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These men, chiefly vicious-looking Albanians, with loosely-slung rifle, and round their waist a bandolier of cartridges, lend a wildness to the lonely road which is likely to mislead the new-comer; and should one of them empty his revolver light-heartedly in the air, to be answered by another some distance away, the impression is considerably heightened.
The archbishop, a large flat man, gave us each a hand as though he expected us to kiss it; he had a huge archiepispocal ring and a lot of imperiosity. He seemed more political than bishopy, though most of the Churchmen are; and there is the tale of one who said, "I would rather people went to drill than to church." There were a lot of wealthy looking Albanians sitting round and being respectable.
When I was about a hundred yards up in this old mixed quarter of Greeks, Turks, Jews, Italians, Albanians, and noise and cafedjis and wine-bibbing, having turned two corners, I suddenly gathered my skirts, spun round, and, as fast as I could, was off at a heavy trot back to the quay. She was after me, but being taken by surprise, I suppose, was distanced a little at first.
The Albanians are always glad of an excuse to kill; the wanderer found his death in perhaps the only moment of heroism that he had displayed throughout his wretched life. Such, though, was the story our informant had gleaned, and it took the edge off our evening's amusement.
The heat was now getting tremendous, and a friendly Albanian picking apricots on the roadside gave us many handfuls, which proved very acceptable. Two Albanians came across in a large barge in answer to our hail, and we and our horses the latter, by the way, stepping into the barge most unconcernedly were piloted across.
The mode of fighting was on the whole the same with both nations; they fought chiefly with arrows and light javelins, which they frequently after the Indian fashion discharged from their lurking-places in the woods behind the trunks of trees, or hurled down from the tops of trees on the foe; the Albanians had also numerous horsemen partly mailed after the Medo-Armenian manner with heavy cuirasses and greaves.
The Indo-European languages, those, namely, of the higher race in India, and of the Persians, and those of the Greeks, Italians, Celts, Germans, Slavs, Letts, and Albanians, approach each other always more nearly as they are traced upwards.
The aboriginal Albanians, who with their back to the Adriatic had kept the Slavs at bay, asserted their vitality and sent out migratory swarms to the south, which entered the service of the warring princelets and by their prowess won broad lands in every part of continental Greece, where Albanian place-names are to this day only less common than Slavonic.
He had barely reached us and seized my stirrup leather, on which he hung, panting heavily, when from the woods emerged a pursuing crowd, brandishing their rifles as they ran. Within a few minutes we were surrounded by about a hundred and fifty Albanians, whose gestures were not to be misunderstood. They wanted to kill the man at my stirrup, who looked beseechingly up to me for protection.
With but few exceptions all the mountain priests were Albanians, and almost all had had part of their training in Austria. In knowledge and intelligence they were much ahead of the almost untrained "popas" of Montenegro, who had never been beyond their own borders.
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