
I have traveled under his protection. I thank him, I thank him deeply,
I am most grateful with my whole heart, but now I will leave his
protection and travel onward.” And to Rexh’s words, with my hand on my
heart, I added in Albanian, “I thank you from my heart.”
The byraktor made a gesture, only a little gesture with his hand, but
the violence of its fury I cannot describe. “You thank me! You have
broken my honor!” he said, and even without Rexh’s murmured translation
I would have felt the menace of the silence that followed.
“But,” I said, bewildered, “I am traveling with the Shala man. Isn’t
the Shala man protection? Besides, tell him I don’t need protection. I
am protected even here by the power of my own tribe.”
“The Shala man shall take you in, Mrs. Lane,” said Rexh. That
too-handsome youth had hung back from the conversation, but Rexh’s
stern eye brought him into it. And then there was such a battle of
words that the very rocks joined it. The byraktor stood listening,
bending down a little, intent; Rexh--short, pudgy Rexh in his
flannelette pajamas--drove home with fist on chubby fist his earnest
words, and the Shala man called Heaven and the cliffs to witness his
clamor. The byraktor turned his eyes from Rexh to the Shala man, from
the Shala man to Rexh, and thoughtfully stroked his chin. Around us the
other men stood attentive.
Then the Shala man turned and, lifting me from the trail to which I had
dismounted, swung me again into the saddle. He pounded the saddle with
his fist and exclaimed violently, his face congested with dark blood.
“It is all right, Mrs. Lane,” said Rexh, grimly. “He will take you
in. He has told the byraktor why he cannot take you to Scutari; it is
because the gendarmes are looking for him to kill him. But he will take
you in. After that the gendarmes can have him; he is of no use.”
Even my fixed idea was shaken by those astounding, calm words.
“But, Rexh,” I said, in horror, “I can’t kill a man, even to get to
Scutari to-night. Do you think the gendarmes will really kill him if
he takes me in?” But one glance at the violently miserable Shala man
answered the question.
“Yes, Mrs. Lane,” said Rexh. “They will kill him by law, because he has
killed some men. But, Mrs. Lane, he said he would take you to Scutari
and he must take you to Scutari. The byraktor will tell you so.”
“_Po, po_,” said the byraktor, agreeing, and, “_Po, po_,” said the
others; and looking at the Shala man, I had no doubt that if he
faltered on the way Rexh’s tongue had barbs to drive him onward.
“But explain to the byraktor that it is not American custom--that I
can’t take a man to be killed, Rexh. I’m sorry,” said I, for it did
seem a pity to disappoint Rexh so, when he had so nicely arranged
everything. I leaned from the saddle and spoke earnestly to the
byraktor myself, Rexh’s murmured translation for his ears while I
held his eyes: “I must get to Scutari to-night. It is necessary. But
I do not want to risk any man’s life. I take my own life in my hands
and go with it on the trail. No one else can carry it for me. That is
American custom. It is American custom that I thank you now, and give
back to you your protection, and go on alone. If it is not your custom,
I am sorry, but by all American custom your honor is safe, and I am
American, and Albanian law does not apply to me.”
“You speak with a tongue of great learning,” said the byraktor, but
this time his manner was sympathetic. “However, my honor is my honor,
and my protection goes with you all the way to your own tribe. I will
go with you to Scutari.”
“But I don’t want the byraktor to be killed, either!” I wailed; and
then the byraktor’s gendarme came forward. He was a low-browed,
rascally-looking fellow, a man with bad eyes like those of an
untrustworthy horse, and a charming smile. He was naked except for the
wide scarlet sash around his loins and the tiny white cap over his
scalplock.
“The honor of my byraktor is my honor,” he said. “My byraktor is a good
byraktor and a great byraktor. He is byraktor of five hundred houses.
If he is killed, all the valley mourns. If he is killed in the dark
and we never know who killed him so that we can kill that man, that is
black dishonor for all the tribe of Shoshi. I am only one man, and if I
am killed it does not matter. I will go with you to Scutari.”
“Glory to your lips!” said the others. “Good! It is decided.”
“Well,” I thought, “all this is beautiful rhetoric, but no one will
kill him while I am with him.” As for the danger in the darkness, I did
not believe it for a moment. Who would shoot a person he could not see?
So I said good-by to the byraktor--all our long and flowery speeches
consumed another quarter of an hour, and the sunlight was climbing
away over the mountains so rapidly that we could see it go--and I said
good-by to all the others, and promised the frantic Shala man that
indeed he should be paid what had been promised; I would send him
the money by the gendarme, and I would send the mule and the hundred
kronen to the byraktor--and then another difficulty arose. If I left
the Shala man unprotected here, in the midst of the Shoshi men who
had traveled amiably with him all that day--but he had never wandered
beyond eyeshot of me--his life would be no safer than in the hands of
the gendarmes of Scutari.
