Rose Wilder Lane

“ Beyond Shijak the road goes over the last low hill, and twenty miles of plain lie before it, most sparsely dotted with the great white houses of the beys of central Albania. Against the eastern sky the towering mountains, with their eternal smoke of clouds, catch the last rays of the sun and make magic with it. For an hour the colors shift and change, plum purple, orange gold, mauve and violet and sea green, until at last only a pale gold moon and a silvery star shine in a lemon-yellow sky. And the seven white minarets of Tirana lift above the green of trees. ”

“ We were speechless before that infuriated woman who had killed nineteen Serbs with her hands. We went away, leaving her walking up and down, while her mother silently smoked and the children watched from their heaps of rugs.
In the street by the gate of Government House Sied Bey was watching the sky to the northwest. Five red flares were there now, and the rifle fire was running like flickering lightning over the western hills.
“It is too bad my sister is not there,” he said. He was proud of her. “My sister was a lion when the Serbs came in. There is no man better than my sister in a battle.” ”

“ I leaned from the saddle and spoke earnestly to the byraktor myself, Rexh’s murmured translation for his ears while I held his eyes: “I must get to Scutari to-night. It is necessary. But I do not want to risk any man’s life. I take my own life in my hands and go with it on the trail. No one else can carry it for me. That is American custom. It is American custom that I thank you now, and give back to you your protection, and go on alone. If it is not your custom, I am sorry, but by all American custom your honor is safe, and I am American, and Albanian law does not apply to me.” ”

“ It was all very peaceful and beautiful, and we sang as we took the trail again, but for a long time, whenever the sharp bark of a rifle was answered by a hundred cliffs, I wondered. It was nothing, probably; some one firing his gun at the sky in sheer exuberance of spirit. It happens all the time, in these mountains.
It was on this day that we passed the Wood of the Ora, and, even though I had not heard the stories of them, I should have felt an uncanny sensation while going through that narrow, dark defile between gray cliffs. The trees stood thickly there, climbing the bowlder-strewn slope ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, no, the magic departed; there was only the flat wet lands of Thethis below me, the stone houses and stone fences, and beyond them the blue and purple and white and black and rose color of the snow-crested mountains with a hundred waterfalls. Beautiful, but like the stranger’s face that shatters the wild, irrational expectation of having found a friend in an impossible place. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At four in the morning the house was astir. Out of the darkness yawning men came to stir the slumbering fire; the byraktor appeared without his turban, a weird figure with his shaven, skin-white head and long black scalplock, and began to make the morning coffee; the sheep and goats were driven out into the rain by the ragged shepherdesses. I sat up and put on my opangi, and the sleepy Rexh, still streaked with red dye from his fez, rolled out of his blankets. ”

“ The government had made Tirana the capital for the same reason that the teacher puts the worst boy of the class in the front seat. But this was no solace to Scutari or Elbassan.
Tirana, the white, low town, drowsed in the sun; water rippled in the gutters of the winding, walled streets; donkeys laden with cedar boughs, the brooms of Tirana, carefully picked their footing on the uneven cobbles; women with gayly painted cradles on their backs trudged behind the donkeys. ”

“ A white face, and darkness under the eyes, and eyes that see straight to the end of things. Soft tramping of feet in rawhide opangi behind him, and the Mati men in dingy black-braided trousers and colored sashes and Scanderbeg jackets, rifles all-angled above their kerchiefed heads, pouring down the narrow street. Then lumbering behind them, dust filmed and mud splashed, the empty automobile of the Albanian government, gone forty miles to Durazzo to fetch Ahmet and come back empty because he would ride at the head of his men. ”

“ Scutari had been merely a place to pass on the way from Podgoritza to Constantinople. And now, in this brightening dawn upon the Scutari plain, I was riding to unknown adventure among the hidden tribes of Dukaghini.
This was the doing of Frances Hardy. That impetuous and efficient girl had seized upon me and my small affairs as six months earlier she had seized upon the refugee situation in Scutari, taking control, making adjustment, creating a new pattern. A thin, athletic, sun-browned girl, so full of energy that her very finger tips seemed to crackle electrically—that was Frances Hardy. ”

