Yard by yard the path became steeper, and at times bent so abruptly that only with the greatest care, and by the united efforts of the whole party, could the gyro-car be dragged or pushed round. More than once Giulika muttered an imprecation on the people who invented machines. On foot, even on horseback, the narrow path presented little difficulty to a mountaineer, and the simple old man could not understand why two travellers, in peril of their lives from enemies, should enhance their danger by clinging to a thing of metal. He admitted, however, that the lamp was a good one, and even said that he should like to have a light as brilliant in his kula; it would enable the women to knit at night!
When they had gone so far from the village that there was no risk of a sound reaching the Albanians at their camp fire, George started the motor actuating the gyroscopes, and so made the haulage of the car easier, since the men no longer needed to concern themselves with keeping it upright. This fact caused no little consternation among them, and one asked earnestly whether the Inglesi would assure him that the car was not a creature of Shaitan.
They soon found that, difficult as it was to get the machine up-hill, it was still more difficult when the path took a downward trend. At such times the car had a tendency to break away from the hands of those who held it. By-and-by it occurred to George to climb into the car at the head of such descents and apply the brakes. Even then, however, the men had to hang upon it, for powerful as the brakes were, they were scarcely strong enough to hold it at the steepest parts.
Progress was slow. To start the driving motor was out of the question: the one consolation was that no petrol was being consumed. Eager as all were to reach the river, Maurice was determined not to jeopardise the remainder of his journey to Sofia by over-haste. Both George and he felt utterly worn out. The strain of constant travelling, the want of sleep and food, the agitation of the past day, were telling upon them heavily. They nibbled at hunks of hard maize bread given them by Giulika, and at some polonies they had bought at Durazzo; but with the exhaustion of their nervous energy they had lost appetite. Their present perils, and the thought of possible dangers to come, kept them on the rack.
It was indeed anxious, terrifying work, this scrambling up rough, tortuous acclivities, then diving headlong into what seemed at times an almost perpendicular gulf. The path was little more than a goat track. Here a huge mass of rock blocked the way; there the track diminished to a width of little more than four feet, with a sheer cliff on one side, and on the other a precipice of unknown depth. Giulika confessed that but for the light of the lamp he would never have attempted the more hazardous portions of the path; and the Englishmen were thankful that the surrounding darkness concealed from them the full measure of the risk they were running.
Suddenly they heard the baying of dogs.
“We are coming to the house of Zutni; he is a friend,” said Giulika.
Descending a long incline, a bend in the track brought them in sight of a rectangle of light. A door stood open, and out of it came a gigantic mountaineer, gun in hand. He was dazzled by the white glare of the lamp, and called suspiciously to the strangers to halt. Giulika went forward; his friend recognised him, and kissed him affectionately. A few words passed between them: then, hearing that two Englishmen were with the party, Zutni advanced, shook them warmly by the hand, and invited them to enter his house.
“Be welcome!” he said.
“Is it safe to delay?” Maurice asked of Giulika.
“Yes, indeed,” replied the old man. “We have come far; the Austrians will not dare to follow on horseback in the dark, and they may not discover our flight until the morning.”
The house was a small one, perched on a rocky eminence. The whole party entered; Giulika and his men, according to Albanian custom, handed their weapons to their host, who hung them beside his own on the wall. He placed mats for the Englishmen before a blazing fire; his women pulled off their boots, and in a few minutes grilled for them some mutton steaks on skewers. Rakia was produced: “Good health, friends,” said the jovial host; and the travellers, basking in the warmth, ate and drank with relish.
Giulika related what had occurred. His friend listened with indignation.
“You have done well,” he said, “but will not the villains slay your women and children and burn your house when they find that you have gone?”
“Aha!” chuckled Giulika. “The women and children are safe: I sent them this afternoon towards Ochrida to my brother.” (It was really a very distant cousin, but the ties of blood are close in Albania). “As for my house, it is likely to be burnt; but it is God’s will. I could not betray my guests.”
“True. And do I see Leka among you? Is it besa?”
“Yes: it is besa until we return to the village. Leka is an honourable man.”
And then Maurice learnt, with amazement, that among the villagers who had accompanied him was the man who had shot Giorgio. The blood-foes were at this moment squatting side by side, laughing and talking in the friendliest way, drinking alternately out of the same mug. The truce between them would hold until they returned to their village: then Leka would watch for an opportunity of stalking and slaying his enemy, with no more compunction than if he were a noxious beast.
