THE WATER ORA OF MALI SHARIT—THE COMING OF THE TRIBES TO EUROPE BEFORE THE SEAS WERE BORN, AND HOW THE FIRST GREEKS CAME IN BOATS—WHY ALEXANDER THE GREAT WAS BORN IN EMADHIJA, AND OF HIS JOURNEY TO MACEDONIA—THE SAD HOUSE OF KOL MARKU.
“The water ora were an ancient race,” said the old man. “They were here before the ora of the forests. I do not think there are very many of them left, and no man has seen them in my time, nor in the time of my father. But very long ago, before the tribes of Shala, Shoshi, and Pultit were founded by the three brothers from the land that is now the Merdite country, there was a man of their tribe who caught a water ora. It is a very old song, and much of it has been forgotten, but the man was a man from the Mali Sharit, and by three days he missed becoming the king of the world. In my father’s time the thing that happened to him was still sung. I heard that song when I was a child, but I have forgotten the words of it. I remember only the thing that happened.
“The man of Mali Sharit went every day to the wood on the mountain, and in that wood was a lake, small, but like the sky in clearness. I do not know why he went; he was probably laying by green leaves to feed his sheep in the winter. But it happened that one day while he worked he saw a very beautiful girl lift her head from that clear water and look carefully in every direction. He was hidden by low leaves and she did not see him. When she saw no one, she came from the water into the sunshine, and danced in the sunshine. When she had danced until she wished no longer to dance, she went again into the water. The man of Mali Sharit went to the pool and looked into it, and it was like the sky in clearness.
“The next day this happened, and the next, and on the evening of the third day the man of Mali Sharit went to a wise old woman and told her what he had seen. He said: ‘I am thirsty for this girl. If I cannot marry her I will marry no one and have no sons. Tell me what I can do.’
“The old woman thought, and said: ‘I will tell you what to do. To-morrow you shall take to the edge of the pool a silver mirror and lay it beside the pool. And you shall take a rope and tie yourself round and round with your back against a tree trunk. And you shall stay there without moving while the girl comes from the pool and goes into it again. Then come and tell me what you saw.’
“The man of Mali Sharit did this. When the girl came from the water and saw the mirror she looked into it for a long time. Then she saw the man of Mali Sharit where he stood tied to the tree, and quickly she went back into the water. That day she had not danced.
“In the evening the old woman said: ‘It is good. For three days you shall do again as you have done to-day. On the third day, lay beside the mirror a dress of white silk in which there has been cut no opening for the head to go through. The girl will put this on, in order to see it upon her in the mirror. But when her head is inside it, while she tries to find the opening that is not there, then loosen your ropes and leap quickly, and take her to your house as your wife.’
“All that the old woman had said was wise, and the man of Mali Sharit took the ora of the pool to his house as his wife. But that is not the end of the song.”
The old man paused to adjust a freshly rolled cigarette in his silver holder. For a moment pale sunshine came through the slits of windows in bars of light across the colored rugs and the mass of loungers upon them; it struck a sparkle here and there from revolver hilt and silver chain. Then it went out, and only the firelight richly accented the duskiness. There was a constant coming and going on the long balcony outside the windows, for behind one of the closed doors Padre Marjan was hearing confessions and giving absolution or penance for sins.
“It’s like some old, half-forgotten story,” I said, puzzled. “I remember it, but only as he tells it.”
“Mmmh. So do I,” said Alex. “I can’t just remember what comes next.”
“Asht shum i buker (It is very beautiful),” I said to the old man. “And what was the end of the song?”
“The man of Mali Sharit kept in his house the ora of the pool,” the old man continued, “and she was his wife. For six months he was not unhappy, for she was beautiful and she was good, but he longed to hear her speak. And when the six months of humbleness and modesty were gone and the time had come for her to laugh and be gay in his house, she was still silent. The man of Mali Sharit worked hard for her. He brought her fine wool to weave and he made a most beautiful cradle painted with figures of animals and of birds and of fishes, for he remembered that she was of the water. But when he gave her the wool she said nothing, and when he showed her the cradle she was silent. He said to her, ‘Tell me what you want, that I may get it for you,’ and she did not answer. He went into the woods to a place he knew, and fought the wild bees and brought her honey, and she ate the honey, smiling, but still she did not speak. He did other things that I do not remember; he did everything that his mind could devise, to make her break that stillness, and she did not. His home was always very still, and he was troubled. And when their son was born she loved the child, but she made no sound when he was born and she made no song when she nursed him.
