Peaks of Shala

by Rose Wilder Lane

“We do not see the ora,” said a tall man with many heavy silver chains around his neck. “Do you see the ora in your country?”

“I do not think they live in the West,” said I. “I think that they are very old, like the Albanians, and, like you, do not leave their mountains. This is the first time I have ever been where they live, and I should like to meet one.” But I doubt if I should have said that if I had been outside those solid stone walls.

“Perhaps you will hear them talking when you go through the Wood of the Ora,” said a woman whose three-year-old daughter was going to sleep in her lap.

“Very few people have seen them,” said the coffee maker, licking a cigarette and placing his left hand on his heart as he offered it to me. I fitted it into my cigarette holder; he lifted a burning twig from the fire and lighted it. “Now my father was accompanied by an ora all his life, but he was the only one who saw it, and he told no one about it until just before he died.”

“Did he ever talk with her?”

“No, but she always walked before him on every safe trail. He was sixteen when he first saw her; he was watching the goats in the mountains. She appeared before him, standing on the trail. He said that he knew at once that she was not of our kind, because she was so beautiful. She was about twelve years old, wearing clothing not like ours, but of a white and shining material—my father said that it was like mist and it was like silk and it was like fire, but he could not say what it was like. Her hair was golden. She stood on the trail and with her hand she made a sign to him to stop, and he stopped, and they looked at each other for a long time. Then he spoke to her, but she did not answer. She was not there. And my father went on, and found on the trail he would have taken a great rock that had just fallen, and he knew that the ora had saved his life.

“He came home, and said nothing. The next morning when he went out with the goats the ora was waiting outside the door, and she went before him all that day. Always after that, whenever he left the house, she went before him on the trails.

“My father was a strong man and very wise; he married and had many children; he fought the Turks and the Austrians and the Serbs and the Italians. He had a good life. But he never went anywhere unless the ora went before him. In the morning when he left the house, if she was not there he returned and sat by the fire that day. Often on the trails he was with many people, but none but him ever saw the ora. She remained always the same, always the size of a twelve-year-old child, always very beautiful, shining white and with golden hair.

“When she turned aside on the trail, my father turned also, and the people did as he did, though he did not say why. My father was known as a very wise man. Many times he saved the lives of many people by following the ora.”

Several of the older men in the intently listening circle shook their heads, as though they remembered this, and when I asked them with my eyes they said, “Po! Po!” which means, “Yes.”