THE STORY OF PIGEON AND LITTLE EAGLE—THE PREHISTORIC CITY OF POG, AND THE TALE OF THE GOLDEN IMAGE—THE GENDARMES SING OF POLITICS.
I came back to full consciousness for an instant, stumbling up the stairs, and gathered that we were going to bed. By the torchlight my wrist watch said a quarter past two. Frances and Alex do not remember even that. Rexh awakened us at eight by shaking us, and we were rolled in blankets on the floor of the bishop’s room. Outside was the pouring sound of a steady rain.
As soon as we were fully roused the bishop’s servant brought us tiny cups of Turkish coffee. That was breakfast. Afterward we rose with groans, opened the heavy wooden shutters of the window space, and looked out. Through a rain that poured almost as solidly as a waterfall we saw a low-walled courtyard and a schoolhouse.
Beyond the schoolhouse there lay some fifty miles of the wildest beautiful mountain country—blue peaks, fifteen-hundred-foot slanting rocks, soft pink and rose and purple and green; brighter green masses of young foliage in the valleys, bronze-brown and bright-brown bare forests above them, and here and there snow drifts flung up among smoky-gray clouds. Thirty-two waterfalls I counted from that window, veining the mountains with wandering streaks of silver. But our gaze came back and fastened upon the school.
“I didn’t know they had one in the mountains!” exclaimed Alex, thinking of her Mountain School Fund. “I thought our school at Thethis would be the first one!”
“Padre Marjan certainly said so when he walked down to ask us for it,” said Frances.
“Perhaps this isn’t a school,” said I. Though it looked like one, the little square stone house through whose open doorway we saw rows of benches, and boys sitting on them, barefooted, wearing the long, tight, white trousers braided with black that hang low on the hip bones, the gorgeous sashes, and the short black jackets thick with fringe, that were white centuries ago, but were changed to mourning when Scanderbeg died for Albanian liberty.
It was a school. The pale, meek priest in black, who is the bishop’s ecclesiastical household, showed it to us with pride; he is the teacher. The Turks and the Austrians had blocked all attempts to bring schools into the mountains, he said, and the people, not knowing that schools existed, were naturally not eager to have them. But now the Land of the Eagle was said to be free, after so many centuries of Turkish rule in the valleys, and refugee children who had fled before the Serbs were coming back to their tribes and telling about the American school in Scutari, so that all the people wanted their children to learn to read and write. The chiefs themselves, hearing that there was a Tirana government, and not being able to write or read letters about it, or to learn from newspapers (oh, simple-minded, mediæval people!) the truth about European politics, saw what education meant.
The people had taken rocks from the mountains and made the schoolhouse. They had cut precious trees and made the benches and the desks. They had made a slate of a slab of the native rock, set in a rough wooden frame; they wrote upon it with softer rocks. From Italy, across the Adriatic to Durazzo, up to Tirana, to Scutari, and into the mountains—a two weeks’ journey by donkey and river ferry—the bishop had got three copy books and a bottle of ink. Pens had been made from twigs. The priest had one book printed in Albanian.
Since the boys must herd the flocks in the mountains, they could not spend the day in school. There is so little land that the goats and sheep are fed from trees. The shepherd climbs a tree, carefully cuts the tender branches, and throws them down to the nibbling beasts that eat the young buds and strip off the juicy bark. There is no tree in all the mountains that the shepherds have not climbed; not a tree that is not a branchless, gnarled trunk.
So the school was open from six to nine in the mornings, and the boys came to it, some from ten, twelve, fifteen miles away, and after school they walked back again and took out the flocks. The school had been open six weeks; already the copy books were half filled with beautiful, neat writing, and the boys not only read easily from their one book, but had no difficulty with sentences that Perolli wrote on the slate.
I asked the priest what I could send him from Paris, and his eyes filled with tears as he asked, hesitating a little for fear it was too much, if I could send just a little white paper and half a dozen pencils. The ink was almost gone; they could make more from berries, but he would like the boys to see pencils and learn how to use them. And, of course, when the two copy books were filled, there would be no more paper.
