“Do you mean you actually believe that there are ora?” said Alex. “All these stories of people who have seen people who have seen them—I’d like to see one myself.”
“And if you see one, it doesn’t prove that it exists,” said I. “We see a great many things that don’t exist—and don’t see a great many that do.
“How can you prove that anything exists? Only by common belief. I once had a letter from a man in an insane asylum, who wrote to ask if Art Smith, an aviator I knew, saw in the upper air the shapes that he did. Art Smith never had; I didn’t even bother to ask him. But if Art Smith had seen them, and all other aviators had seen them, we would believe that they existed; they would exist, and the man would be sane, because he would believe as all the rest of us did. How do we know there are air currents five thousand feet from the earth? Because everyone who has been there has felt them. How do we know there are subtler currents that carry wireless messages? Because everyone who uses a wireless uses them. How do we know that there are ora in the Albanian mountains? Because all the Albanians who live here have heard them, and many have seen them. If we say there are no ora we will be crazy, by the standards of these men. Or simply foolishly ignorant. What do we think of an Albanian when he tells us that the power in a waterfall cannot be carried invisibly on a wire?”
“Do you believe there are ora?” said Alex.
“No,” I said, “I don’t. But human beings began life on this planet among spirits and demons; they knew they were there, they saw them and heard them and arranged their lives by them; therefore, by any measurement we know, spirits and demons existed. Here in the Albanian mountains they still exist. We live among electric currents and ether waves and X-rays and radium; we see them or use them; they exist. They exist for us and not for the Albanians; spirits and demons exist for the Albanians and not for us. And none of us can explain any of them; it is all mystery. Listen!”
We listened. All around us the trees seemed to be listening, too. From far away on a distant peak we heard the shrill, clear, infinitely fine sounds of a conversation, a conversation carried on from mountain to mountain, swinging like thin wires over the wide valley of the Lumi Shala. All around us the woods were perfectly silent, the cliffs were still; against that background of profound silence we heard a water drop falling from a rock, the delicate sound of our breathing and of the blood in our ears.
“Which proves nothing, of course. The sound wasn’t in the right direction; the echoes didn’t work,” said Alex.
“Yes,” I said. “But I wish they had. It would have given us such delightfully shivery sensations.”
So we came up out of the wood, and over the next mountain, and there on a slope, where the dead grass was splotched with patches of rotting snow and the soft earth trodden by the sharp hoofs of goats, we came back with a jolt to problems of unquestioned reality. For we met a woman, herding the goats, who believes in private property.
She was a tall, dark-eyed woman, handsome, but not beautiful. Her face, as we say, was full of character; and there was independence, even a shade of defiance, in her bearing as she stood watching us approach, her chin up, her eyes cool and steady, one hand grasping a peeled branch as a staff, her ragged skirt strained against her by the wind that blew down from the mountain pass. Her thick, dark hair hung forward over her shoulders in two braids, and from each dangled a charm of bright blue beads, defense against any demon she might meet in the mountains.