“And when a year had gone by since their marriage he could endure this stillness no longer. He went to the wise old woman and told her this and asked her how to make his wife speak.
“The old woman thought, and said, ‘You will kill a sheep and take the bladder of the sheep and fill it with its blood. Secretly put the bladder into the cradle of the child. To-night speak sternly to your wife and command her to speak. If she does not answer, take your knife and say to her, ‘Speak, or I will kill the child.’ If then she does not speak, strike with your knife into the cradle and cut the bladder. When she sees the blood your wife will speak.’
“The man of Mali Sharit went with a heavy heart and a dark mind and did as the old woman had told him. He said to his wife, ‘Speak!’ and she was silent. He took out his knife and showed it to her, and she was silent. He laid his hand upon the cradle, he said he would kill the child, and she looked at him with terrible eyes and was silent. Then he struck, and the blood came red upon the blankets, and she spoke.
“She spoke with a sob and a scream. She lifted the cradle in her arms, and she said, ‘Had you been patient for three days longer, I could have made you king of the world.’ Then she wept, and her tears became a fountain, and the fountain became a mist, and the mist was gone. The man of Mali Sharit never saw his wife again, and as for the child, in three days he died. And I do not know what became of the man of Mali Sharit.”
In my disappointment I spoke too quickly, forgetting the excellence of Rexh as an interpreter. “It isn’t Albanian, after all; it’s Greek,” I said. “I remember now that I read it years ago.”
“Yes, so do I,” said Alex, and her words crossed those of Rexh, who had picked up mine and was turning them into Albanian.
“Po,” said the old man, with irony. “It is a Greek song—it is as Greek as Lec i Madhe.”
I had thanked the old man with an insult, for even the Ghegs keep smoldering in their hearts the knowledge that the Greeks hold Janina, and the memory of the burned villages and slaughtered Albanians of Epirus is only six years old. In an unguarded instant I had made for myself one of those recollections that burn in sleepless night hours. I called myself a fool, while I heard my voice trying to bury the irremediable mistake by hurried words. “What is Lec i Madhe?”
Frances and Alex were busy in a scrap bag of mythology, and Rexh replied. “I don’t know what you call him in English, Mrs. Lane. Lec i Madhe was our king of very long years ago, who went down from the mountains and took all the cities of the world. He was the son of our twentieth king, and he was a very great fighter. I think surely you must know him by some name in English. We call him Lec i Madhe; it means, the Great Lec. Because we had other kings before him called Lec.”
“Lec i Madhe?” cried Frances, headlong at the word. “Alexander the Great! What are they saying about him?”
Once a week she comes walking over fifteen miles of mountain trails, to be ready for business bright and early on Bazaar Day. This week she has brought jars of kos (the thickened but not soured milk that she makes by putting three sprigs of grape vine into the boiled milk) and plums and baskets, and on the way she has been knitting. When she finishes the gay sock pinned to her jacket she will sell that, too.
The young man in the American army shirt had listened not at all to the story of the ora, but he heard Frances’s words and misunderstood them. “Alexander the Greek?” he repeated. “Alexander was not Greek; he was Albanian.”
“You mean his mother was an Albanian,” said Frances.
The young man smiled scornfully. “And you think his father was not? When has a king of Albania married a foreign wife? Albanians marry Albanians. When Filip the Second married, he married a woman of his own people, but of another tribe, as the custom has always been. Do the Greeks dare to say that Filip was a Greek? If he had been Greek, no Albanian chief would have given him a daughter for wife. Even then we Malisori[4] despised the Greeks.”
“But Philip of Macedonia—was a Macedonian,” I said, feebly. “Wasn’t he a Macedonian? The Macedonians weren’t Albanians, were they?”
“Ask the old man what he knows about Lec i Madhe, Rexh,” said Frances. But the old man, drawing solace from the amber mouthpiece with his toothless lips, still brooded upon the song of the man of Mali Sharit.
“The things which I have told happened to an Albanian of the tribe of the Mali Sharit,” he said. “The song of them has been sung by the Malisori from the days when they happened till the days of my own father’s manhood. The Greeks are a little, inquisitive people who have played with paper and with writing since they first came to our shores in boats, long ago—a hundred hundred years before the Romans came. We gave them shelter then, we let them come to our shores, we let them come from the cold seas and stay on our land, and they are guests who steal from their hosts. They have killed our people; they have taken Janina. Let them leave our songs and our kings alone. Greek!” said he, muttering. “They will be claiming the Mali Shoshit, next!”
