Chapter Nine: October 14, 1809

Byron was awakened by the feeling that someone was looking at him. He opened his eyes to find Isak’s gaze on him.

‘Good morning,’ Isak said.

He was evidently the first one out of bed; for everyone else was still asleep. Meanwhile, as if on command, the others began to stir. It was still raining, Isak proclaimed to all; no longer so violently, but still fairly heavily.

‘So the weather is moderating,’ Byron murmured.

Isak replied that he wouldn’t quite say that. ‘This is more of a short respite. That’s why we should get moving quickly, if we don’t intend to spend several more days in this cave. If we head out now and don’t pause to rest, we can, by my calculation, reach a han by nightfall,’ Isak concluded.

His eyes scanned the room. The Albanians nodded hastily, while Byron and Hobhouse shrugged their shoulders. Hobhouse walked over to the entrance of the cave, and he came back a few seconds later: ‘It’s still raining ferociously. We should wait a few more hours, or at least eat something first,’ he said, turning to face Isak.

‘No,’ Isak said, ‘that’s not possible. We have to make use of the day and its light. It’s going to rain even harder, believe me.’

So with collars up and heads covered by caps and scarves, they all led their horses out of the cave, spurred them on, and rode off. The rain continued its intense drumming on the earth, but the thunder and wind had ceased. All around them lay evidence of nature’s fury from the night before. There were broken boughs and branches everywhere, and many smaller trees had been completely ripped out of the ground; the earth was plowed up, and the road was strewn with numerous puddles and swamp-like pools. The stubborn rain drew fleeting concentric circles on the surface of these shallow but turbid waters. Byron, riding along with his head down, watched intently as the puddles were bombarded by droplets and sent up dirty, cold spurts of water in response. They soon reached the highway, which had not been spared by the storm. The river had overflowed its banks at one point, and they literally had to ride through water for several hundred metres.

‘It’s a good thing that we got an early start,’ Isak said to Hobhouse, ‘because by this afternoon it will be a great deal more difficult to get through here, and by tomorrow it might well be impossible. We would have to make a long detour around this whole area, and it would then have taken fifteen days to get to Tepelena.’

Gradually the rain again poured down harder and harder. The road was deserted: since they broke camp that morning, they had not encountered a single living creature. Now, though, Byron caught sight of a massive silhouette in the sky. An eagle, giant and solitary, flew over them. Isak looked up as well, and said: ‘That is a terrifying bird. It’s the wolf among birds. It attacks snipes but does not spare even lambs. Do you know, my lord, how Aeschylus died?’

Byron shook his head in the negative.

‘Eagles like that take hold of tortoises and smash their armour by dropping them onto rocks from high in the air. They say that an eagle mistook Aeschylus’ bald, pale head for a stone and subsequently smashed it with a tortoise, so that human brains and the meat of the animal were mixed together.’

Byron shuddered. Zeno’s paradox about Achilles and the tortoise occurred to him: as great as the distance was between the elegant and sophisticated mathematical problem and the rustic tale, superficially they had much in common. They linked the names of writings from the classical world with a large, unthreatening, long-lived animal. The myths were alive here in the Balkans, just as Isak had declared the day before. Then, just as their small squad was coming out of a curve in the road, Byron heard one of the Albanians shout. In front of them stood an enormous tree, a remarkably tall and thick oak, perhaps thousands of years old. Isak was surprised, but he was also pleased.

‘We’re almost there!’ he called out. He turned to face Byron and Hobhouse: ‘We are closer to the han than I thought. We’ll be there, I believe, in less than an hour.’

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, despite the increasingly heavy rain. It was only a short time until the outlines of the han were discernible on the horizon. The horses broke into a gallop, as if they, too, were overjoyed.

* * *

The han was a hive of activity. A sum of money and the mention of Ali Pasha’s name ensured that Byron and the others quickly obtained good rooms. Isak merely had to utter two or three sentences to the innkeeper and everything was settled. The arrival of this unusual company of people did arouse some curiosity though; the men who sat smoking and playing cards in the forecourt of the han looked up at them and started to whisper. These idlers and brigands, with their tattered tunics and bloodshot eyes, did not exactly make a peaceable impression. Byron watched them out of the corner of his eye, cautiously, so that their gazes did not meet, and he also avoided turning his back to them. Isak said under his breath: ‘Have no fear, my lord. It is written on your brow, so to speak, that you are under the protection of Ali Pasha. Believe me, no one will so much as look askance at you, believe me.’

‘Who are those people then?’

‘Who knows, my lord, who knows…. Some of them are just passing through and have taken shelter from the rain, as we have done; others however are cut-throats and robbers of the type who always hang around places like this. They would like nothing better than to deprive a person of his worldly possessions, my lord,’ Isak went on, ‘but whoever has a real fortune need not fear them at all, because in the end they will all kill each other.’

‘Let everyone go now to his own room!’ Isak said at last, to their whole group. ‘Rest your bodies and souls.’

‘How long will we be staying here?’ asked Hobhouse, who had overheard the brief conversation between Byron and Isak.

‘Until the storm is finished,’ Isak answered. ‘In two nights, perhaps three, the rains will be over.’

At these words they parted, each looking for his room. It turned out that Isak and Byron were sharing a room, and Hobhouse took one with Fletcher and Collins; with the other Englishmen ending up in a third room, with the two Albanians in a fourth. The room for Isak and Byron was somewhat larger than the others, and was fitted-out with two hard wooden bunks at either end, and a large, roughly hewn table in the middle. There were no chairs. Directly upon entering, Byron dropped onto a bed, while Isak continued to pace back and forth. The noisy rain went on undiminished. Byron rolled over to face the wall, but he could tell, by the heavy footfalls, that Isak was still pacing about the room. He did so nervously, with rapid, loud steps. Byron sat up suddenly. Isak paused and said, ‘Forgive me, my lord. Were you trying to sleep?’