“ The village of Thethis is built on the plateau that tops the gigantic, shiplike rock wedged in the narrow head of Shala Valley. All around it rise the mountains, snow capped, seamed with white waterfalls like rich quartz with streaks of silver; the shadows of them lie almost all day long across the village. Thethis itself is perhaps thirty large, oblong stone houses scattered at wide intervals on the flat land, and all the land is divided neatly into squares by stone fences—some fields for corn, some for grain, some for meadow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rifles are human possessions; rifles are solid things that at worst can only kill. The sound of the rifles, multiplied a thousand times by echoing courtyard walls, muffled and enabled us to bear that other sound, still faintly heard through the uproar. “It’s only their war cry,” we babbled to each other. “It’s the mountain men fighting. That’s all it is.” Coherence came back to our minds. “It’s the Dibra,” I said. “Dibra and the refugee Kossova men, come to take the government away from the Toshks.” And we ran out into the courtyard. ”

“ I said, “marriage does not have much to do with the family. Young people grow up thinking about themselves. Then, when they are old enough, if they have money enough to live on, and if they meet some one they like and want to marry, they marry. They marry to be happy, because they have found some one they want to live with always. They go away from their families, sometimes very far away, and live in a house by themselves.”
It came over me, while I watched the surprise growing in Lulash’s eyes, how haphazard and egotistic—how shallowly rooted, really—our whole system is. ”

“ We had ventured out of the courtyard into Tirana, that low white town that, to the eye, seemed sleeping in the moonlight, and to the ear was bedlam. Bullets were whizzing, scattering white plaster, smashing tiles. But mosques and minarets, arcaded streets, arched stone bridge, rippling water, were peaceful in the moonlight. No human being seemed to be abroad, save us two, who wandered like forsaken ghosts through the incredible clamor.
The windows of the Vocational School were alight, the American flag was over the gate. ”

“ Constantinople’s nothing. Everyone goes to Constantinople. But if you don’t see Albania, you’re wasting the chance of a lifetime. Up in those mountains—right up there in those mountains, a day’s journey from here—the people are living as they lived twenty centuries ago, before the Greek or the Roman or the Slav was ever known. There are prehistoric cities up there, old legends, songs, customs that no one knows anything about. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ Rrok Perolli was motionless, a cigarette between his lips, his hand arrested in the act of striking a match. Little Rexh, his round face intent beneath the red fez, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide and blank, was an image of concentrated listening. The two gendarmes stood alert, like dogs straining at a leash, scenting something. Our four guides, in their long white trousers, black jackets, colored turbans and sashes, were like men frozen in attitudes of interrupted talk. ”

“ Near the farther end, on the stone floor, a bonfire burned in a ring of ashes. In the corner near the door several goats and two kids and two sheep stopped their browsing on a heap of dry-leaved branches, and looked at us with large eyes shining in the torchlight. Five or six women came out of the shadows to greet us, and behind us the men were coming in, reloading their rifles, hanging them on pegs, closing and bolting the heavy wooden door.
Rexh and our two gendarmes were already busy unrolling the packs, spreading our blankets over heaps of dried grass on the other side of the fire. ”

“ It meant another war in the Balkans, the kindler of wars in Europe. All along a thousand miles of new frontier and ancient hatred any outbreak in the Balkans would spread. Italy would cross the Adriatic again; what would Jugo-Slavia say to that? Serbia would come down in force from the north; would Croatia, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Montenegro, not seize the opportunity to strike at Serbia, the hated new master? Could Jugo-Slavia turn her back on Hungary, in safety? All the Balkans and Central Europe are tinder to any spark, to-day. ”

“ Incredible, as we walked homeward under the white moon, that on this spring night men could be killing one another. Incredible, in this magic of moon and rippling water and a little owl calling love notes from the dark cypress, that anywhere there was anything but peace. The tall carved wooden gate of our courtyard was romantic in the shadow of Government House; our little house was picturesque with black shadows on white plaster; there was glamour everywhere. ”