Excitement so shook my fingers that the writing wavers on the page. The blotted and rain-smeared notebook before me now evokes like a crystal before the gazer the picture of that old man in the warm duskiness of the house of Sadiri Luka, the streaming of rain on the roof, the smell of coffee and cigarette smoke, the soft sound of moccasined feet going down the corridor to confession at the knee of Padre Marjan.
“The Greeks came to your shores?” I said, goading the old man on. “But it is written in the books that they came from the lands watered by the Danube, by the river that flows through Belgrade to the Black Sea. It is written that they came down through the Balkans to build their great and beautiful cities on the shores of the Ægean. And no one writes about the Albanians. Where did the Albanians come from?”
These words created a perceptible sensation. Hazel eyes and blue eyes turned upon me in amazement. A middle-aged man who had come from the room of confession to stack his rifle with others beside the fireplace and to roll a cigarette stopped with the tobacco half poured and stared at me. “It is not written where the Shqiptars came from?” said he, in a tone of stupefaction. “But surely all the world knows where the Shqiptars came from.”
I assured him that it was written only that the Greeks, when they came, found some savage tribes whose origin was unknown. But it was thought that these tribes were old peoples of Europe who died out when the peoples of to-day came—I stopped, to give them no clew to the migrations of Aryans from India—who died out, I said, when the great civilizations of to-day came into the world. And the first of these civilizations was the Greek.
The newcomer finished his cigarette thoughtfully, put it in its holder, lighted it from a coal, and summed up his conclusions in an Albanian proverb. “It is very true,” said he, “that only the spoon knows what is in the dish.”
“And when we speak of the Greeks,” said another chief, “let us remember the saying of our fathers: The tree said to the wood cutter, ‘Why do you kill me, for I have done nothing to you.’ And the wood cutter replied, ‘You gave me the handle for the ax.’”
The old man’s irritation had died. He looked upon us now with pity, as ones who had offended because of ignorance. “If the American zonyas wish to know what we have learned from our fathers, who learned it from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, I will speak,” he said. “All these things are very old, and none of them are written in books, therefore they are true. I am an old man, and I have seen that when men go down to the cities to learn what is in the books they come back scorning the wisdom of their fathers and remembering nothing of it, and they speak foolishly, words which do not agree with one another. But the things that a man knows because he has seen them, the things he considers while he walks on the trails and while he sits by the fires, these things are not many, but they are sound. Then when a man is lonely he puts words to these things and the words become a song, and the song stays as it was said, in the memories of those who hear it. Like the song of the man of Mali Sharit. These things in our songs are therefore true, for I know many songs about many things, but no song shows that another song is a liar.
“Now it has always been said in our songs that the Shqiptars came long ago from the east, from a crowded country beyond the eastern mountains. There was no water in the Black Sea then. The people came across mountain and valley, in many tribes. It was a land of great animals, good to eat when they were killed. These peoples—we were not then called Shqiptars, but each tribe had its own name, the name of its chief—these peoples who were our fathers’ fathers took all the land from the river in the north, that flows to-day through Belgrade, to the plains in the south that are now a sea.
“I do not know how long they lived here before the valleys became seas. There was a rain that was like the rain that is falling now, and there was a water that came up from the earth to meet it. And then there were the seas, on the east and the west and the south, and many tribes, many large tribes, were drowned in them. My grandfather told me this, and he said that his grandfather said there had been a song with the names of all these lost tribes, a song of mourning for the tribes that were eaten by the seas. But the grandfather of my grandfather had not heard that song. New songs come all the time and old songs are forgotten, and we have had much to mourn since the forgotten tribes ceased to be living men.
“But this you must understand. It was after the seas came that the Greeks came. They came in boats across the seas, and they were strange peoples that we had never seen before, speaking a strange tongue. Their boats came to the shores in the south, and our fathers had never seen boats. That was the coming of the Greeks. They came, and came again, and stayed, and built cities. The fathers of the Shqiptars stayed on the mountains and watched them, and went down and gave them gifts. We did not kill them, as we might have done when they were few and weak and there were no Five Powers.
“The Greeks were always a soft people—except one tribe of them, whose name I do not remember. There was one tribe of good fighting men. But most of the Greeks were plainsmen. From the first, they loved to sit and think, to talk, and to write, and to read to one another what they had written. That was their pleasure.
“For this reason, all mountain men who liked to take their pleasure in that way went down to their cities and learned from the Greeks how to write, and having learned, they stayed there and wrote, and read what they had written, and in this way their days passed and no songs were sung about them. But the Greeks did not come to the mountains. When at last the mountain men went down to Greece behind their king, then there was no more Greece. And for these many years of years there would be no Greece if the Five Powers would take their hands from the Balkans.”
