TRAILS OF THE MOUNTAINEERS—THE MAN OF IPEK KILLS HIS DONKEY—THE HOUSE OF THE BISHOP OF PULTIT—MARRIAGE BY THE LAW OF LEC—THE BLOOD FEUD BETWEEN SHALA AND SHOSHI.
Darkness was creeping up the slopes like a rising flood from the valleys, and it had engulfed the trails long before we made the descent into the village of Gjoanni, which I may as well say at once is pronounced Zhwanee. Not that we were thinking about such far-away things as written words. Everything that makes our ordinary lives was already as far from us as another planet. It was as though we had dropped through a hole in time and fallen into the days when men were wild creatures in the forests.
One reads in books of dizzying trails twelve inches wide, on which travelers cling precariously between the sky and sudden death. Long before dense darkness had risen to meet the shadow of the mountain wall between us and the rest of the world we would have welcomed a twelve-inch trail as though it were the Champs-Elysées. We were in a land where a twelve-inch trail is to the people what the Twentieth Century Limited is to America.
My memories become incoherent here. I recall a thousand-foot slide of decomposed shale, the color of an American Beauty rose. The flakes of it were as large as a thumb-nail, and the mass of them tilted at surely thirty-five degrees, sloping to a sheer cliff that dropped I cannot say how far. The stone houses looked like children’s blocks at the bottom of it. Across this we made our way on foot, and at every step a considerable quantity of the shale sped away beneath the pressure and plumped over the edge. The fourth time I slipped I remained on my hands and knees; it seemed simpler. And for something like a century I had the sensation a squirrel must have in a revolving cage—steadily clawing upward and making no progress in that direction. But sidewise, crablike, I did eventually come out on the other side and into the waterfall.
The waterfall was called a river. It was about two thousand feet long, and stood on end. About every three feet it struck a bowlder as large as an office desk, and leaped into the air until it hit the next one. The shale was wet with spray for several yards. The water between three bowlders, where we crossed, was a little more than knee deep, and there was nothing whatever leisurely about its progress. I try to be calm about it; I tried to be calm then.
The horses went across first, four men to each horse. One gripped a rope tied about its neck, one firmly held the tail, two stood downstream and leaned their weight against the saddle. Then the men carried across the packs and their trousers, which they had taken off so that they should not get wet. Then they quite simply picked us up, slung us across their shoulders, and took us over.
It is a strange sensation, being a bag of meal hanging over a muscular back, clutched firmly around the knees, green water roaring at toes and chin, white spray choking and blinding you, and a thousand feet of hungry bowlders waiting below for your bones. In the middle my man stopped, braced himself, and shifted me to his other shoulder. Then he shouted, and another man came out above us and held his free hand to steady him through the worst of the current.
After we were all over, the men clasped their ears, sent an exuberant call out through the twilight, were answered from the far distances, fired all their guns several times in joyous unison, and then, slinging them back on their shoulders, went on blithely.
They went on blithely into such a rain as I had never supposed could be. Around the shoulder of the mountain we walked into it, as one walks into a shower bath—scattering drops on the fringes of it so few that they did not break the shock of its impact. Water fell upon us suddenly; our piteous gasps and small cries of protesting misery were muffled by the sound of its pouring on the rocks. In an instant rivulets of chilly water were wandering over shrinking skin from soggy mufflers to filling shoes, and there was no longer gayety in the world. Even the Albanians were gloomy, occupied with the task of keeping the slipping horses on the trail. In a few moments we had left their struggles behind us.
We climbed doggedly, in silence. Only the swishing of the relentless rain and the clicking of our staffs on the rocks made little noises against the distant roaring of waterfalls. By some trick of light reflected from peak or cloud, the trail and the valley below it were visible in a green-gray ghost of daylight, which made us seem unreal even to ourselves. And we climbed, interminably, forever, putting one foot before the other with the patient deep attentiveness of trudging animals, while rain dripped unheeded from forehead to cheek to chin. We climbed, absorbed in detail of slippery shale and stubborn bowlder, till Perolli’s exclamation shocked us as though a rock had spoken.
