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Alexander Obrenovitch was succeeded on the throne by the father of Alexander II, at whose murder in the newsreel Author West peered "like an old woman reading the tea-leaves in her cup. ... I could not understand this event, no matter how often I saw this picture. I knew, of course, how and why the murder had happened.
Luccheni has got on well in the world. . . . Luccheni is Mussolini, and the improvement in his circumstances can be measured by the increase in the magnitude of his crime."
This is the first grim movement in the symphony of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Evidence of Things Unseen. When the train bearing Author West and her husband made its first stop in Yugoslavia, an elderly white-haired man trotted along the platform, calling softly: "Anna! Anna! Anna!" It was raining, and "he held an open umbrella not over himself but at arm's length. He had not brought it for himself, but for the beloved woman he was calling. He did not lose hope when he found her nowhere in all the long train, but turned and trotted all the way back, calling still with anxious sweetness: "Anna! Anna! Anna!" Says Author West: "I was among people I could understand." With these words begins the vast architectonic of her book.
She went to Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Old Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro. She climbed mountains, visited Roman and Venetian ruins, tuberculosis sanatoria, Turkish mosques, shrines, churches, monasteries, tombs, hovels, homes. She talked with intellectuals, professors, lawyers, peasants, poets, censors, soldiers, politicians, anti-Serb Croats, fanatical Serb nationalists, Bosnian Moslems and unassimilated Turks.
The things they told her, the things she said to them, above all the things she observed and thought fill two volumes of some 1,181 pages. But two things which impressed and distressed Novelist West had a special meaning as symbols of death and life—Ovche Polye and Kossovo Polye—the Sheep's Field and the Field of the Blackbirds.
The Sheep's Field was in Macedonia. "Of the surrounding hills one stood alone, magnificent in sharp austerity of cliff and pyramid: it is called 'the witness of God.' " Author West and her friends arrived at the Sheep's Field by car. "When we got out we were so near the rock that we could see its colour. It was a flat-topped rock . . . rising to something like six feet above the ground, and it was red-brown and gleaming, for it was entirely covered with the blood of the beasts that had been sacrificed on it during the night. . . . The colour of spilt blood is not properly a colour, it is in itself discoloured, it is a visible display of putrescence. In every crevice of the red-brown rock there had been stuck wax candles, which now hung down in a limp fringe of greasy yellow tails, smeared with blood. . . .
"It would have been pleasant to turn round and run back to the car . . . but the place had enormous authority. It was the body of our death, it was the seed of the sin that is in us, it was the forge where the sword was wrought that shall slay us."