Nobody who has not visited Northern Albania can have any idea of the wildness of those bare grey rocks, of the roughness of the tracks, or the savagery of life there. Northern Albania is to-day just as it was under the Roman Empire. The might of Rome has waned, the Servian has come and gone, the Venetian has been swept away, and the Turk is now nominally master. But the country has never, through all the centuries, been annexed, and those wild tribes, descendants of the savage people who inhabited those fastnesses before the days of Greek dominion, have never been tamed. The Northern Albanian is the last survivor of mediæval days. He has no written language—indeed, his alphabet, with its many soft and hard “ssh” sounds, has never yet been determined—therefore he has no literature and no newspaper. Thin, wiry, and muscular, he wears raw-hide slippers, in which he moves with cat-like, stealthy tread—a habit survived from prehistoric days—while his very dress is protective, rendering him at a short distance difficult to discern, so like is he in colour to the rocky background. He looks as though he had just stepped down from a mediæval Florentine fresco, with his head half-shaven, hair long at the back and cut square across the shoulders.
He is entirely unchanged ever since the Turk found him, except that of late he has adopted the breech-loading rifle and a particularly heavy pattern of revolver. The black furry bolero which he wears, without exception, is the sign of mourning for his great prince, Skender Beg, who died in 1467, after being at war with the Turks for over twenty years; therefore with him fashions do not easily change, and “latest novelties” in dress are unknown. Great are the changes that have come over the world during the past thousand years or so, but Northern Albania has remained unaffected by them, and is still in a measure in the lowest depths of barbarism. The Turk does not rule. The wild, inaccessible country is under the various independent tribes, ruled by a chieftain according to unwritten laws which have been handed down orally from remote ages, and one of the fiercest and most independent of these chiefs was Vatt Marashi, the man whose guest I now was to be.