We must wait for our men, he said, and we dropped where we stood and sat soddenly. To light a cigarette was as impossible to us in that rain as to a swimmer under water. We sat and looked at one another, and laughed aloud, and were silent again. The horses came past us at last, each held by halter and by tail, and slowly they struggled over the crest of the mountain and disappeared. We should go on, Perolli said, and we murmured assent, but still we sat. When a stranger appeared on the trail against the gray sky we moved only our eyes to look at him.
He was a young man, dark eyed and handsome, but haggard. Besides the rifle on his back was strapped a small baby. The little head, uncovered, streaming with water, appeared above the thick woolen-fringed collar of the man’s black jacket. The baby’s mouth was open, drawn into a square of misery, but no sound came from it. The man’s jacket had been darned and darned again, till no thread of the original weaving was visible; his white homespun woolen trousers, hung low on the hips, were worn so thin that the darns no longer held together, and tatters fell around his bare ankles, above feet wrapped in rags. The remnants of black braiding on his trousers were of a pattern I had not seen before; I could not guess his tribe. Behind him a shapeless bundle of household goods moved slowly on the tiny hoofs of a donkey, and the little beast’s drooping ears and nose almost touched the trail.
“Long may you live!” And when he had returned the greeting we continued the courteous formula. “How could you get here?”
“Slowly, slowly, little by little.”
“Are you a man?”
“I am a man of Kossova, of the district of Ipek,” he answered, and it was not necessary to say more, for the Serbs hold Ipek. The memory of their taking it moved like a darkening shadow over his face, and it is best to ignore such memories.
Yet there was a little hope in his vague voice. He was going, he said, in search of a farm on which he could live. He had tried to live in the Shala country, but it was impossible there. There was too little land for the tribe of Shala, and the making of land is slow among mountains where stone walls must be built to catch the little earth that remains when rain melts limestone. He had heard that in the valley of Scutari there was soil, as there had been in Kossova, and his voice sank into silence as though it were a burden too heavy to lift.
But he tried to make the baby smile for the American zonyas. The baby, too exhausted to cry any longer, was equally unable to smile, and this last baffled effort suddenly became rage. It was only a twist of the haggard face, an explosion in the depths of the man’s spirit, and, like an explosion, it was over before we saw it, leaving on our eyeballs a picture of something that no longer existed.
“He has a beautiful smile,” the father said, apologetically, “very beautiful,” and he took up his rifle.
“Long may you live,” we said. “Go on a smooth trail.”
In a moment the rain had blurred the figures of the man and the tiny donkey, moving slowly down the mountain side.
We wiped the streaming wet from our faces with water-withered hands, picked up our staffs, and drove our bodies again to their task of climbing. The burden of the world’s helplessness in misery was heavier on our spirits than the weight of water-soaked woolen on exhausted muscles. Why should man toil over such heart-breaking trails, endure and struggle through such sufferings, only to keep alight a little fire of life, when life means only suffering and painful effort? The rifle-shot which interrupted the question seemed an answer to it. We stopped, and the same thought was in all our eyes while we waited for the echoes of the shot to roll away like thunder among the cliffs.
Then Cheremi pressed his thumbs tightly against his ears and sent down the trail the wild high note of the “telephone call.” He waited, repeated it, repeated it once more. An answer came.
The man of Ipek had killed his donkey. It had slipped from the trail; it would not try to get up. And there on the mountain side, five hours from shelter, with night upon them, he had killed it.
“I wish you blind!” Cheremi called through the rain, and fired his rifle to end the talk.
We must help the man, we said. We must do something. But Cheremi and Perolli, in whom also weariness had become anger, went on over the ridge of the mountain, and we followed them. It was true; what could we do? We could not carry the donkey’s pack, the only goods left to the man of Ipek.
In half an hour we met a beautiful girl. Her hazel eyes and chestnut hair shone through the grayness of the rain, a wide silver-studded marriage belt held the dripping tatters of a Shala dress about her slender body, and her ankles were white above delicate feet bruised by the trails. She drove before her six starveling goats that constantly tried to evade her; they were traveling strange trails and wanted to turn homeward.
