“One marvels that no one comes to clear up this country, one itches to be at the job, and then one realizes that before one can begin here, one must get to work back there, where the fools and pedants of welt POLITIK scheme mischief one against another.  This country frets me.  I can’t see any fun in it, can’t see the humour of it.  And the people away there know no better than to play off tribe against tribe, sect against sect, one peasant prejudice against another.  Over this pass the foolery grows grimmer and viler.  We shall come to where the Servian plots against the Bulgarian and the Greek against both, and the Turk, with spasmodic massacres and indulgences, broods over the brew.  Every division is subdivided.  There are two sorts of Greek church, Exarchic, Patriarchic, both teaching by threat and massacre.  And there is no one, no one, with the sense to over-ride all these squalid hostilities.  All those fools away there in London and Vienna and St. Petersburg and Rome take sides as though these beastly tribes and leagues and superstitions meant anything but blank, black, damnable ignorance.  One fool stands up for the Catholic Albanians, another finds heroes in the Servians, another talks of Brave Little Montenegro, or the Sturdy Bulgarian, or the Heroic Turk.  There isn’t a religion in the whole Balkan peninsula, there isn’t a tribal or national sentiment that deserves a moment’s respect from a sane man.  They’re things like niggers’ nose-rings and Chinese secret societies; childish things, idiot things that have to go.  Yet there is no one who will preach the only possible peace, which is the peace of the world-state, the open conspiracy of all the sane men in the world against the things that break us up into wars and futilities.  And here am I—­who have the light—­wandering!  Just wandering!”

He shrugged his shoulders and came to stare at the torrent under the bridge.

“You’re getting ripe for London, Cheetah,” said Amanda softly.

“I want somehow to get to work, to get my hands on definite things.”

“How can we get back?”

She had to repeat her question presently.

“We can go on.  Over the hills is Ochrida and then over another pass is Presba, and from there we go down into Monastir and reach a railway and get back to the world of our own times again.”

8

But before they reached the world of their own times Macedonia was to show them something grimmer than Albania.

They were riding through a sunlit walnut wood beyond Ochrida when they came upon the thing.

The first they saw of it looked like a man lying asleep on a grassy bank.  But he lay very still indeed, he did not look up, he did not stir as they passed, the pose of his hand was stiff, and when Benham glanced back at him, he stifled a little cry of horror.  For this man had no face and the flies had been busy upon him. . . .

Benham caught Amanda’s bridle so that she had to give her attention to her steed.