The old man did not speak without interruption. There were promptings and contributions from his listeners, and now and then a question from us. And he had to be brought back to Lec i Madhe, for the politics of his own lifetime were fresher in his mind and more stirring to his emotions.
“Lec i Madhe was not a wise man like his father, but he was a chief and a fighter, and a leader of great fighters,” said he. “There were twenty-one kings before his father, who were kings of all the tribes from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, north of the tribes of Greeks. The kingdom was made by Karanna, who was a foreign chief from the eastern shores of the Black Sea. He came over the sea and made the united kingdom, and its capital was the city Emadhija.[5] After him came these kings: Cenua, Trimi, Perdika, Argua, Filip, Ajeropi, and Ajeropi was the first king whose family was of the pure blood of our fathers who came first from the east. After him there were these kings: Alqeti the son of Ajeropi; Aminti the son of Alqeti, who was the ally of Darius the king of Persia. Then Lec the son of Aminti; Perdika i dyte, the son’s son of Perdika, Arqelloja the son of Lec; Oresti the son of Perdika i dyte; Arqelloja i dyte the son of Arqelloja; Armint’ i dyte the son of Arqelloja i dyte; Pafsania who was a foreigner; Armint’ i trete, the son of Armint’ i dyte; Lec i dyte, the son of Armint’ i trete; Ptolemeoja, who was a foreigner; Perdika i trete, of the family of Perdika; Armint’ i katerte, the son of Lec i dyte; Filip i dyte, the son of Lec i dyte, and Lec i Madhe, the son of Filip i dyte. After Lec i Madhe was Filip i trete——”
But here the genealogy breaks off, for we wished to hear more of Lec i Madhe, and we never came back to the story of his successors.
“Lec i Madhe was born at Emadhija in the Mati,” began the old man, and was interrupted by three small shrieks of excitement.
“Alexander the Great born in Albania!” we exclaimed. “But—but it is written that he was born in Macedonia!”
“There were at that time two capitals of the united kingdom,” said the old man. “There was Pela, between Salonika and Monastir, and there was Emadhija, the old capital, lying in the valley which is now the Mati. In Pela and in Emadhija Filip the Second had great houses, and sometimes he was in Pela and sometimes in Emadhija. There was a trouble between Filip the Second and his wife, because she loved Emadhija and would not go with him to Pela. She went, it is true, but she did not want to. And there was trouble between them because of a Greek woman of Pela. I do not know the song, but I think that it was fancy and foolishness, for Filip the Second was a good man and a wise king. But this is true, that before Lec i Madhe was born his mother left Pela and came back to the city Emadhija, and it was in Emadhija that Lec i Madhe was born, and there he lived until he was out of the cradle. He rode on a horse when he first went down to Pela, and Filip the Second came out from Pela to meet him, and it was from the back of a horse that Lec i Madhe first saw his father.
“And it is said that when Lec i Madhe rode down from Emadhija with his mother and many chiefs of the Malisori they passed through the valley of Bulqis, where there are springs of strange waters, and that as they passed through the forest—there was in those days a great forest in the Bulqis, where now there are fields of grain—they rested by one of the springs, in the place where the great rocks are standing in rows. There they heard a sound of singing in a strange tongue, but the end of the song they understood, and the end of the song was, ‘Long live Lec, the son of Filip i dyte, Lec i Madhe, the king of the world!’[6]
“Filip the Second was very proud of his son, and his pride led him to the one great foolishness of a good and wise king. He said that he would make Lec i Madhe king of the world, and that was well enough, but he thought that to be king of the world a man must be more learned than he himself. Whereas all old men who have watched the ways of the world know that to be strong and ruthless will make a man powerful, but to be learned makes a man full of dreams and hesitations. In his pride and blindness, Filip the Second sent to Greece for an Albanian who had learned the ways of the Greeks, and to that man he gave the boy, to be taught books.”
“Really, this is too much!” said Alex. “Aristotle an Albanian?”
“Yes,” continued the old man, taking the amber mouthpiece from his lips and tranquilly answering the sound of the name, “his name was Aristotle, and he was from a family of the tribe of Ajeropi, his father having gone to a village in Macedonia and become a merchant there. Being rich, he sent his son, who was fond of thought rather than of action, to learn the Greek ways of thinking. And it was this man who was brought back by Filip the Second to teach his son, though there were many chiefs of the Malisori who could have shown him how to be a man and a leader of men.