I actually felt despair when Rexh pointed this out. “Well, but he has
to get back through the tribe of Shoshi somehow, anyway, hasn’t he? Why
on earth did he ever start this idiotic trip?”
“He wanted the money, Mrs. Lane, and he cannot think ahead. He came
through Shoshi only for a joke. If he can get away alive from these men
he can go back through Pultit.”
“Well, ask the byraktor if he will give me this Shala man’s worthless
life. Ask him not to let his men shoot him until after to-morrow
night. Ask him if the Shala man may stay safely under the byraktor’s
protection until the gendarme gets back with his money, and then go in
peace.”
So this was arranged, and the Shala man, turning his beautiful eyes
most languishingly to mine, fervently kissed my hands in Italian
fashion; and again I said good-by to the byraktor, and at last, just as
the last sunlight left the mountains, Rexh, the gendarme, the mule, and
I continued our way toward Scutari.
We followed the winding trail along the banks of the Kiri River.
Twilight was over the rushing waters and the cliffs; all along the way
the trees were misty green with the youngest of new leaves, and the air
was very pure and still. It was all peaceful and very beautiful, and,
lulled into dreaminess, I leaned back in the wooden saddle, watching
the first stars pricking through the sky. The only sounds were the
little tinkling of the donkey’s steel-plated hoofs upon the rocks, and
the pouring, rushing noise of the Kiri. Mile after mile we went, the
narrow cañon opening fresh vistas before us at every turn of the trail
around the cliffs, and the twilight grew grayer, the stars brighter.
But we were coming down the river, out of the mountains, and a sudden
shaft of pale sunlight striking a green hill on the other bank
surprised me by announcing that the sun had not yet set on the Scutari
plain. It was like coming into a new day. I sat up.
“Tired, Rexh?”
“No, Mrs. Lane.”
“But you’ve been walking twelve hours! Sure you don’t want to ride?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Lane. I am truly not tired.”
“I think I’ll walk awhile,” said I, sliding down from the saddle. Even
then he would not ride, but it was good to stretch tired muscles again,
and, hand in hand, Rexh and I ran for some time along the almost level,
winding trail, splashing through the little streams that crossed it,
until suddenly Rexh stopped.
“We must not leave the gendarme behind, Mrs. Lane. Some one will shoot
him.”
“So they will!” said I. “Well, let’s wait for him.”
He overtook us, hurrying the mule with blows, and we fell in behind
him, speculating now and then around which turn of the cliffs we would
first see the Kiri bridge, that lovely succession of old stone arches,
built long ago in the Italian style, and wondering what the girls in
the Red Cross house would say when we so unexpectedly arrived.
The crash of the thing that happened was like an explosion--over before
one had time to comprehend it. I happened to be looking toward the
gendarme, a couple of yards ahead of me, walking at the donkey’s head;
I had just taken my eyes from the creamy blue river and I saw him reach
for his rifle. A misty rain was falling; he had thrown my poncho over
his shoulders; the strap that held his rifle ran under it. His gesture
was quick and desperate, some part of the rifle caught on a rent in the
poncho and the heavy oilcloth ripped apart with a loud tearing sound.
The broken, frantic, struggling movement was printed on my eyeballs,
and then with headlong leaps I had reached him; we stood beside a
bowlder that had blocked my view of the trail, and in front of us were
two rifles, pointed straight at us.
There were two men behind the rifles, but I swear that I saw only the
rifles. I flung out my hand and heard the most fluting feminine voice
I have ever commanded crying, “Long life to you!” And then the rifles
fired.
I have tried to give the effect of the thing as it happened; I may
now say at once that I was not killed, though I shouldn’t have been
at all surprised if I had next realized that I was dead. Instead, I
saw two very haughty and displeased Albanians advancing up the trail.
“And to you long life!” they said, stiffly, and turned their heads
from the gendarme as they passed him. When they were quite gone I was
startled to find myself in a heap on the trail, weeping aloud like a
six-year-old. It’s odd how such things take you; I suppose it was the
surprise of it.
[Illustration: THE KIRI BRIDGE]
The gendarme did not seem unduly excited. He said he had killed the
cousin of one of those men not long before, and had been a little
afraid of meeting him on this road. He said they had lifted their
rifles when they saw me, and the bullets had gone over our heads. He
said that from now on, if I did not mind, he would wear my hat as a
disguise, because there were more of that man’s relatives about. And
would I mind walking beside him until we passed the Kiri bridge? He
would then be out of the dangerous territory. As for my poncho, he was
very sorry that he had torn it. I assured him that it did not matter.
I walked beside him all the way to the Kiri bridge, and then got on the
wooden saddle again and leaned back and rested. There was still an hour
of traveling across the Scutari plain.