“Long may you live!” she murmured, anxiously urging them forward with her staff, while we climbed the bowlders above the trail to let them pass. Cheremi bent to take her hand and lay his cheek against hers, and for an instant there was a beautiful smile on her lovely troubled face. When she was gone we continued to sit, gazing into the valley. Far below us, below jagged cliffs as vague as clouds, below tortured trees from which every bough had been hacked to feed hungry flocks, below slopes of bowlders which ran down into darkness, lights were already gleaming. A thousand feet above them on the other side of the valley the white speck of the priest’s house promised us rest and warmth.
“But we must wait here,” said Perolli, surprised by our impatience. “The woman is the wife of the man of Ipek, and she is a Shala woman. He has killed his donkey; it may be that he is mad and will kill her, too.”
Cheremi’s childlike smile was gone. His rifle lay across his knees, his profile was set and stern, cruel. He was a man of Shala, and, though he had never before seen this woman, he would avenge her if there were need for vengeance, for she had been born in his tribe. So we waited for the crash of a second shot. But only the rushing sound of the waterfalls came up to us from the darkening valleys.
With staffs and aching feet we found the trail when we went onward. Unseen bowlders bruised our knees, unseen rocks rolled when we stepped on them. We went for two hours down a slide of shale, slipping at every step and clutching the empty darkness. At its bottom we came to wide rapids, and this time the men put us on the little horses, and the horses crossed by jumping from bowlder to bowlder; this seemed cruelty to animals, but we were too weary to protest, and already we had become Albanian in one thing—an absolute indifference to danger.
When, an hour later, one of my pony’s hind legs went over the edge of a crumbling trail and only my man’s grip on his tail kept him from quite going over, the incident interrupted for only a second my enjoyment of the wild, weird scene; a hundred miles of mountain tops fighting with their shadows the light of the moon.
At ten o’clock we fell from our saddles in the walled courtyard of a ghostly white house, and a tall figure in the hooded robe of a Franciscan father lighted us across it with a flaming pine torch.
We really were in the Middle Ages, or in some century perhaps even earlier. An hour after our greeting by the Bishop of Pultit we had forgotten even to realize it; so adaptable are human beings that we quite forgot that modern civilization had ever been.
The hooded priest lighted us with his torch up a flight of worn stone stairs and into a low, beamed room on the second floor of the bishop’s house. There the bishop, rising from a wooden bench, welcomed us in Albanian and Latin. He wore a rough, homespun woolen robe; his bare feet were in wooden sandals; a rosary of wooden beads hung on his chest. He was perhaps fifty, rotund, jovial, dignified. Perolli bent one knee and kissed the episcopal hand; little Mohammedan Rexh, in his red fez, gravely saluted; Cheremi, the ragged gendarme, put his rifle in a corner and knelt for the bishop’s blessing.
We sat, Alex, Frances, and I, in a row on a wooden bench in the chilly bare room. A servant came in, barearmed, barelegged, clad in one piece of brown cloth that reached his knees, and the bishop gave orders; the servant returned with a hammered copper tray holding an earthen cup and a wooden bottle of rakejia. Now rakejia is a cousin to vodka and one of the strongest drinks that ever turned the imbiber’s blood to liquid fire. We girls had debated about it; what should we do when courtesy required us to drink it? We had decided that Perolli should explain that we came from America and that in our tribe it was forbidden to drink intoxicants. But after sixteen hours of travel in the Albanian mountains we did not hesitate. One by one we took the cup that the servant filled, and drained it dry. From that time onward we drank the stuff like water, and it had no visible effect upon us, though in a Paris restaurant one glass of mild wine will make me realize that a second would be unwise. I don’t explain this, I simply note the fact, and it gives me a different point of view on the chronicles of hard-drinking past centuries.
We sat there, talking, for an hour or more. The bishop said that he had never been out of the mountains except for a trip long ago to the Vatican in Rome; he had been there a year, and had conversed with his brother priests in Latin. Then he had come back to the mountains and had lived there ever since. His diocese included all the northern tribes, and he visited them from time to time, riding wherever a donkey could carry him, and walking where it could not. Ten years earlier he had had another foreign visitor, a Miss Durham of England; he had heard that she later wrote a book in which she told about the visit, and if he could have afforded it he would have liked to send for that book.