Returning from the dusky schoolroom through the gray slant of the rain, we found in the bishop’s house the most handsome man we had yet seen. Tall and lithe, wearing the tight black jacket, scarlet sash, and snowy woolen trousers braided in black, he amazed us by his animal beauty and grace. His silver chain was of the finest pattern, a ring was on a hand that might have been perfectly gloved on Fifth Avenue, and his quiet air of the aristocrat would have made him remarkable in any company. Beside him was a manly little boy perhaps seven years old. He wore with the same grace a miniature copy of the mountain costume. His manners were perfection of grave courtesy, his eyes were keen and intelligent, and his frank smile was charming.
They were father and son, come to arrange for the boy’s schooling. The father spoke to the boy with the courtesy he would have used to an equal, and the boy replied as one. There was such pride and love in their eyes that it was beautiful to see them together. For a little while the father spoke of his ambitions for his son; he hoped to be able to send him to the American school in Tirana, he dreamed even of a university in Europe. He was proud that he and the boy were mountain men, but he wanted the boy to be wiser, more learned, than the mountain life had let his father be.
“I,” he said, “am Plum [Pigeon], but my son is Sokol [Eagle]. I gave him that name because his wings shall be stronger, his eyes keener, and his flight higher, than mine.”
Having been thus presented to the bishop, Sokol knelt for a blessing, Plum on one knee beside him. Then the two went across the courtyard to the schoolhouse, and I shall not forget the two against the dusky doorway, the father looking down at the boy, and the boy visibly courageous and resolute before the mysteries he was facing.
“Long may you live,” said the father. “Go on a smooth trail.”
“Long may you live,” said the boy. “God take you safely home.” Then he went into the schoolhouse, and Plum followed the trail toward the mountains.
“He is a good man, and brave,” said the bishop, “and little Sokol will be a great one.”
At noon the rain was still pouring from apparently inexhaustible skies, but Cheremi, Rexh, and Perolli assumed, as a matter of course, that we would go on; the difficulty was that there were no mules. There should have been a mule in the village, whose houses were scattered, miles apart, all the way down the deep-walled gorge to the banks of the River Shala, twenty-five miles away, but when Cheremi hastened lightly up a twelve-hundred-foot peak and cried to the farthest house that we wanted mules, the answer came back that there were none since the war.
So he found an aged man—seventy-five years old, he was, but still agile and bright eyed—and put our packs on his back, and at noon we started out on foot, with fresh-peeled staffs provided by Rexh, and new-baked corn bread in the saddlebags.
After an hour of desperate climbing we stood on the peak from which Cheremi had telephoned. The bishop’s house and the school lay dwarfed beneath our feet, and Perolli, standing on a rock and holding his ears, sent down to them a shrill hail. “Ooeeoo! Monseignor!”
The bishop appeared in his woolen gown, a rifle in his hand, and all the guns in our party went off at once, and again, and again, while fifty miles of sheer rock cliffs barked back at them. My hands were over my ears, but I saw the three answering white puffs from the bishop’s rifle, and while the echoes were dying, still repeating themselves down the valley, we saw him hand it to his servant and protect his ear-drums with his thumbs. His call came up to us, “Go on a smooth trail!”
AN OLD SHEPHERD
Wearing goatskin opangi on his feet, and trousers braided in his tribal pattern.
“Now,” said Perolli, thrusting his revolver back into its holster, “we have said good-by to the bishop. Allons!”
“And to-night,” I said, joyously, “we’ll sleep in a native house.”
Frances and Perolli did not seem enthusiastic about that hope, and as we toiled up trails that were stairways of giant bowlders, or slid down slopes of pale-green shale, above valleys where the clouds swirled beneath us, the discussion continued fragmentarily.
Frances’s reluctance I could ascribe to the shrieking of her muscles, which, if tortured as mine had been by the previous day’s travel, must be screaming with agony at her every step. But Perolli, true Albanian in spite of his years of living in foreign capitals, was as fresh as the crisp air that blew upon us between the gusts of driving rain. He leaped up bowlders, he joined in the singing of the others, who, with sixty-pound sacks on their backs, walked easily up the incredible steeps, their thumbs at their ears, chanting songs of ancient battles with the Turks.