The sunlight faded from the silvering western sky, the western
mountains were low dark shapes blotting out the stars. Far away a
light twinkled on the citadel of Scutari. For a long time it was the
only light in a vast darkness, and then the moon rose slowly above
the snow peaks of the eastern mountains. The sky was the pale blue
of a turquoise, flooded with creamy light, the lake of Scutari was a
silver glimmer, like quicksilver spilled far out on the plain. All
around us the tall spikes of yucca blossoms stood vaguely creamy in the
moonlight. We traveled over the silent land like silent ghosts, our
shadows wavering uncertainly beside us.
The donkey walked with little, quick, indefatigable steps; the gendarme
swung along easily, his rifle on his back; Rexh trudged beside me with
his hand on the saddle. The soft earth let us pass without a sound.
“Tired, Rexh?”
“No, Mrs. Lane.”
“What is the matter?”
“I am thinking that you will go away to your own country and forget us.
You say you will come back to Albania, but you never will. It is easy
to forget when one is far away; the mind changes. A mind is like the
water in a river. We will forget you, too. But I would like to keep
this night, because it is a very beautiful night.”
“Yes, Rexh, so would I.”
The lights of Scutari were like scattered glow-worms among the trees.
How strange it would be to come back into the twentieth century again!
Scutari, Tirana, Salonica--Constantinople? No, not Constantinople.
I would go back to Paris. It was not so much that I was tired of
traveling as that I was filled with it. One must go across the
centuries and back, across a great deal of the world and back, perhaps,
to know all the strange things that are at home, all the romances and
surprises in one’s own self.
The lights of Scutari were coming nearer. Scutari, Tirana, Durazzo,
the Adriatic, Trieste, and Venice, and then Paris--perhaps ten days
to Paris, the center of all Europe’s intrigues. For a weary instant I
felt again the pressure of all those currents which bewilder, crush,
and smother the struggling individual--movements of peoples, marching
of armies, alliances of nations, the tides of poverty and disease, the
tremendous impersonal economic conflicts. Silicia’s coal, Galicia’s
oil, England’s unemployed millions, Ireland, Egypt, India--my mind slid
away from them all. I was too pleasantly tired, too much under the
spell of the Albanian moon--perhaps, now, a little too old--to care
tremendously again for movements. They seemed at once too inevitable
and too unpredictable to be concerned about.
The three of us were so small on that vast plain, the sweep of the
moon-filled sky and the bulk of the blue-black mountains were too
vast; simple as an Albanian, I thought of the world as made of little
individuals like ourselves, each lonely, surrounded by the unknown,
each a little world in himself. That little world was the real world.
Externals did not matter. If each of us could only make our own little
world clean and kind and peaceful----
“Tired, Mrs. Lane?” Rexh said, softly.
“No, Rexh. Just thinking.”
“Slowly, slowly, little by little,” said the byraktor’s gendarme.
POSTSCRIPT
IN WHICH IS RELATED WHAT MAY BE FOUND BEHIND THE CURTAIN OF SILENCE
WHICH HIDES ALBANIA, ALSO HOW THE MEN OF DIBRA CAME WITH THEIR RIFLES
TO TIRANA, AND HOW AHMET, THE HAWK, CHIEF OF THE MATI AND PRESENT
PRIME MINISTER OF ALBANIA, SAVED THE BALKAN EQUILIBRIUM.
For me, there has been a sequel to this tale of my first adventures
in the Albanian mountains. And if I have transmitted, through the
little clickings of my typewriter, something of the interest and charm
those adventures had for me, perhaps there will be interest in the few
additional things I have learned about the Albanians.
Just a year from the day on which I parted with the byraktor of
Shoshi, I came with a friend, Annette Marquis, down the Adriatic
on a Lloyd-Triestino boat to Durazzo. As always, a flock of little
boats came out to meet the steamer. Dingy, unpainted, rowed by
villainous-looking, swarthy men in rags, they seemed indeed the
emissaries of a nation of brigands. The nice girl from Boston, who was
traveling from Venice to Athens chaperoned by two aunts, looked at us
with horrified eyes.
“You aren’t really going into Albania--all alone?” she gasped.
“Why--won’t you be killed?” The shipload of passengers crowded the
rail to watch us descend the swaying ladder, and gazed as the safe
crowd watches the lion tamer, divided between admiration for daring
and contempt for such senseless waste of courage. The weight of this
mass opinion swayed even my friend, who said, nervously, as we went
bobbing across waves of green water: “I wish I hadn’t listened to you
in Budapest. I wish I’d brought the gun they told us to bring.”
“Nonsense!” I said, firmly--and would have believed no fortune teller
who had told me I was lying--“we’ll be safer in Albania than in New
York.” And with irrational, vicarious pride I pointed out to her the
many masts of sunken ships around us--remains of Austrian and Italian
cruisers impartially sunk by Albanians during the Great War.