“The end of it was that Lec i Madhe became the king of the world. Is that written in the books? Po? Is it also written that he was made king of the world by the chiefs of the Malisori who had loved his father, and that Lec i Madhe himself was no man, nor ruler of men? Is it written that when the Malisori came back to their mountains after following Lec i Madhe to the ends of the earth they sang a song saying it was good that the eyes of Filip the Second were closed forever, that they might not shed tears of shame for his son? Is it written that this harm was done to the Shqiptars by a man who had gone down to the cities to learn from the Greeks to despise his own people?”
“No,” I said, “it is not exactly written so.”
But there were expostulations from some who, as Albanians, were proud of Lec i Madhe and would cry down this attack on their most renowned king, and objections from others who contended that the old man was right, and all these were silenced by the entrance of Padre Marjan, whose pale, fervent face and gentle voice brought us back to the present.
He was given the place of honor among these of his flock whom he had shriven, and Sadiri Luka hastened from the withdrawn corner where he had been talking with Perolli to make with his own hands a cup of coffee for the padre. When the readjusted group was settled again, and we had replied to Padre Marjan’s questions about our morning and our journey, I asked him whether Aristotle was an Albanian. He said, yes. I asked him then about the migration of the first Albanians and the coming of the Greeks in boats, and he said he believed these stories to be true. It was strange, I said, that the historians of the west, the Greek scholars of the universities, could be so misled. Padre Marjan smiled.
“All these old things are debatable, of course,” he said, “and it must be remembered that Greeks and Hellenized Albanians wrote all the records. We Albanians have given no material to scholars. Besides, is it strange that they should be mistaken about the lives of men who died thirty centuries ago, when they are mistaken even about their own times? In the same books which say that the Greeks were shepherds from the Danube you will read that the Albanians of to-day are Mohammedans, or brigands, or both.”
This was so true that I was silent, and, lounging comfortably upon the cushions, I smoked and watched the firelight run nimbly along silver chains and leap from cigarette holder to knife hilt with every slight movement of the entangled bodies around us. Padre Marjan spoke of the unimportance of past glories and shames, of the new dawn of liberty for Albania which brought responsibilities and duties, and of the importance of eternal things, of goodness, strength, and courage, given by God to man for man to use. For, said he, the knife in its scabbard cuts no leaves to feed the flocks, and the goodness of man when not used for those around him becomes a rusty knife, which is of value to no one.
His voice was tense in its softness, and, looking at his wasted face and feverish eyes, I thought, “This man is wearing himself out, here in these mountains, unknown, alone—for he must be starving for the companionship of equals; it is lonely to be always the superior—and when he has burned to ashes he will lie in a grave beside some village church, under a wooden cross from which the rain will wash his painted name long before the wood decays. There are so many of those little graves that the rain has made nameless and that no one visits except the nibbling sheep searching for a grass blade.” And I wondered where Lec i Madhe lay buried, for, after all, all men wear themselves out, or are worn out by the years, and the difference between the king of the world and the priest of Thethis is nothing to the rain. Then Padre Marjan gave back the empty coffee cup to Sadiri Luka, saying, “Per te mire (All good to you),” and rose. He would not stay to share the food which the women were even then bringing, for there was a sick man in upper Thethis, too ill to come to confession, who had sent, begging the padre to come to him. The sick man’s son waited for him at the door, and two chiefs laced his opangi, gave him his staff, and went with him a little way on the trail.
It was midafternoon, and since early morning the women had been preparing the feast they offered us. A special dispensation had been asked, and granted by Padre Marjan, for that feast, for though this was Lent, we were not Catholics, and never before had Americans been guests in upper Thethis. Far and wide the rumor had gone that in our own tribe we were daughters of chiefs, and it was with apologies that the village offered us its best.
When we had washed our hands in water poured from a silver pitcher, and dried them on a towel of white silk, a large brass tray was set on four midget legs in the midst of our cushions, and the other guests withdrew to places near the walls. Much urging persuaded Sadiri Luka to sit with us and share such parts of the feast as did not break the Lenten fast. Newly made wooden spoons were given us, and a silver bowl of hot chicken broth was set in the center of the tray.
Sadiri Luka spoke little, but his remarks were sound and well considered. While our spoons rhythmically dipped the delicious broth, he said that the whole question of good government in Albania depended upon the fixing of the frontiers, and that the League of Nations talks too much and does too little. He suggested, as explanation of this fact, that the League is made of human beings.