“Don’t you think it safe to stay in a native house?” said I, remembering that he was an officer of the government traveling incognito among unfriendly tribes, and that within sight were the Albanian mountains held by the Serbs who had put a price on his head.
“Safe?” said he, scornfully. “A man is always safe in another man’s house. It has happened not once, but often, in these mountains, that a man has given shelter to a hunted man and found, while the guest sat at his fire, that he was harboring a man who had shot the son of the house not an hour before. The neighbors bring in the body, and the father sits beside it, with the murderer under his roof. And the father gives him coffee and food and drink and rolls cigarettes for him, until the guest is ready to go, and then he accompanies him for an hour’s journey, so that none of the tribe can injure him, and says a courteous farewell to him on the trail. ‘Go on a smooth road,’ he says. ‘There is a word of peace between us for a day and a night because you are my guest. After that I will follow you all my life, until I kill you.’”
I began to see the exquisite, infinite complications of that system of law and order, the Law of Lec, which guides these people in all their actions, and I thought, “This goes back beyond the Middle Ages,” remembering the old Bible stories of the time when men lived similarly, under the laws of Moses.
But already the sense of perspective in time was growing dim; we were living in the past, not thinking of it, and the scores of future centuries in which men would spread over Europe, invent private property, build great cities and empires, discover America, and invent machines, became as faint to us as the old memory of a dream. By the next day we had forgotten it all; two weeks later I was to come back to a room with a rug on the floor, a window in the wall, a bed, and a stove, and feel such a sense of strangeness among them that, tired as I was, I could not sleep between the unfamiliar sheets. Now that I am back in my own century, writing of those days in the Albanian mountains, I understand why men so easily slip into the ancient savagery of war and all war’s atrocities. All that we call civilization is like a tune heard yesterday, a little thing floating on the surface of our minds, which sometimes we can keep step to, and then in a moment it is gone so that we cannot remember it.
Upon the trail that day we were barbarians, simple and primitive; we were isolated, small bits of warmth and energy in a hostile universe of stone and rain. And when, out of the gray mist of the trail ahead, another simple barbarian appeared, we greeted him with the unquestioning acceptance of understanding. He was a man of Pultit, bare in the rain save for turban, loin cloth, and opangi. He was bound for the house of the bishop to bring back the boy Sokol, whose father was dead.
Standing around him in the rain, we listened to the news. Three days earlier Plum had sheltered a woman who was leaving a cruel husband, a man of Shoshi. She had slept beneath Plum’s roof one night on her way to her father’s tribe. That morning, as Plum returned after taking his son to school, he had met the husband on the trail, and without a word the husband had shot him down. But as he died Plum had managed to reach his revolver and had killed the husband, saying, “This, from Sokol.” And as Sokol was now the head of his family, he must return from school to the house where the women were mourning his father.
Cheremi thrice made the sign of the cross. “Plum was a good man,” he said.
“And loved his son,” Perolli added. For Plum with his last effort had avenged himself, had closed the account. He left no blood feud to darken the life of the little Eagle. The boy would be known as the son of a hero, and to-day would take his place as a chief and a member of all village councils.
The man of Pultit, having told us this news and wished us long life and smooth trails for our feet, went on down the mountain side, and gripping our staffs tighter in water-soaked hands, we resumed our climbing.
We had begun that day with ponchos over our sweaters; our gendarmes had begun it by taking off their jackets and trousers, so that the sluicing rain would not wet them. These garments were in the packs, protected by ponchos, and, barelegged, barearmed, with only the colored sashes about their waists and cloths wound around their heads, the men went up and down the interminable trails as easily as panthers. Now and then they stopped and, kneeling on the trail, reached down a hand to one of us, pulling us up over unusually large and steep bowlders, and from time to time, as we struggled and panted after them, they offered to carry us. With the blood pounding in our heads, blinding and deafening us, our lungs torn with gasping in our aching sides, we refused, and struggled on. Our gloves had become sodden in a moment; we stripped them off, and soon the ponchos which impeded our climbing followed them; and then, as we were wet to the skin, anyway, we discarded sweaters and began to long for the complete freedom of nakedness. At each step our feet made a sucking sound in the water that filled our shoes, but the exertion of climbing and sliding kept our bodies warm, and by degrees, as suppleness returned to our stiff muscles, we began to see the magic country around us. We stood on rocks from which we saw a hundred miles of snow-tipped peaks, blue gorges, bronze-brown forests. White and smoke-colored clouds swirled beneath us, and through rifts in them we saw tiny green terraced fields, the blue hair line of water in stone-walled irrigation ditches, and houses tiny as those on a relief map, made of stone and almost indistinguishable from the native rocks, as large as they, among which they were set.