As the boat came nearer to the yellow walls of Durazzo I gazed with
complacency on the ruins of the palace of the Prince of Wied, the
German king forced on Albania by the European Powers just before
the Powers themselves leaped at one another’s throats. In 1914 the
Albanians rose and drove him out with their rifles; his palace is a
ruin now, and the palace grounds are a public park. But all Durazzo is
built upon ruins, for it was an ancient city when the Romans built the
towers and walls that still surround it, and there are still cafés on
the sites of the cafés where Cicero sat with parchment and stylus,
writing home to Rome for money to pay his way back--because, as he
admitted with some chagrin, he had wasted all his substance in that
merry and wicked city. Even for Cicero Durazzo had, in addition to its
living charms, the flavor of antiquity, for the Roman city was built on
the ruins of the older Albanian seaport.
A year earlier there had been no automobiles in Albania, but now, to
our surprise, we found a valiant small Ford waiting at the pier, and
engaged it at once to take us to Tirana, forty miles away. Our baggage
was a problem until the chauffeur of a government truck, addressing
us in French, volunteered on his own responsibility to take it to the
capital for us. “Pay? _Mais, non!_” said he, hurt. “You are Americans,
and the stranger in Albania is our guest.”
The road from Durazzo to Tirana crossed the low mountains that, from
Trieste to Valona, make the endless monotonous eastern wall of the
Adriatic. When you come over the crest of them you see lying before you
the green low central valley and the farther blue peaks of the lands of
the hidden tribes. And everything accustomed, everything commonplace,
everything that reflects ourselves to us, is left behind. Gray water
buffalo, flat-nosed, curly-horned, monstrous beasts that seem risen
from depths of primeval slime, plod down the road drawing high, narrow
wagons of wickerwork on huge wooden wheels. Shaggy, small donkeys carry
picturesque folk down the winding road to Shijak, the village by the
river where the bridge begins and ends in willow groves.
Beyond Shijak the road goes over the last low hill, and twenty miles
of plain lie before it, most sparsely dotted with the great white
houses of the beys of central Albania. Against the eastern sky the
towering mountains, with their eternal smoke of clouds, catch the last
rays of the sun and make magic with it. For an hour the colors shift
and change, plum purple, orange gold, mauve and violet and sea green,
until at last only a pale gold moon and a silvery star shine in a
lemon-yellow sky. And the seven white minarets of Tirana lift above the
green of trees.
Dusk was on the plain, and lights were glimmering through little houses
here and there, when we came to Tirana. No, the lights do not glimmer
through windows; these houses of peasants on the great estates have no
windows, as they have no chimneys. The light of the evening fire, built
on the earthen floor, shines through walls woven of willow withes, and
the smoke seeps through thatched roofs.
Before us twinkled the street lamps of Tirana. These are literally
lamps, filled every day with kerosene and set on their poles, to
be lighted with a match after the evening call to prayer from the
minarets. Our little car passed between low, ghostly white walls, and
stopped before the gendarmerie. An officer came out, lifted one of the
street lamps from its pole and held it over the car door, the better to
see us.
“Long may you live, _zonyas_!” said he, and, after he had glanced at
our passports: “All honor to you. Go on a smooth trail!” And the words
rekindled an old hearth fire in my heart. After a year of the bleakness
of Europe, I was at home again.
Three days later rifles were crackling, machine guns were ripping out
their staccato shots, and we were under fire in the streets of Tirana.
It was the rebellion of March, 1922--a strange affair, which I am
about to relate. But before it can be understood, Albania itself must
be understood, for that crisis and its outcome are incomprehensible,
incredible, without their background.
It would be useless, even though it were not dishonest, to claim that I
see Albania with impartial eyes. But this should be said: if I feel a
fondness for the little country which perhaps obscures clear judgment,
that fondness was created by knowing Albania. I came into it, as I have
said, rather prejudiced against it than otherwise. I did not intend
to stop there; I was persuaded to stay two weeks; and I have twice
returned to Albania and will go there again.
Yes, I have become a special pleader for Albania. But I know the
country, I speak the language, I have traveled along the northwestern
frontier from Lake Scutari to the Dibra, I have spent months with the
people of tribes never before visited by a foreigner. And I have yet
to read in any American publication a reference to Albania which
is accurate. When a writer so well informed as Mr. Lathrop Stoddard
refers to Albania as a “land of rugged mountains and equally rugged
mountaineers which raises nothing but trouble,” and thinks that its
importance in the Balkan problem is due to Italy’s exaggeration of
Valona’s military importance; when all American consuls in Europe
warn travelers not to go to Albania, a land of brigands; when Albania
appears in the newspapers only as a joke or as the scene of another
lawless revolution--the few Americans who know Albania do become
special pleaders.