While we gorged upon pieces of miraculously tender roasted lamb, fished from a heaping platter, he said that any definite frontier, however unjust, would be better than the prolonged uncertainty which daily encouraged further Serbian invasions.
While we chose morsels of stewed chicken, he said that the greater danger was not from Serbia, which fought with artillery, but from Italy, now driven to intrigue. Italy, having been promised southern Albania and much of the eastern Adriatic coast in return for joining the Allies in the Great War, had now been cheated of payment, driven from Albania by the Albanians, and refused Fiume. However, Italy had authority from the League of Nations to occupy Albania again if the Albanians could not maintain a stable government. Italy would, therefore, do two things; first she would spend money and munitions in trying to stir rebellion within Albania and in encouraging the already savage discontent of Montenegro, Bosnia, and Croatia; then she would develop an aggressive foreign policy, drop all pretense of accord with France or England, and fight it out with Jugo-Slavia. When this occurred, of course both Serbia and Italy would fall on Albania; any trouble in the Balkans was a signal for that.
The chicken being taken away, we were given a bowl of little cakes, light as whipped cream, cooked in brown butter and served with honey. Sadiri Luka said that the only hope of peace in the Balkans was a Balkan federation; nothing less, he said, would persuade the European Powers and Turkey to leave the Balkans alone. It was true that for fifteen centuries the Slavs had been attacking Albania and tearing territory from her; it was true that more than a million Albanians were suffering under Serbian and Greek rule to-day; it was true that Albanians had won the Greek war of independence, and the Young Turk revolution, and their own revolution, only to see their country mutilated by their neighbors and by European diplomacy. But if it were possible for free Albania to live, he believed she would be the leader in a movement for a Balkan federation, and he pointed out that, with frontiers free and military expenses pooled, all the Balkan peoples could develop lands and mines, water power and industries, and in time readjust their boundaries by purchase, which would be cheaper than war.
This solution was so logical that I suspected it to be in the realm of pure fantasy, for I have long observed that human affairs and logic have little in common. But we listened with great interest to these opinions of Sadiri Luka, which came strangely from an Albanian mountaineer whose trousers proclaimed in black braiding his descent from a tribe older than history.
The feast continued for a long time; there were bowls of kos, which is sweet milk made solid in texture, but not sour, a joy on the tongue, and there were platters of fluffy rice with gravy and giblets, and many kinds of cheese, and little individual spits of broiled lamb, onions and potatoes, and a cream made of powdered rice, milk, and honey, and breast of chicken baked in sour cream, and crisp cakes of whipped white of egg browned in butter and smothered in beaten raw eggs and sugar—which is strange in words, but unexpectedly good to eat—and many other things which we tasted absent-mindedly. For the setting sun had briefly conquered the clouds, the rain had stopped, and we thought of the trail to Thethis.
It was good to be out in the rain-sweet air, and the waterfalls were music in the evening quiet. Sunshine gleamed on the peaks of snow, blue and purple shadows filled the valleys, and bells of flocks came tinkling down the trails. When we had said farewell to Sadiri Luka and the chiefs of upper Thethis, by the arching glass-clear torrent to which they had accompanied us, we went on light-heartedly, humming to ourselves. And Perolli sang a song of the mountaineers which is more sound than words, being a song of evening with rippling water in it, and sleepy birds, and the bells of the flocks answering one another across ravines and from far mountain slopes.
“Yes,” he said, “I am happy. I am happy, for Sadiri Luka is a true Albanian, and when I go back to the plains I shall see that he is released from the price on his head which has been offered in Scutari.”
“What!” we cried. Yes, he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, ten thousand kronen were officially offered for the head of Sadiri Luka.
“And he doesn’t even carry a gun?”
“Why should he? He is among his own people. It is no shame to go unarmed among his own people. He would carry a rifle, certainly, if he had to go to Scutari.”
“But you are from Scutari—we are all from Scutari—Cheremi, Rexh—and he asked us to his house?”
Perolli looked at us with scorn. We had been guests in the house of Sadiri Luka, he explained, with weary patience. If he had been twenty times a traitor to Albania, could a guest have killed him? And on the trail he had not carried a gun; no one could kill him, unarmed. He could go to Scutari in safety, if he went unarmed. But, of course, he would not do that, for that would be shameful. For two years he had been living in upper Thethis, unable to go to Scutari without risking his life, though he was a merchant, and poor, and could have made a business for himself in Scutari. But it had all been a mistake, said Perolli, which he would clear up.
