petticoats engirdled with an armoury of
pistols, daggers and yataghans, who if they are unkind make a surgical
demonstration with these lethal implements, and if they are smitten with
a mania of amiability, hand you over, for superintendence of your
repose, to an army of satellites of whom you are only too glad to call
the flea brother? I trow not. Personally, I dislike mountains. They were
made for goats and cascades and lunatics and other irresponsible
phenomena of nature. They have their uses, I admit, as windscreens and
water-sheds; and beheld from the valley they can assume very pretty
colours, owing to varying atmospheric conditions; and the more jagged
and unenticing they are, the greater is their specious air of
stupendousness. . . . At any rate they are hindrances to convenient
travel and so I go among them as little as possible.

To judge from the fervid descriptions given us by Jaffery and Liosha,
Albania must be a pestilentially uncomfortable place to live in. It is
divided into three religious sects, then re-divided into heaven knows
how many tribes. What it will be when it gets autonomy and a government
and a parliament and picture-palaces no one yet knows. But at the time
when my two friends met it was in about as chaotic a condition as a
jungle. Some tribes acknowledged the rule of the Turk. Others did not.
Every mountainside had a pretty little anarchical system of its own.
Every family had a pretty little blood feud with some other family.
Accordingly every man was handy with knife and gun and it was every
maiden's dream to be sold as a wife to the most bloodthirsty scoundrel
in the neighbourhood. At least that was the impression given me by
Liosha.

When the tragedy occurred she herself was about to be sold to a
prosperous young cutthroat of whom she had seen but little, as he lived,
I gathered, a couple of mountains off. They had been betrothed years
before. The price her father demanded was high. Not only did he hold a
notable position on his mountain, but he had travelled to the fabulous
land of America and could read and write and could speak English and
could handle a knife with peculiar dexterity. Again, Liosha was no
ordinary Albanian maiden. She too had seen the world and could read and
write and speak English. She had a will of her own and had imbibed
during her Chicago childhood curiously un-Albanian notions of feminine
independence. Being beautiful as well, she ranked as a sort of prize