Peaks of Shala

by Rose Wilder Lane

“Shall it be said,” demanded the padre, “that the Americans have come from far across strange seas to bring money to build a school for the children of Thethis, and that the people of Thethis will not give even one small piece of land?”

“But,” said I to Frances, “why do you want to take land from the tribe and give it to the Church?”

“The Church is the only light they have up here; the only center of inspiration and learning,” said Frances. “See how the people come to the padre’s kitchen; see what he means to them. I’m not a Catholic, but can’t you see that if the school is to be a community center the Church must have it? They don’t know how to make it what we want it to be, themselves.”

“Very well,” said the chiefs. “You may have the land, Padre Marjan.”

My opangi had arrived. The edges of the leather had been turned upward and joined across the toes by an intricately woven network of rawhide thongs. Another network made a heel piece, and there were thongs to go around the ankles. With the opangi came a pair of short, knitted purple socks reaching just to the ankle, where they ended in points bound with black braid and stiff with gold and silver embroidery. These were really separate linings to the stiff and hard opangi, which had to be soaked a long time in water and put on wet, in order to get them on at all.

Very conscious of my feet, which seemed large and unwieldy flopping objects at the ends of my legs, I went across the flat, wet fields with Perolli to drink coffee in the house of Lulash.

The house of Lulash was different from any of the others we had seen. It stood on a castlelike rock; we went up to it by a stairway cut in the side of a cliff that rose almost sheer for so far that the waterfall pouring down it looked like a motionless streak of snow near the top. A natural bridge of rock crossed the little space between the cliff and the rock on which the house of Lulash was built; a furious little stream roared beneath us as we crossed the bridge, and then there was another stairway leading up to the house.

Lulash and a dozen men and women of his household stood outside his door to receive us. No rifles were fired. We passed through a double line of salutes and greetings and into a high-arched stone doorway. There was a little hall, floored and walled with stone, and a massive stone stair leading upward. This we climbed, and were in a large whitewashed room, lighted by a window and furnished with beautifully painted chests and a few hand-woven rugs. But this was not the only room; there were others, and, leading us through several arched stone doorways, Lulash brought us into the living room, where I exclaimed, “My house in San Francisco!”

It was exactly the same—long, wide, with the large gray stone fireplace in the center of one wall, folded blankets of goats’ wool piled like cushions around it; the alcove where my bookshelves used to be was there—an old carved chest stood in it; and there were my windows, where the nasturtiums used to grow and the orange curtains frame the blues of San Francisco Bay and the Berkeley hills and the sky. I went to those windows at once. But, no, the magic departed; there was only the flat wet lands of Thethis below me, the stone houses and stone fences, and beyond them the blue and purple and white and black and rose color of the snow-crested mountains with a hundred waterfalls. Beautiful, but like the stranger’s face that shatters the wild, irrational expectation of having found a friend in an impossible place. I turned my back upon those windows.

But it was, it was the living room that I remembered! The gray walls—but these were of plaster; the black floor; the huge gray stone fireplace. Even the rug on the wall, where my treasured shawl used to be. “It is my house!” I said, while Perolli looked as though I had suddenly gone mad, and all the others stood concealing their amazement. “Tell them that it is exactly like my house at home, far away on the other side of the world.” And I sat down on a pile of folded blankets before the fire, not yet sure that I was not dreaming and that the strange chests and stranger figures of turbaned men and barbarically dressed barefooted women would not vanish when I awoke.