Sadiri Luka had lost all he owned in Ipek when the Serbs came in. He escaped with only his rugs and the few pieces of silver we had seen. But his flocks, which were in summer pasture on the high mountains, had not been taken. Sadiri Luka had come back to his people in upper Thethis, and in the winter he had brought his flocks there. And in the spring he had sent them back to their summer pasture, now on the other side of the 1913 frontier. For this the price had been put on his head, as a traitor. How could his shepherds come and go with his flocks across the new frontier, guarded by Serbian troops, unless he were a traitor to Albania, unless he had secret dealings with the Serbs? For two years his sheep had got safely to their summer pastures and back again, while all the other flocks of Thethis had been taken by the Serbs or killed at home because there was no longer pasture for them.
The explanation, however, was quite simple. Sadiri Luka was a successful smuggler of his sheep. He explained to Perolli how he did it, for both of them knew by heart these mountains, which were strange to the Serbs. Once safely across the frontier, the flocks were comparatively safe, for the high plateaus where they grazed were uninhabited and hard to reach; so far, none but Albanian shepherds of Ipek had seen them there. Sheep, when they had no bells or lambs, were silent things, and the flocks were moved by night. Sadiri Luka said that, if he had reached Thethis in time, he could have saved all the flocks by smuggling them through the ways he knew; already his shepherds were taking with them the few lambs born in Thethis in the last two years.
There was no question that Sadiri Luka was a true Albanian. For the Serbs had relied on their possession of the pasture lands to starve the tribes on the border into treason to Albania, so that the frontier could again be moved forward. Sadiri Luka, with his flocks, could have been a powerful weapon in Serbian hands, an object-lesson to the people of the advantages of friendship with Serbia which would have been well worth paying for. But he preferred to risk his sheep by smuggling them. The price on his head had been a mistake. The chiefs of Thethis had already said this to Perolli, and talk with Sadiri Luka had convinced him that it was true. Therefore he was very happy, and sang along the trail.
But joy is not a lasting thing on Albanian trails. We had gone but a little way, perhaps half an hour, when the skies opened again. The water fell with such force that we feared we would be washed from our foothold, and, gasping and drenched, clutching bowlders and deformed trees, we struggled into the shelter of a leaning cliff. We had hardly reached it when around its corner came two women under loads of wood. One was old and withered, with a strange, sharp expression; the other, as she put down her burden and straightened her back, showed us a most beautiful face. The pose of her head was regal, her forehead and eyes and mouth struck the heart with their perfection of beauty and sorrow.
“You are a happy girl,” she said to Frances, after our greetings. “I have never before seen anyone so happy. Why do you come to our sad country?”
Frances said we came because we loved the Albanian people and wanted to know them better.
“We would bless the trails that led you to our house,” they said, and added, “but ours is a sad house.”
“Why?” we asked, and the old woman answered, while the younger stared into the sheets of rain that veiled Thethis from us.
The son of the house, Kol Marku, husband of the younger woman, was an exile from his home. His wife had been brought to his house only a week before the night when he killed his cousin, Pjeter Gjon. He had not meant to do it. With a number of other men they had been sitting by his fire, their rifles on their knees, as usual. They were cold and tired and had been talking of crops, when suddenly Kol’s rifle spoke and Pjeter fell back and died. Kol swore that he had not touched the trigger, but when the body was carried to the house of Pjeter, Pjeter’s family said that Kol had killed him in order to become the head of the family and move with his bride into Pjeter’s rich house. They claimed blood vengeance, by the Law of Lec.
It was a killing within the tribe, a matter for the chiefs to settle. They had conferred, and decided that Kol’s family should pay to the family of Pjeter twelve thousand kronen, or that value in goods. The family of Pjeter had refused to accept this. Again the chiefs met. Twelve hundred kronen had been blood payment within a tribe before the Balkan war, but everything was higher now, and the chiefs offered fifteen hundred kronen. But the old mother of Pjeter was bitter, and the family said that no money would pay for the blood of her only son. They demanded blood for blood, life for life; only the death of Kol or one of his brothers would pay the debt. Kol fled from the mountains and his brothers walked in fear.
Without their men the family could not live. The land was poor, was too hard for the women to work. The irrigation ditches were down, and they could not lift the rocks to rebuild them. And the lives of the men, hunted without rest, became no longer good to them, so that they became morose and sat always by the fire talking of death. Then the women went to Padre Marjan, to ask of him the last ultimate effort.