“Sleep, friends,” said Zutni presently to the two Englishmen, who were nodding. “The Inglesi need much sleep; it is one of God’s mysteries. I will wake you when day comes. Long life to you!”
They needed no pressing. Zutni’s wife brought some mats for pillows, tucked them up in blankets with her own delicate fingers, and they slept till daybreak, oblivious of the insects that feasted on them.
In the wan, grey light Zutni awoke them. The fire was raked together: the women made strong coffee; and after a breakfast of coffee and hot maize bread baked on the hearth they set off to resume their journey. Zutni himself accompanied them; like Giulika, he felt responsible for his guests, and had resolved to see them safely to the Drin.
When they looked back upon the track they had traversed, they could scarcely realise that it had been possible to cross the rugged mountains behind them. Looking forward, it seemed equally impossible that they could climb the heights in front with so cumbrous a vehicle as the gyro-car. Peak after peak thrust its pinnacles into the sky. The path was visible for only a few yards ahead, and as each rugged corner was rounded, another came into view. But the terrors of the night had vanished. Daylight, while it revealed the difficulties and dangers of the journey, enabled the travellers to avoid them; and the Albanians hauled and pushed and dragged joyously, grunting with satisfaction as each new obstacle was surmounted. The only check upon their high spirits was the necessity of moving quietly, in order not to attract attention from any who might be wandering on the heights. For the same reason George did not start his engine. In the clear mountain air its throbbing might be heard for many miles. But it was possible now to let the car run down many a downward slope by its own weight, so that the progress was nearly twice as rapid as it had been in the darkness.
After they had been marching for about an hour, and began to find the descents longer than the ascents, they came to the blackened ruins of a small mountain village. In answer to Maurice’s inquiries, Giulika explained that the houses had been burnt by the Turks in the last rising. The Ottoman troops, coming to a village and finding any of the men absent from their homes, would assume that they were with the insurgents, and burn their houses. There was no more effective means of crushing an insurrection, for the Albanian’s house is his all.
“What we want is a good government,” said the old man. “You Inglesi have a good king, they say; why does not he come and govern us?”
This was a question which Maurice found it difficult to answer in any way that could satisfy the simple mountaineer, to whom international politics was an unknown world. He was listening sympathetically to Giulika’s recital of the misdeeds of the Turks, when the party encountered a more serious obstacle than any they had yet met. A mountain stream, running towards the Drin, had spread out into a wide swamp, dotted with boulders. So soft and oozy was the soil, that the leaders of the march sank deep into it. There was not water enough to float the car, and its weight would clearly prevent its being run across. Nor was there any possibility of carrying it as the sailors had carried it from the quay to the launch at Dover: the men could not get a firm footing.
They halted, looking blankly at one another. Zutni said that the morass could be circumvented, but only by striking back into the mountains, and following a track that would take them several hours’ march out of the direct course. Such loss of time was dangerous, and might prove fatal. Remembering how the man from Elbasan had refused to shoot him at the bidding of Slavianski, Maurice asked Giulika whether the Austrian might not have permanently lost the help of his allies. But the old man answered that this was unlikely. The Elbasan had obeyed the dictate of honour in refusing to kill a helpless prisoner; but the same sense of honour would bid him fulfil his obligation to his employer when the prisoners were free. They would certainly pursue on horseback, and the delay involved in fetching a circuit about the swamp would enable them to gain upon the fugitives.
While they were discussing the perplexing situation in which they found themselves, George’s eyes lighted on the ruined buildings perched on the heights about half a mile in their rear.
“If there are any planks left whole in those buildings,” he said to Maurice, “there is a chance for us. We could lay them on the mud and form a track. It would be slow work getting across even then, but quicker than going miles round.”
Maurice explained the suggestion to Giulika. He at once sent half a dozen men back to the village to see if the fire had spared enough timber to serve the purpose. The Englishmen gazed with admiration as the lithe young men hastened up the slope, as nimbly as goats. In an extraordinarily short time they were seen returning, each carrying one or more long, rough, blackened planks, ripped from a half-demolished barn. They brought news as well. They had caught a glimpse of horsemen approaching through a defile in the hills behind.
“How far away?” asked Maurice anxiously.
Their answers left him very much in the dark. Time and distance are alike vague to the people of Albania. One said an hour’s march, another declared that it was less; all were agreed that if the swamp were dry ground, the pursuers would overtake them before they had reached the other side, and from this Maurice inferred that the distance between the two parties was even less than the mountaineers supposed.