No, the Church had not very greatly altered the ancient customs of the people. They were all good Catholics, and attended mass. But they still buried the dead uncoffined, with three apples on the breast, and when they put a stone or a wooden slab above the grave they often carved on it, not only the cross, but also the sun. One would note, too, that at the rising and setting of the sun they made the sign of the cross to it.
He was not too intolerant of these things. After all, beyond the sun was always the good God. It was not strange that what I had heard of the marriage customs had baffled me, he said; I should not look for traces of marriage by capture or marriage by purchase; the basis of the tribal ceremonies is fire worship.
On the day of the wedding the bride, elaborately dressed, is carried, screaming and struggling, from her father’s house, and by her brothers is delivered to the husband’s family at a place midway between the lands of the two tribes. Since each tribe is technically a large family, claiming a common prehistoric ancestor, it is forbidden to marry within the tribe. The bride carries with her from her home one invariable gift—a pair of fire tongs. When she arrives at her husband’s house she takes a humble place in the corner, standing, her hands folded on her breast, her eyes downcast, and for three days and nights she is required to remain in that position, without lifting her eyes, without moving, and without eating or drinking.
“Though I believe,” said the bishop, smiling, “that she takes the precaution of hiding some food and drink in her garments, and no doubt the mother-in-law sees that she is allowed to rest a little while the household is asleep.” And he explained that this custom remains from the old days when the father of each house was also the priestly guardian of the fire, and anyone coming to ask for a light from it stood reverently in that position, silent, before the hearth, until the father priest gave it to him. The bride, newcomer in the family, is a suppliant for the gift of fire, of life, of the Mystery that continues the race.
On the third day she puts on the heavy belt that means she is a wife, and thereafter she goes about the household, obeying the commands of the elders, always standing until they tell her to sit, and for six months not speaking unless they address her. And it is her duty to care for the fire, and with her fire tongs to light the cigarettes smoked by any of the family, or by their guests. Sometime, when it is convenient, she and her husband will go to the church and be married by the priest. Usually she has not seen her husband until she comes to his house, since she is of another tribe and the marriage is arranged by the families.
“We have tried to prevent the betrothing of children before they are born,” said the bishop, smiling ruefully, “and in many centuries we have had some effect. Children now are usually not betrothed until they are two or three years old. Even that we combat, of course, yet I cannot say that the custom makes much unhappiness. Husbands and wives are good comrades; they almost never quarrel and they are devoted to their children. But you will see all that for yourself. Yet occasionally there is something like this Shala-Shoshi affair, which I fear will lead to much bloodshed. But the dinner is ready and my servant will show you your room and bring water to wash your hands.”
The servant led us to the bishop’s own bedroom, furnished by a mattress laid on a raised platform of boards. Our saddlebags and blankets had been piled on the rough wooden floor, and Rexh held the torch while the bishop’s servant poured cold water from a wooden bucket over our hands. Then he offered us a beautifully hand-woven towel of red-and-white striped linen, and when we had dried our hands he led us down a stone stairway, through a kitchen crowded with villagers, where an old woman tended cooking pots over a fire built on the earthen floor, and into the dining room.
There was a long, rude table covered with hand-woven linen, rough benches on each side of it. The bishop sat at its head, on a stool, and served the soup. The Franciscan brother and a meek little priest in black sat humbly near the foot of the table, and did not speak. There was nothing in the stone-floored, plaster-walled room except the table, the benches, and a rain-stained photograph on the discolored wall—a picture of a gathering of Albanian priests, taken many years ago in Tirana.
“The feud between Shala and Shoshi looks very bad,” said the bishop. “I fear there will be many deaths. We do what we can to prevent it, all the authority of the Church is used against these feuds, but——”He shrugged his shoulders. “It is their way of enforcing their law, the Law of Lec, which has come down to them from prehistoric times. And the Albanians are very tenacious of their own customs.”
He filled our glasses with red wine. “You must not mistake my people,” he said. “The blood feud is bad, very bad, but it is their only way of enforcing laws, which are, in general, admirable.