The good padre granted their plea. Wearing his holy robes and attended by twenty-four chiefs walking in silence, he took the crucifix itself from the church, and went to the house of Pjeter in upper Thethis. For twelve hours he stood, holding the crucifix before the eyes of that family and telling them as God’s messenger that they must forgive Kol. For twelve hours the twenty-four chiefs stood beside him, waiting. But the old mother was bitter, and upheld the spirits of her nephews, so that they refused.
Never before in all the mountains had anyone refused forgiveness asked by the crucifix itself. It had been carried back to the church above twenty-five bowed heads, and the people of Thethis knelt before it in shame. And Kol could not come home, the men could not work in the fields. The family was always hungry, and the young wife had wept till her eyes were dry of tears.
“We could not again ask Padre Marjan to take the crucifix,” said the old woman, looking at us with eyes that begged that we would do so. But the young woman’s eyes were somber and hopeless. The violence of the rain had lessened; below us we saw the green valley, the many little houses linked by tiny fields and a network of overflowing irrigation ditches, and the wounded church which had no steeple. But a column of smoke from the chimney showed that Padre Marjan was there. The women lifted their packs, bent forward under them, and slowly went out of sight down the trail.
Before we reached the level of the valley Padre Marjan had seen us, and came across the flat fields to escort us again to his door. He met us at the edge of a gorge in whose depths a waterfall turned the wheel of a mill beside a tiny house. Smoke seeped from the house roof to mix with the spray of the waterfall, and as Padre Marjan greeted us, up from that misty gorge leaped a figure that seemed risen from an incantation. She was less a child than a sprite, bare of arm and leg, clad in a scrap of sheepskin, with wildly tangled hair and bright, wild eyes. Even as she leaped she addressed us in passionate words.
Padre Marjan’s response was clear without translation. He told her to be still and to go away; he spoke in distress and shame, but the sternness of his tone was hollow. The child stood her ground, she gulped and avoided the padre’s eye, but determination shook all her little body, and she spoke again with vehemence. She was like one crying out against some monstrous injustice.
“What on earth does she say?”
“Well”—Perolli was reluctant, and also avoided the padre’s eye—“did you give her brother a handkerchief? She says it is not just, because he also has new trousers, and she has neither handkerchief nor trousers. Absurd! What would she do with trousers?” And he also looked at her accusingly.
Feet planted firmly, the child faced the tall group of us, flung back her hair, and continued defiantly to speak: “It is not just. Is it my fault I am a girl? Is it my fault that I am too small to work in the mill? I go with the sheep, I carry the lamb, I climb the trees and cut leaves. I bring water from the spring.” She beat her breast. “And my brother gets new trousers, and also a handkerchief! I, I have nothing! I have nothing to wear to the Easter mass, and my brother has new white trousers! And my brother has a handkerchief!” She stamped her bare foot. “I say to the world that it is not just. I shall cry to the Five Tribes that it is not just!”
“My word, but she’s magnificent!” said Frances.
“Tell her quickly, Rexh—she shall have a handkerchief—she shall have two handkerchiefs,” said Alex.
“Glory to your lips,” said the child, for an instant unbroken by the happiness. Then she swung her tangled hair across her face and fled, weeping.
It was curiosity as much as the renewed violence of rain which made us follow her down the trail and go into the little house. Two women welcomed us on the doorstep and led us into darkness lightened by a handful of fire. They were mother and grandmother, both haggard and worn by work. They had no coffee and no sugar, but they welcomed us to their house by offering each in turn a cup of hot water, with all the ceremonies of coffee drinking. They thanked us beautifully for the handkerchief we had given their boy—the little girl had not yet returned to the house—and we thanked them for the three eggs. He was a good boy, they said, fourteen years old, and he had built the mill and worked in it. A clever, good boy. The new trousers lay on the earthen floor, carefully wrapped in a cloth; while she talked, the mother unwrapped them and worked on the black Shala pattern. The boy’s father had been killed in the Serbian retreat of 1914, but the boy had been too young to fight. And the little girl was born on the mountains while their village was burning. But the boy—always the talk returned to the boy, and it was easy to see why he had the new Easter trousers.
“Perhaps it is unjust to the girl, but it is because they are so poor,” Padre Marjan said, as we went home through the gathering darkness. “And I am sure she did not mean to beg. But you see they have so little, and they do give all they have to the boy. After all, he is the head of the family, and he is a good boy; he works their land and he works in the mill; he keeps them all alive.”
“And out of such poverty they sent us three eggs,” said Alex.
Padre Marjan asked what she had said, and when he was told he answered, “My people are poor and ignorant, but they know what is due a guest.”