Without the loss of a moment he instructed them how to lay the planks. The first having been thrown down upon the mud, a man carried a second along it and placed them end to end, and so on, until there was a kind of pier, sixty or seventy feet long, extending into the swamp. George then mounted into the car to steer it, and it was pushed from behind until it reached the furthermost plank. At times the planks sank until they disappeared below the surface; but then, although the wheels were running in several inches of ooze, the boards beneath them afforded a sufficiently firm foundation. Each plank was held by a man at the nearer end as the car ran over it, so that it should not swerve, George well knowing that the slightest deviation to right or left must precipitate the vehicle into the morass.
Behind the car marched the whole of the party in single file. The last man, on gaining the second plank, lifted the first and handed it to his comrade in front. Thus each board was raised in turn. When the car arrived at the end of the pier, and came to an enforced standstill, a man passed through it and laid a plank beyond, and the pier was reconstructed as before. Then the advance was carried for another sixty feet, and the operation was once more gone through.
“Upon my word, I’d rather face the precipices,” said George to Maurice, as the car reached the end of the third section. “They were not half so trying to the nerves as this slow crawl.”
“Have patience, my dear fellow,” replied his brother. “It was an uncommonly happy thought of yours. We’ve the consolation of knowing that, as we take up our path behind us, Slavianski can’t follow, and will have to go the roundabout way that we have escaped.”
“Do you see any sign of the fellow?”
“Not yet. The mountain track winds and undulates so much that we shan’t catch sight of him till he comes to the ruins.”
“Well, I hope that won’t be yet, for if the Albanians are anything of marksmen, they can pick us off long before we get to the other side. And we can’t go any faster; these fellows are working splendidly. I suppose if we get through to Sofia safely your chief will reward ’em pretty handsomely.”
“It isn’t in the regulations, as the Customs officer told us,” said Maurice with a smile. “Still, I daresay we shall be able to do something for them—if we get through; we’re not out of the wood yet.”
By slow stages the party had advanced about a quarter of a mile into the swamp, and only forty or fifty yards yet remained, when there was the report of a rifle. Glancing round, Maurice saw a group of horsemen halted in the ruined village; several had dismounted. Then came three cracks in rapid succession.
“They’re no good!” cried George gleefully, when neither man nor car was hit.
“The range is too long for accurate shooting,” said Maurice, “but they can alter that. See, they are coming down, and much faster than we did.”
The horsemen were putting their steeds to a pace that seemed to the onlookers dangerous. Before they were half-way down the hillside, indeed, one of the horses stumbled, throwing its rider.
“He is an Austrian,” said Giulika laughing. “No Albanian, Christian or Moslem, would leave his saddle so quickly as that.”
On coming within a quarter-mile of the swamp the horses began to gallop; but the fugitives had advanced another sixty feet before they reached the edge. There the horsemen reined up, flung themselves from their saddles, and fired a scattered volley. Maurice looked grave as the shots whistled round, but the danger of the party was not so great as might be supposed, even had the Albanians been better marksmen, because the fugitives were not grouped, but marched in a line. The car itself formed the best target. One or two bullets struck its framework, and George felt a little nervous lest one should find its billet in the petrol-tank. But no harm was done until a shot struck Giorgio in the arm, just below the spot where his former wound was bandaged. He growled with rage; but his grandfather laughed at his ill-luck, and Maurice could not help smiling when Leka, the young man’s blood-foe, said cheerfully:
“Never mind. We’ll have besa until your wounds are healed.”
“Hadn’t you better be friends for life?” asked Maurice.
“And lose my honour, excellence?” said Leka. “No; I would sooner drown myself in this swamp.”
The Albanians laid the track over the last stretch with wonderful speed, and in a few minutes the car and the whole party touched terra firma. The pursuers were still firing, but without effect. Some of Giulika’s party paused to return the shots, but their marksmanship was no better than their opponents’, and Giulika presently ordered them to desist.
By this time Slavianski had recognised the hopelessness of further shooting. Mounting his horse again, he rode for a few yards into the swamp, as if to test the possibility of direct pursuit, but he halted when the animal’s legs had disappeared almost to the knees, and returned to the shore. In a few moments his party were in their saddles, and started at a gallop to make the circuit of the swamp.
“Really, his perseverance deserves to be rewarded,” remarked Maurice, as he mounted to his place beside George in the car.