“The blood feud is not a lawless thing, as strangers sometimes think. Nor has it anything to do with personal strife or hate. It is a form of capital punishment, such as all nations have, and it is governed by most strict laws.
“You must remember that in these mountains we have never been conquered by foreign governments. The Roman Empire claimed to have overpowered Albania, it is true, as later the Turks did, but neither Rome nor Constantinople was able to send its government into these mountains. The people live as they did before the days of Greece, except for the influence of the Church. It is a simple, communistic society, without private property or any organized government. The only law is the moral law, enforced by tradition, by custom, and by common consent. The father of the family becomes the chief of the tribe, but he has no power that conflicts with the moral law, the ancient Law of Lec. There is a tradition that all this group of tribes was once, long ago, given this moral law by a man named Lec, but that is doubtless a myth added to through the ages.
“This Law of Lec is based on personal honor, which is also the honor of the tribe. A man or a tribe must punish an insult to honor by killing the man who has given it. Thus, if a member of a tribe is killed unjustly by a man of another tribe; if a woman is stolen or injured or affronted; if any part of the tribal property is stolen; if a man or a tribe fails to keep a besa (a word of honor) in a matter of land or war or marriage or irrigation—you will find excellent and admirable irrigation systems here—then the crime is punished by death. But if these crimes are committed against a member of the same tribe, then the house of the guilty man is burned, and he is cast off by the tribe and must go into the wilderness and live alone.
“You will see this law working out in the case of Shala and Shoshi. Last week a Shala man crossing the lands of Shoshi—the two tribes having some time ago sworn a besa that they would keep the peace between them—saw a woman of Shoshi on the trail. He said to himself that he would like that woman for his son, who was unmarried, though of marriageable age, because his betrothed had died in childhood. So the man of Shala took the woman of Shoshi to his house for his son, and there she is now.
“Apparently,” said the bishop, dryly, “she did not make any outcry, for her husband was in their house only a few yards away, and it is a question whether she and the son had not previously arranged the abduction. However, the husband was, of course, obliged to avenge his honor, and he went at once to the heights above Shala and shot the son. This was, according to the Law, an unjustifiable murder, since he should have killed the father who was the abductor. Therefore the father waited on the trail above Shoshi and shot the husband.
“It should have stopped there, but Shoshi’s honor is involved as long as a woman of the tribe is held unlawfully in the hands of Shala. So a hot-tempered Shoshi man has shot a man of Shala and it has become a blood feud between the two tribes. As the woman was born in Pultit, some say that Pultit’s honor is also involved. So you see that the affair becomes complicated; I have been told by wise men that no less than sixteen deaths will wipe out the insults on both sides. You perhaps heard telephoning about it as you came in? The mountain sides have been ringing with it. But what can one do? Excommunication, of course. At every mass I tell my people that the anger of the Church will descend on all who take part in the killings, but the Law of Lec holds them, and it is, after all, their only civil law.”
It took time to tell this, what with filling the glasses, serving the food platters of delicious stewed rabbit and bowls of macaroni, a dish the bishop had grown fond of in Rome—and then there were the cups of syrupy Turkish coffee to be ceremoniously served and drunk, and for hours, struggling with an agony of sleepiness, we had implored Perolli in English to make our excuses and let us go to bed, he refusing sternly, since it is the most terrible breach of mountain hospitality for a guest to grow sleepy as early as midnight. But at one o’clock, seeing Alex’s desperate eyes stony with the effort to keep them open, and myself beholding at times two bishops, very small and far away, and at times one, who loomed like a mountain, I managed in Latin to suggest that we were tired. We had, I said—calling upon vagrant memories of Cæsar and using both hands to illustrate—been walking and riding over the trails since five the previous morning. The bishop was interested, and asked my opinion of the mountains in comparison with those of Switzerland and of the United States, and I hope I replied coherently.
The rest I do not remember. Perolli says that I sat up straight, and talked, though sometimes rather strangely. Frances and Alex were dumb, he says, but smiled as though they were enjoying the conversation. How was he to know that we were really tired? He thought we had been joking about it.