Peaks of Shala

by Rose Wilder Lane

The sun had not yet cleared the top of the stupendous sweep of striped rock that soared above the chasm; it could hardly do so before noon. The cañon was filled with silver light; the rain itself seemed silver; the rose and blue and white of that great cliff glowed softly through it, and the greens of the little fields below were soft as mist. I sat looking at this, and insensibly realizing why time was so little to these people, and how unimportant, really, all our little hastes are.

Then, coming leisurely across the green, like little toys on a carpet, appeared the byraktor, his gendarme, and the minute mule. In half an hour they reached us, calm and unperturbed. The donkey bore a wooden saddle quite as large as himself; they placed me on this and leisurely began to climb.

“To-night,” said I, firmly, “I shall be in Scutari.”

Rexh translated this to the byraktor, but the byraktor said nothing.

We proceeded slowly over the mountains. This was wilder going than I had yet seen, and again the simplicity of these people was borne in upon me. Coming to places that, to any European understanding, would be absolutely impassable, the byraktor’s action was simple and direct. He wrapped around his wrist the steel chain that held the mule by the neck, and easily, without haste, he went on. The mule came, too; it could not do otherwise, and when it would have fallen the steel chain and the gendarme’s firm grip on its tail kept it going until its feet got their grip again. I was, of course, on the mule’s back, and where it went I went, too.

The byraktor and the gendarme thought nothing of thus casually carrying between them a mule with me on its back, and very shortly—so adaptable is the human mind—I thought little of it myself. I recall sitting there, comfortable in that armchair of a saddle, taking my smoked glasses out of my pocket and polishing them; the sun was piercing through the clouds, and the glare on the snow above was blinding to my eyes. We were passing along a trail really too narrow for the mule; my knees grazed a cliff; a glance over my shoulder went straight down into depths where pine-tree tops looked like a lawn; at every second the mule’s tiny hoofs slipped and rocks showered downward, the chain tightened around the byraktor’s wrist and the muscles of his shoulders knotted as the mule’s weight bore on them. It crossed my mind, as I settled the smoked glasses on my nose, that two weeks earlier my heart would have stopped at very sight of that trail, and then, as it dipped downward and I heard the gendarme bracing his feet and felt the mule’s weight sag against the strength of that useful tail, I looked up and forgot everything else in the magnificence of shadow and sunshine on the snow-piled heights.

I do not mean that I am at all unusual in my attitude to danger. I’m not, and the prospect of sudden death scares me stiff, as it does everyone else. I mean that human beings are all chameleons. The stuff of humanity is always the same, it merely takes on different colors from its environment; in Albania there is not one of us who will not become Albanian. There are many morals to be drawn from this; you may apply the idea to education, or to your attitude toward immigrants or capitalists or criminals or even to your next-door neighbor; it would be useful also in considering international politics or religions that are not yours, or the actions of men in war, but I did not draw any morals, being immediately engaged in crossing the foot of the largest waterfall I had yet encountered.

It was so large that the men unsaddled the mule, stripped themselves, and wrapped their clothes in several bundles before attempting to cross it. Then they made a living chain of themselves; the byraktor, at its head, advanced to a water-worn bowlder in the center of the current, braced himself firmly, and became the pivot on which the chain moved. The end man carried over the clothes, bundle by bundle, wrapped in my poncho; then he carried me across—I was soaked in spray, but that did not matter. Then he put one arm around the donkey and supported it across, and then the saddle, and then he went back once more and took the protesting Rexh and brought him over. The water was above their waists; their white bodies slanted in the glassy current; three yards below them the water poured in a crystal mass over the edge of the pool, a second waterfall that struck in roaring foam fifty feet below.

The worst of the current was between me and the central rock where the byraktor was braced; several times the end man’s feet slipped there, notably when he crossed with the donkey, which I gave up for lost, but each time the chain of hands held firm.

Their bodies came blue from the icy water, but they put on only their cotton underdrawers, for they said we would next go through the snow, and they did not want to get their beautifully embroidered trousers wet; for the same reason they left their purple, gold-embroidered socks and rawhide opangi in the packs, and went on barefoot.