Peaks of Shala

by Rose Wilder Lane

Then the byraktor looked up. “If the solid earth is round,” he said, “and if the water lies upon it in a curve, then this earth is moving very rapidly. For if the earth were standing still the water would fall off.”

My astonishment was profound. I felt myself a child beside that mind, and I thought that a man who could so wrestle with a new fact and evolve from it an even more amazing conclusion was no man for me to contend with in a little matter of hiring a mule and getting, somehow, to Scutari.

Presently large flocks of sheep and goats were driven through the room, past the fire, and into the darkness beyond the arched doorway. Rain-drenched shepherdesses, half clad in rags, followed them, and having, with much noise of tearing branches, given them their dried oak boughs to eat during the night, the shepherdesses returned and sat by the fire, addressing the byraktor in tones of accustomed equality.

There was a constant movement in the room—women coming and going, nursing their babies and tucking blankets more tightly over the cradles, undressing the smaller children, who played naked about the fire until they were taken, unprotesting, to their blankets in other rooms, and bringing casks of water, and making corn bread.

One could always amuse the women by asking them about ages; they guessed mine all the way from sixteen to forty, and there was one of them, a splendid, smiling woman, good natured and competent, whose age I guessed to be forty. She laughed aloud, showing all her white, perfect teeth, and said that she was seventy-two, and that the byraktor was her daughter’s son.

“You have been drinking the new water,” she said, wisely, though I had not mentioned the ache of my breathing. “You have the feeling of knives here,” and she touched her chest. “But do not worry; it is all right; it is only the water, and when the rain stops you will not feel them any more.” And she patted my shoulder comfortingly.

The question of the mule still hung unsettled. The byraktor seemed to be thinking deeply; he asked the Shala man many questions about Rrok Perolli. I caught the name and asked Rexh to listen, for I felt myself surrounded by web within web of intrigue, but Rexh said that the Shala man had nothing to tell, except that Perolli was in the mountains. I wondered whether to tell the byraktor that Shala had sworn a besa with the Tirana government, and then thought best not venture into mazes that I did not understand. But the byraktor was greatly interested on learning that I had been in Montenegro, and all that I knew about that part of Jugo-Slavia I told him; it was very little, but he seemed to see more than I did in the robbery of the Serbian Minister of Finance by Montenegrin bandits.

“The story was in the newspapers,” I told him. “Some day there will be newspapers in Albania, and schools in the mountains, and then you will learn about these things when they happen.”

“I have heard about the school in Thethis,” he answered. “Schools are very good, but what my people need is food and clothes. We are very poor. We have too little land. A school is of no use to a child who is hungry, for hunger has no brains with which to learn. I do not care for a school in Shoshi until all my people have enough bread. It is not right to give the well-fed child a school, too; he has already more than other children, and the school will only make him wiser and prouder than the poorer ones. Already the families with fewer children are stronger than those with many, and that is not right. I do not want a school; I want land for my people, for food comes from land, and after food comes the school. There is no hope for the mountain people while enemies hold our valleys. First the Romans, then the Turks, then the Austrians and Italians, and always, always the Serbs! And it may be that the Serbs will be too strong for us and that we shall all die fighting them.”

After that he went to the other side of the fire, beside his grandmother, and he sat for a long time talking to her. “Shkodra,” I heard, which is the Albanian name of Scutari, and “mooshk” and I knew he was talking of me and the mule I wanted to hire, but why it should be such a long and grave discussion I did not understand.