“I shall not be happy until I stay in one of them,” I said, and at that moment we heard a hail from Cheremi, who stood on the trail thirty feet above our heads. He gestured toward three cone-shaped peaks of solid rock that, rising steeply from the gorge three thousand feet below, rose to some hundreds of feet above the level of our eyes. Little Rexh, silent and watchful as ever at Frances’s side, translated his words.
“There is an old city,” he said, “the city of Pog. He says it was built by his people, men of the Land of the Eagle, a hundred years before the Romans came.”
“Tell him to wait where he is,” we exclaimed, for, looking again at the nearest cone-shaped mountain, we saw on its top traces of old walls, and on its sides what might once have been a circling road, and we clambered up the trail to ask Cheremi about it.
“It is a very old city,” said Cheremi. “It was built before men began to remember.” Standing on the edge of the trail, which was also the edge of the gorge, he looked over perhaps a quarter of a mile of space to the sharp-pointed peak of rock. In one hand he held his rifle, its butt resting on the rock at his feet; the thumb of the other hand was thrust through a fold of the scarlet sash about his loins, and the sun, appearing blindingly at that moment in a rent of the clouds, shone on his wet white skin and made it shimmer like satin. The deep seams worn in his leathery face by forty years of childlike, mischievous mirth became shallow (an unaccustomed look of solemnity had ironed them out) and, looking straight and unwinking at the sun, he said, “The sun is now the only living thing that saw that city built.”
We shaded our eyes with cupped hands and looked at it. The world was suddenly all aglitter, every leaf a heliograph, every giant slope of rock reflecting a thousand rays, and our eyes watered. But, gazing steadily, we saw the fragment of a wall, and below it, curling around the tall, slender cone of the mountain, traces of a road that had been walled, and a broken flight of four broad steps, torn apart by the roots of a tree. It was the only tree we could see on the three-thousand-foot height, but, like all the others of the forests, it was a gnarled, branchless trunk; its young boughs had been cut every spring to feed the goats.
“Does anyone live there now?”
“No,” said Cheremi. “It is the place where the ora love to sit, and sometimes one hears them crying, like trees in a wind, when there is no wind. But no human person lives there.”
“What is an ora?” I asked, when Perolli had translated.
“An ora—a spirit of the forest, soul of a tree or a rock. Nature spirits,” said Frances. “You know the Greek oreads? Well, that’s the Greek name of the Albanian ora; the Greeks got them from the Albanians.”
“And they still live in these mountains?”
“Apparently. Did you ever see an ora, Cheremi?” she asked him, in Albanian.
“No. Very few people see them. But I have heard them singing, and once, in the Wood of the Ora, which we will pass to-morrow, I heard them talking together in the twilight. I heard them say that my cousin would die,” said Cheremi, seriously.
“And did he die?”
“Of course,” said he, surprised by the question. “He was a strong man, but within six weeks, sitting beside the fire one night, he said that he felt a pain in his heart, and in an hour he was dead.” Cheremi crossed himself.
“But about the city of Pog. Does anyone ever go there? Could we go there?”
People sometimes went, he said; the shepherds always went to cut the branches of the trees, which belonged to the tribe of Pultit. How far was it from where we stood? He thought for a time, and said, “Four hours.” Albanians have no measure for distance except the time it takes to walk it, and this time corresponds with no measurement of ours. He had said that our walk of that day would be an hour and a half; we had already been exhausting every ounce of energy and breath for four, and were scarcely a third of the way.
“What does one find when one gets there?”
“Very little. There is the old wall which you see, and on the rock one can follow the lines of the walls of houses, built square and with many rooms, and from the rocks which have fallen they must have been tall houses. That is all, except that on some of the large stones one can see that the sun circle was carved. Everything else has been eaten by the great flocks of years. But there is still treasure buried there.”