There are good reasons for these misconceptions of Albania. For six
centuries the Albanians were one of the buried Christian minorities
of the Turkish Empire in Europe. Their great men who rose to places
of power in the Near East were not known to the outside world as
Albanians. Ismail Kemal Bey, Grand Vizier of Turkey, who raised the
flag of Albanian independence in 1912; Mehmet Ali, who led the struggle
for Egyptian independence in 1811 and founded the dynasty of the
Khedives of Egypt; Crispi, the great Italian statesman--these are a few
of the Albanians who, having lost their own country, have fought under
other banners. When the Albanians of Sicily rose behind Garibaldi and
fought for a free and united Italy, they were thought to be Italians.
When the Albanians of Epirus fought for the freedom of Greece, they
were thought to be Greek. When they fight for the freedom of Turkey,
they are thought to be Turks. And--this is of greater importance--when
the Albanians rose to fight for the freedom of Albania, they fought
behind a curtain of impenetrable silence.
They were surrounded by a battle line. The Slavs were north and east;
the Greeks were south; the Italians were west. Albania was cut off from
the outside world in 1910; for thirteen years she has been cut off from
the world. No telegraph or telephone lines ran from Albania to Europe;
no mail got through without censorship, no traveler without passport
visé from enemies. Letters for Europe must still go by messenger
through Jugo-Slavia, or by Italian steamer to Italian ports. During
May and June, 1922, while I was in Tirana, Albania’s communication
with Europe was completely closed by the Italians, in retaliation for
Albania’s protest against the establishing of Italian post offices in
Albanian cities.
Behind this veil of silence, the truth about Albania lies hidden. Only
one newspaper correspondent, to my knowledge, has visited Albania in
recent years--Mr. Maurer of the Chicago _Post_. Mr. Kenneth Roberts of
the _Saturday Evening Post_ lay for ten days ill in Tirana, left with
all haste for Montenegro, and later wrote of Albania--entertainingly.
News of Albania bears the date lines of Belgrade, Rome, Athens. Since
1910 it has been as accurate as news of France bearing a Berlin date
line. This is only human, for few of us are accurately just to our
enemies, and the Hungarian, Austrian, Serbian, Italian, and Greek
soldiers who have campaigned in Albania have returned to describe the
country as hell with variations. The one European who has spoken to me
of the Albanians without horror is a doctor in Budapest. He had worked
in Serbia during the war, and there had encountered a terribly wounded
Albanian still alive on a battlefield. The doctor bent over him to
examine his wounds, and the Albanian bit off the doctor’s little finger.
“I cannot think of that man without admiration,” said the doctor,
looking thoughtfully at his mutilated hand. “I can’t blame him for
this; I had not spoken to him, and he thought I was an enemy. He was a
splendid fellow--stood the most frightful agony without a murmur, and
kept his spirit like a lion. I did what I could for him--had no hope of
saving him--and that night, wounded as he was, he got away. I hope he
reached home alive. Some day I’m going to see Albania.”
I spoke of Albanians as a Christian minority in the old Turkish Empire.
One of the most frequent errors about Albania is the belief that it
is Mohammedan; this report has been used for political propaganda.
The Albanians became Christians before the Roman conquest, and were
Christians when they were subjugated by Turkey. They remained Christian
without exception until after the death of George Kastriotes--known in
European history by his Turkish name of Iskander Bey Scanderbeg--who
successfully revolted against Turkey and maintained Albanian
independence for twenty-five years, defeating the Turks in thirteen
great battles and innumerable small ones. After his death in 1467
some of the chiefs of the central mountain tribes, exhausted by a
quarter century of war and confronting fresh Turkish armies, purchased
their actual independence by a verbal submission and became nominally
Mohammedan. When the Bechtaski sect--which may roughly be said to
bear the relation to Islam that the Methodist bears to the Church of
Rome--rose in Turkey, it found its most fertile ground among these
Mohammedan Albanians. The northern mountain tribes have always remained
Roman Catholic, and southern Albania Greek Catholic.
None of these creeds, however, have affected national unity--Albania
is the only Balkan country in which religion and nationality are not
synonymous--and all of them are rooted shallowly above the old religion
of Albanians, which is the formless belief in a Great Unknown from
which sprang the gods and mythology of ancient Greece. In southern
Albania you will still hear the people taking oath _per kete djelle
eghe per kete hene_ (by the power of the sun and the moon). You
will still hear them calling upon Zeus--Zaa or Zee, the Voice--and
upon Athena--E Thana, The Intelligence. In the north, the Catholic
mountaineer greets the rising sun with the sign of the cross, and
hears in his forests the voices of the ora. This vague religion is
unconscious. The Albanian himself does not recognize it, but it is
the resisting subsoil which has prevented acknowledged religions
from taking deep root. Families of all religions freely intermarry;
Mohammedan women are unveiled, or Catholic women veiled, according
to the fashion of their town; in the mountains neither are veiled.
