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A young gypsy climbed on to the rock with a black lamb struggling in his arms. He fetched a little 18-month-old girl from a rug where she was sitting. "Now the man who was holding the lamb took it to the edge of the rock and drew a knife across its throat. A jet of blood spurted out and fell red and shining on the browner blood that had been shed before. The gypsy had caught some on his fingers, and with this he made a circle on the child's forehead. Then he got down again and went round the rock another three times, carrying another black lamb."
A bearded Moslem standing by explained, "His wife got this child by coming here and giving a lamb, and all children that are got from the rock must be brought back and marked with the sign of the rock." Rebecca West was disgusted.
The night before she had watched Moslem women embrace and kiss a phallic stone, had embraced it herself. "All I had seen the night before was not discreditable to humanity. . . . When the Moslem women in the Tekiya put out their arms to embrace the black stone and dropped their heads to kiss it, they made a gesture . . . [which] is an imitation by the body of the gesture made by the soul in loving. It says, T will pour myself in devotion to you, I will empty myself without hoping for return, and I can do this serenely, for I know that as I empty myself I shall be filled again.' Human beings cannot remind themselves too often that they are capable of performing this miracle, the existence of which cannot be proved by logic. . . ."
"But the rite of the Sheep's Field was purely shameful, . . . Those who had invented it and maintained it through the ages were actuated by a beastly retrogression, they wanted again to enjoy the dawn of nastiness. . . . They wanted to put their hands on something weaker than themselves and prod its mechanism to funny tricks by the use of pain. ... I knew this rock well. I had lived under the shadow of it all my life. All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing."
Kossovo Polye, the Field of the Blackbirds, sounds to the Serbs like the tolling of a bell. There in 1389 the Turks destroyed Tsar Lazar and the Serb empire, and reduced the Serbs to serfdom for 500 years. Kossovo is a field of four battles; not like Fredericksburg or Manassas, fields of quick successive battles, but like Antietam, which is a legendary battlefield of the Indians.
Author West was "stilled by the stillness of Kossovo. . . . The land lies loosely, like a sleeper, in a cradle of featureless hills. . . . There a shoulder rises, here a hand supports the sleeper's head. . . . Thousands of men and women, even tens of thousands, lived and worked and sweated on Kossovo. But the plain absorbed them and nullified them by its own indifference, and there was shown before our eyes the first of all our disharmonies, the basis of our later tragedies: the division between man and nature. . . . The earth is not our mother's bosom. ... It makes us, its grass is our flesh, it lets us walk about on it, but this is all it will do for us; and since the earth is what is not us, and therefore a symbol of destiny and of God, we are alone and terrified. Kossovo, more than any other historical site I know, arouses that desolation."