“How do you know?”
“I know because I have seen men who have seen it. There is a man of Pultit whom I know. He went to the old city of Pog one day with his goats. There had been a great storm and part of the wall had fallen. Before that day the wall had had a corner, where now you see nothing. Where the wall had fallen there was a golden image of a man, as large as himself, shining in the sun. The man of Pultit forgot his goats in looking at it. It was too heavy for him to carry, so he took a stone and broke off four of its fingers, and with them in his sash he went to get his brothers to help him carry away the image.
“But it was night before he reached their house, and they said it was better not to go to that city until morning. In the morning they went, and where the image had been there was nothing but stones. Afterward, in thinking of nothing but that image, the man went mad, and he now lives alone and naked in the mountains, talking to the ora and begging them to take him again to that image. But before that he sold the fingers to the gold beaters in Scutari, and they said those fingers were of the purest gold and not alloyed, as gold is now. I did not see the fingers, but many did before they were beaten into ornaments.”
“What do you think became of the image?”
“Doubtless it had a bird or snake for guardian, and that spirit came and took it away again,” said Cheremi, and Perolli explained that when one buries a treasure one calls to some creature of the woods and intrusts the hoard to its care. “O spirit of the small gray serpent with poison in thy tooth, guard for me this treasure. Let no man see it for ten times ten years, and then deliver it only to those of my family,” would be a simple formula, but usually more imagination is used. For instance, Perolli knew of a man who called the large magpie to watch him bury his treasure, and he said to the bird, “Let no one uncover this gold until two black mice have dragged three times around this tree a carriage made of an acorn cup, with a small mouse in it.” But his incantation was overheard, and the crafty neighbor caught and dyed and trained the mice and made the carriage, and had them drag it three times around the tree, after which the magpie gave up the treasure. Otherwise it would have disappeared when a hand was laid upon it.
“But does Cheremi really believe these things?” I asked myself, and, looking at his serious face and Perolli’s, I was struck with the startling idea that Perolli believed them, too, in spite of his English suit and European education, and I felt in my own mind something like a soft landslide, uncovering possibilities of wild beliefs in myself. “Anything can happen in the mountains of Albania,” I said, picking up my staff and rising, for the shadows of the western mountains were already climbing up the cone-shaped pinnacle of Pog.
We went on, up and down the trail, over mountain after mountain that at home no one would dream of climbing. The rain fell again, bringing premature night down with the flood of water, and again we came into clear weather and saw all the colors of sunset on the clouds below and around us.
Many times we passed above villages that clung like mud-daubers’ nests on the cliffs below the trail, and once Cheremi stopped at the trail’s edge and, closing his ears firmly with his thumbs, sent out into the interminable miles of air the clear high note of the “telephone call.”
A voice from the depths responded, and, searching with our eyes, we discovered a white-and-black figure among the rocks some hundreds of feet below. Then this conversation ensued:
“Are you a man?”
“I am a woman of Shoshi, married in Pultit.”
“What is the name of your husband?”
“The name of my husband is Lulash.”
“Say to your husband, Lulash, that Cheremi is on the trail. Cheremi goes to Plani with four strangers from far away and with a Mohammedan youth of Scutari. To-night Cheremi will be in Plani. Say to Lulash that he may bring to Cheremi in Plani the hundred kronen which he owes him.”
“I will say to my husband, Lulash, that Cheremi is on the trail. Cheremi goes to Plani with four strangers from far away and with a Mohammedan youth of Scutari. To-night Cheremi will be in Plani. I will say to Lulash that he may bring to Cheremi in Plani the hundred kronen which he owes him.”
“OO-EE-OO-OO!” The final shrill call came circling back among the peaks like ripples of disturbed water, and up through its circling came the answering call of the woman. Since he had been telephoning to a woman, Cheremi did not fire his rifle three times, for which my ears were grateful.
