Peaks of Shala

by Rose Wilder Lane

I sat there on the donkey, appalled. “But, Rexh, you know that I must get to Scutari to-night. Tell them I have said it. I am of the American tribe, and what Americans say they will do, they do. To-night I get to Scutari!”

“Yes, Mrs. Lane. But one must not tell all one thinks. We will say nothing. We will see.”

When the council was ended we went on leisurely through the pass, and down into valleys, and up again over other mountains. At two o’clock we left behind the last glimpse of the wall of snow to the east, the last sight of the interior mountains of northern Albania, the most beautiful mountain country in the world. At three o’clock we saw, glimmering on the far-western horizon, the silvery edge of Lake Scutari, and far to the right, deep between two ranges, the valley of the tribe of Pultit, and the white house of the bishop, the tiniest of specks to my eyes; but the Albanians saw it plainly, and distinguished it from any other.

At four o’clock we began the tremendous descent into the Kiri Valley and I was obliged to dismount. “The gendarme says he cannot hold the donkey by the tail here, Mrs. Lane. He is afraid the tail will break.”

And for two miles we swung downward bowlder by bowlder, exhausting travel to the arms and shoulders; but the mountain women came up that way with cradles on their backs. The mule made it by little leaps.

“Now the road is good,” said the Shala man, and, indeed, the two-foot path, no steeper anywhere than the steep trails on Tamalpais, seemed a boulevard to me. Only twenty miles more to Scutari! And I thought of getting off the clothes in which I had slept for three nights, and a shampoo shone before me like a bright star. Rexh had been borrowing trouble, I thought; there was still light on the western slopes and twenty miles was nothing to these people. And just as I was thinking this the byraktor halted.

“We will go this way, now,” he said, “to the village where we stay to-night.”

Why was it so necessary that I reach Scutari before I slept? I do not know. But the idea had become fixed, an obsession; I was irrational, for the moment a monomaniac. There was nothing I would not have sacrificed to satisfy that imperious desire.

“Tell the byraktor that I must get on to Scutari,” I said. “I am sick and must get quickly to a doctor. I cannot stay in any village to-night; I must be with my own people.”

“Yes, Mrs. Lane,” said Rexh, and, having talked for some time, he explained, “I have told him that you have had word from your father, who is the chief of your tribe, and that the word said you must go to Durazzo and take a boat to your own country.”