Peaks of Shala

by Rose Wilder Lane

I came back to full consciousness for an instant, stumbling up the stairs, and gathered that we were going to bed. By the torchlight my wrist watch said a quarter past two. Frances and Alex do not remember even that. Rexh awakened us at eight by shaking us, and we were rolled in blankets on the floor of the bishop’s room. Outside was the pouring sound of a steady rain.

As soon as we were fully roused the bishop’s servant brought us tiny cups of Turkish coffee. That was breakfast. Afterward we rose with groans, opened the heavy wooden shutters of the window space, and looked out. Through a rain that poured almost as solidly as a waterfall we saw a low-walled courtyard and a schoolhouse.

Beyond the schoolhouse there lay some fifty miles of the wildest beautiful mountain country—blue peaks, fifteen-hundred-foot slanting rocks, soft pink and rose and purple and green; brighter green masses of young foliage in the valleys, bronze-brown and bright-brown bare forests above them, and here and there snow drifts flung up among smoky-gray clouds. Thirty-two waterfalls I counted from that window, veining the mountains with wandering streaks of silver. But our gaze came back and fastened upon the school.

“I didn’t know they had one in the mountains!” exclaimed Alex, thinking of her Mountain School Fund. “I thought our school at Thethis would be the first one!”

“Padre Marjan certainly said so when he walked down to ask us for it,” said Frances.

“Perhaps this isn’t a school,” said I. Though it looked like one, the little square stone house through whose open doorway we saw rows of benches, and boys sitting on them, barefooted, wearing the long, tight, white trousers braided with black that hang low on the hip bones, the gorgeous sashes, and the short black jackets thick with fringe, that were white centuries ago, but were changed to mourning when Scanderbeg died for Albanian liberty.

It was a school. The pale, meek priest in black, who is the bishop’s ecclesiastical household, showed it to us with pride; he is the teacher. The Turks and the Austrians had blocked all attempts to bring schools into the mountains, he said, and the people, not knowing that schools existed, were naturally not eager to have them. But now the Land of the Eagle was said to be free, after so many centuries of Turkish rule in the valleys, and refugee children who had fled before the Serbs were coming back to their tribes and telling about the American school in Scutari, so that all the people wanted their children to learn to read and write. The chiefs themselves, hearing that there was a Tirana government, and not being able to write or read letters about it, or to learn from newspapers (oh, simple-minded, mediæval people!) the truth about European politics, saw what education meant.

The people had taken rocks from the mountains and made the schoolhouse. They had cut precious trees and made the benches and the desks. They had made a slate of a slab of the native rock, set in a rough wooden frame; they wrote upon it with softer rocks. From Italy, across the Adriatic to Durazzo, up to Tirana, to Scutari, and into the mountains—a two weeks’ journey by donkey and river ferry—the bishop had got three copy books and a bottle of ink. Pens had been made from twigs. The priest had one book printed in Albanian.

Since the boys must herd the flocks in the mountains, they could not spend the day in school. There is so little land that the goats and sheep are fed from trees. The shepherd climbs a tree, carefully cuts the tender branches, and throws them down to the nibbling beasts that eat the young buds and strip off the juicy bark. There is no tree in all the mountains that the shepherds have not climbed; not a tree that is not a branchless, gnarled trunk.

So the school was open from six to nine in the mornings, and the boys came to it, some from ten, twelve, fifteen miles away, and after school they walked back again and took out the flocks. The school had been open six weeks; already the copy books were half filled with beautiful, neat writing, and the boys not only read easily from their one book, but had no difficulty with sentences that Perolli wrote on the slate.