We went on. And once, as I clambered up the side of a rock pile that the child of a giant might have made in building a tower with blocks, my staff (ah, how grateful I was for that third leg!) dislodged a stone the size of my head, and Cheremi, turning like a cat, flung himself downward and caught it as it tottered on the trail’s edge. Then I looked and saw, far below, the miniature images of a woman and a cradle, set among moving white spots that were sheep, and I saw that the rock would have gone down the slope like a bomb from an airplane and struck the cradle beside which the woman was sitting, and, I thought, spinning.
“One must be careful on the trails,” said Cheremi, and as the men at that moment had finished a song with a joyous fusillade of rifle shots, I asked if people were not sometimes killed by stray bullets. Perolli said that of course it happened now and then, but everyone understood that the killing was an accident and it caused no blood feud. Accidents, he remarked, will happen anywhere, and he spoke of the death toll of automobiles, which at that moment seemed as far from my knowledge as the twenty centuries that separated us from them.
“Through the Land of the Eagle the news is sung,” the second gendarme began a new song, thumbs against his ears and sixty-pound pack on his back, as he ascended the rocks above us. Cheremi took it up, repeating each line as the other improvised it, and under his breath Rexh translated them for me, storing them away in his memory, from which I later transferred them to my notebook. As I listened I glanced at Rrok Perolli, disguised servant of the new government about which they were making the song, but his face wore a cheerful and unconcerned expression, like a mask so perfect that it seems real.
“Through the Land of the Eagle the news is sung——(It has a double rhyme as they sing it, Mrs. Lane, but I do not know the English to make it rhyme in your language),” said Rexh, apologetically.
“What have the men of Tirana been doing?
I am a son of the mountain eagles;
I do not give up my nest while there is life in my claws;
I do not yield to the gendarmes!
I will drown them in their own blood.
Rise, rise, and go to the door.
There is a sergeant with twenty soldiers.
Ho! Ho! Sergeant, I am not the man you think!
I will not bow and be led to the slaughter.
I will not be killed like a lamb for the men of Tirana,
I am a goat and will fight!”
“What do they mean about sergeants and soldiers?” I asked Perolli, and he said, “These tribes do not understand that the new government in Tirana is an all-Albanian government. They don’t think as a nation; they think as tribes. They think the government is a Tirana government, trying to destroy their liberty as the Romans and the Turks and the Austrians and Italians and the Serbs and the Greeks and the Peace Council tried to do. They know that the Peace Conference in Paris arranged to divide Albania into three parts, giving one to Greece, one to Italy, and one to Jugo-Slavia (and would have done it if Greece and Serbia had been strong enough at the moment to grab a third of a hornets’ nest and if we hadn’t driven out Italy). They know there is a connection between the Peace Conference and the League of Nations, so, now that the Albanian government is a member of the League, they think that the men of Tirana have joined their enemies. They were so dangerous that we had to send soldiers up here to burn the houses of the Shala chiefs. But everything will be all right as soon as we can get the government going and begin building schools and roads up here. They just don’t understand yet.”
Political discussion was cut short by one of the men who had run ahead a few miles to inform the village of Plani that we were coming, and who now popped out of the gathering darkness to announce that the priest refused to receive us in his house.
“The macaroni!” cried our men, with a contempt like vitriol. The priest was of Italian blood; no Albanian would have been such a dog, they said. And we sat down on the mountain side to consider what we should do.
“Why won’t the priest take us in?” I asked, shivering in my wet garments, for night had brought chill down from the snow-covered peaks above us. They were still pale fawn color and pink where the clouds left them unhidden, but the valleys were black, and far away on some distant slope there was a small light, red as a ruby—the flare from a charcoal burner’s fire.
“He says he has no servant,” replied the man who had run ahead to tell the priest that we were coming, and even Cheremi, the joyous gendarme, snorted aloud.
“Priest though he is, he is a macaroni!” and, “Only a macaroni would so disgrace our villages!” the Albanians exclaimed, shamed before the strangers by such incredible inhospitality.
“Perhaps he knows who you are and is afraid to take us in?” I said to Perolli.
“No. He doesn’t know who we are, and is afraid to shelter strangers who may be Serbian or English spies. Cowardly Italian!” said Perolli.
“My house,” Cheremi volunteered, hopefully, “is only across two mountain ranges. You would be welcome there.”