In Guri-Bardhe, a village of the Mati known as being fanatically
Mohammedan, the women were quite willing to pose for photographs, and
Limoni, the chief, was defying the local _hodji_ by demanding a modern
school; the _hodji_ taught the children nothing worth while, he said.
In the spring religious festivals--the two Easters and the fast of
Ramazan--all Albanians in Tirana took part, and Mohammedan fezzes were
thick in the midnight processions carrying Easter candles.
There has never been friction along the frontiers of the three
religions. All Albanians united to resist the Romanizing and
Germanizing influence of Catholicism, the attempt of Shiek ul Islam to
cripple the Albanian language by a Turkish alphabet (a revolution was
fought, and won, for the Latin alphabet in 1910), and the Hellenizing
propaganda of certain Orthodox Churchmen.
But there is a real division in Albania. It lies between the Toshks, or
southerners, and the Ghegs, who are the mountaineers. Men who have held
their mountain fastnesses and maintained their independence for six
centuries within the Turkish Empire look with distrust and contempt on
the Toshks whose valleys have been flooded by every wave of invaders.
The Toshks, who are the educated men of Albania, and the travelers,
are equally contemptuous of the Ghegs, ignorant men unable to read
or write. Nor do the Toshks admit that they cannot fight as well as
the Ghegs. It was the Toshks in Sicily who fought with Garibaldi, the
Toshks of Egypt who fought with Mehmet Ali; the Albanian soldiers in
Russia and Rumania and Turkey are Toshk; the 50,000 Albanians in the
United States are Toshk, and fought well with the Americans in France.
Hundreds of them have returned to spread American ideas through the
south; there are Toshk villages in which American English is spoken by
nearly every child. Men from these villagers led the forces that drove
the Italians from Valona in 1920. Indeed, say the Toshks, they can
fight as well as Ghegs. But it is not fighting that Albania needs.
One of the errors about Albania, to which I fear my descriptions may
contribute is the belief that the country is entirely mountainous.
This is true of the northern part, adjoining Montenegro. Farther south
the ranges are like the partitions in a house; steep, high, almost
impassable, they surround valleys and plateaus of rich level land, much
of it irrigated. The climate of the valleys is semitropical; rice,
cotton, tobacco, citrus fruits, figs, and pomegranates flourish. The
southern plains, before the war, exported fine horses in considerable
numbers. Properly developed, Albania would be a rich agricultural
country, even without the fertile valleys of Kossova and Epirus.
The mineral resources of Albania are unknown. During the Austrian
occupation, a survey was made, looking toward the development of copper
mines during the war; the results of the survey have vanished into the
archives of the Austrian War Department. However, even the untrained
eye perceives that there are copper and lead in the mountains. English
mining engineers have told me that there are probably also silver and
gold. I have seen veins of coal projecting on mountain sides; the
mountaineers chip it off with hatchets or pry it loose with levers, and
use it as fuel to a small extent. There are millions of feet of pine,
oak, birch, and beech timber; unlimited water power. There are oil
fields near Valona; producing oil wells were sunk, and later destroyed,
by the Italians. Valona’s military importance is not the only reason
that Albanians are not left in peace.
There is also the political background. For twenty centuries the
Albanians have been a beleaguered remnant of the first Aryan race in
Europe. By character, temperament, and choice they belong with the
peoples of the west, not with their Slav neighbors in the Balkans. But
they have had no friends, either in west or east; their whole history
has been a struggle for existence.
[Illustration: A TOSHK In his native costume of southern Albania.]
They were never entirely subjugated by Rome; they were not destroyed
or assimilated by the Slavs who have been pushing them southward for
sixteen hundred years; they never ceased their resistance to Turkey.
Since 169 B.C., when the Romans drove them into the mountains, they
have been fighting for a free Albania, and giving the Balkans no peace.
They fight with rifles and with diplomacy. They have had no friends,
but they profit by the quarrels of their enemies. Wherever there was a
weak place in Asia Minor or Central Europe, there the Albanians have
tried to strike a blow for Albania. The opportunity of their hero,
Scanderbeg, came in the fifteenth century, when the Sultan of Turkey
was killed on the battlefield he had won in Kossova. Scanderbeg, whose
childhood and youth had been spent in the Sultan’s court, was left
second in command of the Sultan’s victorious forces. He profited by
the confusion attending the Sultan’s death to get an order giving him
command of the fortress of Kruja, built by his father on a mountain
overlooking Tirana. The song says that he killed seven horses in
reaching Kruja, leaving his escort far behind in the Mati mountains.