‘Actually I wasn’t, if I were to lie back down now, I definitely wouldn’t sleep a wink tonight. The problem is that when I am faced with a choice between sitting and lying down, I naturally prefer to lie down, and in a room without chairs of course I recline.’ ‘That’s interesting,’ Isak said tentatively. ‘Here in the East, sitting and lying are not such strictly differentiated positions. People here somehow prefer to be half-sitting or half-lying, whether it’s on benches, mattresses, or pillows.’ He paused for a moment and then continued, ‘it probably has something to do with hard and soft. The West is hard and the East is soft, or is that too much of a generalization?’

‘I have already noticed this penchant for categorization, as I would put it in Oriental terms,’ Byron asserted with a laugh. ‘But here the issue isn’t sitting or lying, but rather walking.’

‘So the noise did disturb you,’ Isak said more earnestly. ‘I was of the opinion that you didn’t intend to sleep.’

‘No, It did not bother me and I was not trying to sleep. I am simply not used to seeing a person walk back and forth continually in a room, as if it were a prison cell.’

Now it was Isak’s turn to laugh. ‘As far as I’m concerned, my lord,’ he said, ‘it’s like this: if I am not doing anything, or when I’m not speaking to anyone, I can neither stand nor sit, and if I am not sleeping, I cannot lie down either. I have to walk, and it’s how I best think over things. It does not matter if I am in the field or in a run-down hut.’

‘ So you are a Peripatetic, ‘Byron said, with kindness and a touch of disguised irony.

Isak fired back: ‘A lonely, laconic, pathetic Peripatetic. But for now, if you really aren’t going to sleep, we could go down and have a bite, for I am starving.’

* * *

Isak continued behaving strangely, or at least it appeared thus to Byron. At the meal, his mind seemed elsewhere. Byron asked a question, about some completely trivial matter, but Isak did not appear to have heard him at all. He ate slowly and half-heartedly, although a little earlier he’d complained of hunger. Byron wondered if he was becoming ill. He looked a little more closely at him, as if he were searching for symptoms. But nothing in Isak’s face indicated illness or frailty. “I guess the man is just in a bit of a bad mood, or maybe he’s feeling down on account of all the rain,” Byron concluded. Just then he noticed Hobhouse, who had apparently just come down to eat. He beckoned to him, and as Hobhouse joined them at the table, it was as if Isak had been waiting for this opportunity. Standing up, he said he was going to take a short walk.

‘It’s still raining,’ Byron responded.

‘I know,’ Isak said curtly.

Byron and Hobhouse watched him leave.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Hobhouse asked. Byron shrugged his shoulders. Without Isak, he felt somewhat ill at ease in the han, left to the mercy of the other guests. He was not afraid, but it irked him that without Isak he was a man without ears or tongue. Thus he might mistake a greeting for a threat, or a threat for a greeting, and he wouldn’t be able to do so much as ask for water. Hobhouse wolfed down the food he was served. The two of them said nothing to each other the entire time, as if they had silently agreed not to draw unnecessary attention to themselves with unintelligible words as long as they had no one at their side who would fend off possible intruders in their own language. Byron was also aware of the fact that people were staring at them intently, and he sensed a special abhorrence in their glances. Ali Pasha’s name had drawn an invisible line around them and now it protected them the way a heavy cloak protects you from the rain. After they had emptied the bowls in front of them, Byron and Hobhouse sat on for a bit in silence. Dusk was falling, and the front-court of the inn gradually emptied. Soon the two Englishmen retired to their rooms.

But Byron wasn’t tired. He lit a candle, and shortly thereafter he found himself doing what Isak had been doing – walking up and down the room. “Now all that’s missing is for me to go out for a stroll in the rain,” he thought, and at that very moment the door opened. Isak had returned, and he wasn’t even particularly wet.

‘Is it still coming down?’ Byron asked, just to have something to say; the muffled noise from outside was supplying a clear answer.

‘Yes,’ Isak replied, ‘it’s still raining, and heavily at that.’ He sat down on his bed.

‘That means that tonight nothing will come of your peripatetic ambling,’ Byron spluttered with a laugh.

Isak did not seem to have understood.

‘That pacing back and forth in the room,’ Byron explained, ‘I tried it too. Not such a bad idea.’

Isak was in a visibly bad mood. He nodded his head, commented that he was tired, and stretched out on his bed. Byron, from his own bed, saw Isak lying on his back, but there was no way of knowing whether he was asleep or just staring at the ceiling.

‘The best place to look is always at the ceiling, the blue-blooded lady said’ Byron whispered, thinking that he might be merely talking to himself.

The chuckle from the other side of the room revealed that Isak was awake.

‘Such bits of popular wisdom, my lord, are to be found in both the East and the West, among noblewomen and beggars; at least we are no different in this regard. People here say that a woman’s life is hell by day and paradise by night,’ Isak went on.

Byron called to mind Teiresias, the only person ever to have been both man and woman in his lifetime, and he recalled the wager between Hera and Zeus. ‘Teiresias,’ he began--but there was no response. “He’s probably drifted off,” Byron thought, getting up for a moment to put out the candle. For a long time Byron lay in the dark and stared out into the impenetrable blackness. As slumber at last descended and his eyelids closed, he thought he heard Isak get quietly of bed, open the door, and leave the room. Maybe I’m dreaming, Byron thought. And with that, he sank into Morpheus’ arms.