Peaks of Shala

by Rose Wilder Lane

I began to see the exquisite, infinite complications of that system of law and order, the Law of Lec, which guides these people in all their actions, and I thought, “This goes back beyond the Middle Ages,” remembering the old Bible stories of the time when men lived similarly, under the laws of Moses.

But already the sense of perspective in time was growing dim; we were living in the past, not thinking of it, and the scores of future centuries in which men would spread over Europe, invent private property, build great cities and empires, discover America, and invent machines, became as faint to us as the old memory of a dream. By the next day we had forgotten it all; two weeks later I was to come back to a room with a rug on the floor, a window in the wall, a bed, and a stove, and feel such a sense of strangeness among them that, tired as I was, I could not sleep between the unfamiliar sheets. Now that I am back in my own century, writing of those days in the Albanian mountains, I understand why men so easily slip into the ancient savagery of war and all war’s atrocities. All that we call civilization is like a tune heard yesterday, a little thing floating on the surface of our minds, which sometimes we can keep step to, and then in a moment it is gone so that we cannot remember it.

Upon the trail that day we were barbarians, simple and primitive; we were isolated, small bits of warmth and energy in a hostile universe of stone and rain. And when, out of the gray mist of the trail ahead, another simple barbarian appeared, we greeted him with the unquestioning acceptance of understanding. He was a man of Pultit, bare in the rain save for turban, loin cloth, and opangi. He was bound for the house of the bishop to bring back the boy Sokol, whose father was dead.

Standing around him in the rain, we listened to the news. Three days earlier Plum had sheltered a woman who was leaving a cruel husband, a man of Shoshi. She had slept beneath Plum’s roof one night on her way to her father’s tribe. That morning, as Plum returned after taking his son to school, he had met the husband on the trail, and without a word the husband had shot him down. But as he died Plum had managed to reach his revolver and had killed the husband, saying, “This, from Sokol.” And as Sokol was now the head of his family, he must return from school to the house where the women were mourning his father.

Cheremi thrice made the sign of the cross. “Plum was a good man,” he said.

“And loved his son,” Perolli added. For Plum with his last effort had avenged himself, had closed the account. He left no blood feud to darken the life of the little Eagle. The boy would be known as the son of a hero, and to-day would take his place as a chief and a member of all village councils.

The man of Pultit, having told us this news and wished us long life and smooth trails for our feet, went on down the mountain side, and gripping our staffs tighter in water-soaked hands, we resumed our climbing.

We had begun that day with ponchos over our sweaters; our gendarmes had begun it by taking off their jackets and trousers, so that the sluicing rain would not wet them. These garments were in the packs, protected by ponchos, and, barelegged, barearmed, with only the colored sashes about their waists and cloths wound around their heads, the men went up and down the interminable trails as easily as panthers. Now and then they stopped and, kneeling on the trail, reached down a hand to one of us, pulling us up over unusually large and steep bowlders, and from time to time, as we struggled and panted after them, they offered to carry us. With the blood pounding in our heads, blinding and deafening us, our lungs torn with gasping in our aching sides, we refused, and struggled on. Our gloves had become sodden in a moment; we stripped them off, and soon the ponchos which impeded our climbing followed them; and then, as we were wet to the skin, anyway, we discarded sweaters and began to long for the complete freedom of nakedness. At each step our feet made a sucking sound in the water that filled our shoes, but the exertion of climbing and sliding kept our bodies warm, and by degrees, as suppleness returned to our stiff muscles, we began to see the magic country around us. We stood on rocks from which we saw a hundred miles of snow-tipped peaks, blue gorges, bronze-brown forests. White and smoke-colored clouds swirled beneath us, and through rifts in them we saw tiny green terraced fields, the blue hair line of water in stone-walled irrigation ditches, and houses tiny as those on a relief map, made of stone and almost indistinguishable from the native rocks, as large as they, among which they were set.

“I shall not be happy until I stay in one of them,” I said, and at that moment we heard a hail from Cheremi, who stood on the trail thirty feet above our heads. He gestured toward three cone-shaped peaks of solid rock that, rising steeply from the gorge three thousand feet below, rose to some hundreds of feet above the level of our eyes. Little Rexh, silent and watchful as ever at Frances’s side, translated his words.

“There is an old city,” he said, “the city of Pog. He says it was built by his people, men of the Land of the Eagle, a hundred years before the Romans came.”