When he reached the fortress, he at once proclaimed Albanian freedom,
and maintained it for twenty-five years of warfare, during which he
built citadels and roads and established laws which still exist. After
his death, his people waited four hundred years for another chance
to strike. Then the Young Turk movement rose. Albanians seized upon
it, precipitated the revolution at Uskub in Kossova, and were the
deciding factor in terrifying the Sultan and winning the Constitution
which promised to respect the languages and laws of subject peoples in
Turkey. When these promises were broken, when Montenegro and Serbia
invaded Albania, the chiefs raised the flag of Scanderbeg and wrote
their own Constitution of Lushnija. The Six Powers, in an effort to
maintain the Balkan equilibrium, gave Albania a German king. As soon
as the Powers were engaged in the Great War, Albania drove him out.
During the war she impartially fought both sides whenever they invaded
Albanian territory. When the war ended, when Jugo-Slavia replaced
Austria as Italy’s rival on the Adriatic, and England and France
quarreled, Albania played a shrewd game at Versailles and Geneva and
became officially an independent republic.
Still blockaded after ten years of war and blockade, still fighting
invaders in the Mati and the Dibra, she became an independent republic.
Her people, from Hoti and Gruda to Corfu, from the Merdite to the
Adriatic, were refugees. Her flocks had been killed, her villages
burned, her orchards hacked down, her irrigation systems destroyed.
She had a provisional government, hardly strong enough to hold
itself together. She could not have a permanent government until her
boundaries were fixed by the League of Nations.
She had great natural wealth and no debts, but she had no currency of
her own, no banks, no credit system. She had hides, wool, and olive
oil to export, but all her frontiers were closed by enemies. She had
minerals, forests, water power, oil, harbors, but no machines of any
kind, no trained men, no commercial organization. She had the strongest
men, the bravest fighters, the most indomitable national spirit in
Europe, but few of her people could read or write. Certainly more than
half the population was ill from malnutrition and malaria, and she had
probably the highest infantile mortality rate in Europe.
This was the new Albania which must somehow maintain itself. And if
the curtain of silence behind which this Balkan drama is played were a
stone wall shutting out her neighbors, the situation would not be so
difficult. But Italy--promised southern Albania by the secret Treaty of
London in 1915 which induced her to join the Allies against Germany,
and cheated of her payment--has authority from the League of Nations
to occupy Albania again if the Albanians fail to maintain a stable
government. Serbia is still intriguing to push farther south and west
the boundary lines not yet entirely fixed by the League of Nations.
There were other difficulties. Because the Toshks are the Albanians
who can read and write, the weak provisional government was Toshk.
Around the fires in their mountain houses, the Ghegs were saying that
only cowardly Toshks would allow free Albania to bow to a League of
Nations--a League of the very Powers who were her enemies. The Ghegs,
they said, were no such shameful trucklers. And every fire had its
refugee guests who had fled from burning villages, leaving terror
and death behind them. These refugees cried to their brother Ghegs
for vengeance. Did the Ghegs call themselves men and Albanians? they
demanded. “Our teeth in the throats of the Serbs!” the Ghegs replied.
Meanwhile in Tirana the Toshks were talking softly of patience, and
of more patience, of waiting month after month for a commission and
yet another commission from the League of Nations. The Toshks--with
that threat of Italian invasion over them--were demanding peace, peace
at any cost. Albania must wait for the League of Nations to fix the
boundaries, must acquiesce in any boundaries fixed, must be quiet, must
wait.
While they waited, the people starved. Prices in Albania are higher
than in the United States--higher in dollars. The homespun garments
have worn out; there is nothing to replace them. Fields have
been devastated, and no men left alive to till them. Flocks have
disappeared, horses and mules are gone. And as the boundaries have
been fixed, mile by mile upon a map, Dibra and Mati have lost their
market cities, Dukaghini and Merdite have lost their grazing lands, the
tribes of Hoti and Gruda and Castrati have been cut in two. Still, the
Albanian government spoke of peace, demanded peace, and--determined
to have peace--set about disarming the Ghegs in the very face of their
enemies.
This was the Albania into whose capital I blithely rode, in the
rattling little Ford, on that spring night of 1922. I pass over all
the minor political disputes, the ambitions of selfish men, the
mistakes of foolish ones, the bitter rivalry between Elbassan, to the
south, Scutari, to the north, and Tirana, in the center, for the honor
and profit of being Albania’s capital. Tirana was, tentatively, the
capital; made so because it was everywhere conceded to be the least
progressive, the most hopelessly Mohammedan, the most dangerously
un-Albanian city in the country. The government had made Tirana the
capital for the same reason that the teacher puts the worst boy of the
class in the front seat. But this was no solace to Scutari or Elbassan.
