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It is his best-known work, and has been translated into Italian more than once. After his return to Macchia followed some years of apparent sterility, but later on, and especially during the last twenty years of his life, his literary activity became prodigious.
Deeper than the tall forests behind it the macchia will hide two lovers, and under the open sky hedge off all the world but their passion . . . In the macchia we roamed together, day after day, and forgot the world; forgot all but honour; for she, my lady, was a child of sixteen, and as her knight I worshipped her. Ah, those days! those scented days!
Again, in 1899, we find him reading a paper before the twelfth international congress of Orientalists at Rome. But best of all, he loved the seclusion of Macchia. Griefs clustered thickly about the closing years of this unworldly dreamer. Blow succeeded blow.
But at every stride I drank in the odours of the macchia, my very skin seeming to absorb them, as my clothes undoubtedly did before my journey's end; for years later I had only to open the coffer in which they reposed, and all Corsica saluted my nostrils.
At Macchia he remained, brooding on Albanian wrongs, devising remedies, corresponding with foreigners and writing ever writing; consuming his patrimony in the cause of Albania, till the direst poverty dogged his footsteps. I have read some of his Italian works.
Zuu shiu menes; ne mee se Ijinaar chish Ijeen pa-shuatur skiotta, e i ducheje per moon. I will only add that the translation of such a passage it contains twenty-eight accents which I have omitted is mere child's play to its pronunciation. Sometimes I find my way to the village of Macchia, distant about three miles from San Demetrio.
Kill yourself for a woman? Just as if we women were obliged to love every man who thinks he's in love with us!... How stupid men are! We have to be their servants, love them willy-nilly. And if we don't, they kill themselves just to spite us." And she was silent for a time. "Poor Macchia! He was a good boy, and deserved to be happy.
He could not live without her! A single night without seeing her would mean despair. He would end as Macchia ended! He would shoot himself! And he seemed to mean it. His eyes were fixed on the floor as if he were staring at his own corpse, lying there on the pavement, motionless, covered with blood, a revolver in its stiffened hand. "Oh, no! How horrible! Rafael, my Rafael!"
No: my mission was never meant to succeed: and if in my later professional pride I now think shame of it if to this day I wince at the remembrance of Corsica the shame comes simply from this, that I began my career as a scout by losing my way like any schoolboy. But, after all, even genius must make a beginning; and I was fated to make mine in the Corsican macchia. Do you know it?
Within five minutes of my first introduction to the macchia I had learnt how easily a man may be lost in it; and in less than half of five minutes I had lost not only my way but my temper. To pursue after the hogs was nearly hopeless: all sound of them was swallowed up in the tangle of scrub.
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