Tirana, the white, low town, drowsed in the sun; water rippled in
the gutters of the winding, walled streets; donkeys laden with cedar
boughs, the brooms of Tirana, carefully picked their footing on the
uneven cobbles; women with gayly painted cradles on their backs trudged
behind the donkeys. Men in rags of their homespun white garments and
Scanderbeg jackets and colored sashes sat all day on the low walls
around the mosques. The fez makers, amid their piles of raw wool and
mixing bowls and heating irons, were talking politics, and so were
the men in the street of the coppersmiths, which is musical from day
to sunset with the sound of little hammers beating glowing sheets of
metal. At noon the _hodjis_ droned their long prayers to Allah from
the minarets. At sunset their voices wailed again, above the sound of
clattering hoofs and tinkling bells as the flocks came home to the
courtyards. Then the sunset left a yellow sky behind the dark blue
mountains. The air was so still that the bells of a mule train, winding
down to Tirana on the far-off foothill trails, chimed with the sound of
running water in the gutters beside the courtyards’ mud-brick walls.
And the Cabinet Ministers of Albania came out to walk.
They walked in a row, sedately, hands behind their backs, and after
them marched their escort, a single row of soldiers. They walked
down from Government House, the square two-storied building behind a
half-ruined wall; they walked past the Tirana Vocational School and,
turning in front of the painted mosque, by the two Cypresses of the
Dead, they went past the block of little shops that is Main Street,
past the cemetery filled with toppling turbaned stones, past the large
white barracks where soldiers sang of Lec i Madhe, and out on the
Durazzo road. Then they came slowly back, and slowly went out again.
With them on this same way walked all the men of Tirana, for this is
the custom at the sunset hour. And we walked, too, saying at intervals:
“Long may you live! Long may you live!”
[Illustration: THE PAINTED MOSQUE IN TIRANA, AND THE LOW WALL ON WHICH,
ALL DAY LONG, MEN SIT AND DISCUSS POLITICS]
It was on the second evening of our walking that, counting Their
Excellencies as they came toward us, I said: “Where is the other
one? Who is he?” For we had met them all except the Minister of the
Interior, and suddenly I realized that he was unknown to us. And Rrok
Perolli, who, strangely, was no longer with the government, nor talking
much of politics, but living quietly upon an inherited income in
Tirana, replied, “He is Ahmet Bey Mati.”
The name awakened a thin, faint echo in my mind, an echo mixed with a
remembered sound of rain. But, “Long may you live!” I said to Their
Excellencies, and for a moment we stood talking in French.
“The disarming is going well in the mountains, Your Excellency?”
“Very well, very well. No trouble at all. _Tout est tranquil, madame._”
I did not believe this, knowing that to a Gheg his rifle was his honor,
and either dearer than life. But there is a convention which exempts
the words of statesmen from measurement by the Decalogue.
“Then we can soon be starting for the mountains?”
“Certainly, certainly, madame. As soon as we can find proper guides and
horses for you.”
We thanked them and, refusing a coffee, walked slowly on in the summer
evening. Nothing could have been more tranquil than the low white town,
with its cobbled winding streets, its stream murmuring beneath a stone
bridge, its minarets, its plane trees. The crowds went slowly up and
down, sauntering past the mosque’s naïvely pictured walls, past the
white-arcaded street of little shops whose owners sat crosslegged among
their goods, past the cemetery of toppling turbaned gravestones, past
the lighted windows of the cafés where men were singing the strange
Albanian melodies. It is a town to be happy in, Tirana.
But the water rippling in the gutters stirred uneasiness in my mind, a
vague uneasy effort, out of which came a name. “Ahmet Bey Mati! What
have I heard about him, Rexh?”
“I don’t know all you can have heard about him, Mrs. Lane. But you
remember the _comitadj_, in the cave above the Lumi Shala on the trail
from Thethis? The one that sang us the songs? He told you first about
Ahmet Bey and how they went to Valona.”
“Oh, Rexh, sure enough! Doesn’t it seem a long time ago? And how you
have grown, and how much you have learned, since then!”
For the little boy who trudged beside the donkey through that moonlit
night on the plains of Scutari was gone. The red fez, the flannelette
pajamas, were memories. It was a youth with a quick smile and earnest
eyes who walked beside me in Tirana, a student in the Vocational
School, learned in baseball and college yells and geometry, modest
still, and thinking more than he spoke, but no longer a child. It was
Frances--now in France--who had got Rexh into the American school,
handicapped though he was with lack of schooling and with his Gheg
tongue, and he had worked hard to justify her commendation.
“I do my best, Mrs. Lane. At first I was very stupid, for I could not
understand the Toshk boys, and I could not understand the teachers when
they asked me questions, and I was two years behind with the books. But
now they speak English, and I have learned Toshk. So I am happy, and
my report card is very good. I would like to show you my next one. Now
that you have come, I have some one to show it to. It is a joke on me,
because, though you said you would come back, I did not think you ever
would. And aren’t you happy to find the school really here?”