Peaks of Shala

by Rose Wilder Lane

These words created a perceptible sensation. Hazel eyes and blue eyes turned upon me in amazement. A middle-aged man who had come from the room of confession to stack his rifle with others beside the fireplace and to roll a cigarette stopped with the tobacco half poured and stared at me. “It is not written where the Shqiptars came from?” said he, in a tone of stupefaction. “But surely all the world knows where the Shqiptars came from.”

I assured him that it was written only that the Greeks, when they came, found some savage tribes whose origin was unknown. But it was thought that these tribes were old peoples of Europe who died out when the peoples of to-day came—I stopped, to give them no clew to the migrations of Aryans from India—who died out, I said, when the great civilizations of to-day came into the world. And the first of these civilizations was the Greek.

The newcomer finished his cigarette thoughtfully, put it in its holder, lighted it from a coal, and summed up his conclusions in an Albanian proverb. “It is very true,” said he, “that only the spoon knows what is in the dish.”

“And when we speak of the Greeks,” said another chief, “let us remember the saying of our fathers: The tree said to the wood cutter, ‘Why do you kill me, for I have done nothing to you.’ And the wood cutter replied, ‘You gave me the handle for the ax.’”

The old man’s irritation had died. He looked upon us now with pity, as ones who had offended because of ignorance. “If the American zonyas wish to know what we have learned from our fathers, who learned it from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, I will speak,” he said. “All these things are very old, and none of them are written in books, therefore they are true. I am an old man, and I have seen that when men go down to the cities to learn what is in the books they come back scorning the wisdom of their fathers and remembering nothing of it, and they speak foolishly, words which do not agree with one another. But the things that a man knows because he has seen them, the things he considers while he walks on the trails and while he sits by the fires, these things are not many, but they are sound. Then when a man is lonely he puts words to these things and the words become a song, and the song stays as it was said, in the memories of those who hear it. Like the song of the man of Mali Sharit. These things in our songs are therefore true, for I know many songs about many things, but no song shows that another song is a liar.

“Now it has always been said in our songs that the Shqiptars came long ago from the east, from a crowded country beyond the eastern mountains. There was no water in the Black Sea then. The people came across mountain and valley, in many tribes. It was a land of great animals, good to eat when they were killed. These peoples—we were not then called Shqiptars, but each tribe had its own name, the name of its chief—these peoples who were our fathers’ fathers took all the land from the river in the north, that flows to-day through Belgrade, to the plains in the south that are now a sea.

“I do not know how long they lived here before the valleys became seas. There was a rain that was like the rain that is falling now, and there was a water that came up from the earth to meet it. And then there were the seas, on the east and the west and the south, and many tribes, many large tribes, were drowned in them. My grandfather told me this, and he said that his grandfather said there had been a song with the names of all these lost tribes, a song of mourning for the tribes that were eaten by the seas. But the grandfather of my grandfather had not heard that song. New songs come all the time and old songs are forgotten, and we have had much to mourn since the forgotten tribes ceased to be living men.

“But this you must understand. It was after the seas came that the Greeks came. They came in boats across the seas, and they were strange peoples that we had never seen before, speaking a strange tongue. Their boats came to the shores in the south, and our fathers had never seen boats. That was the coming of the Greeks. They came, and came again, and stayed, and built cities. The fathers of the Shqiptars stayed on the mountains and watched them, and went down and gave them gifts. We did not kill them, as we might have done when they were few and weak and there were no Five Powers.

“The Greeks were always a soft people—except one tribe of them, whose name I do not remember. There was one tribe of good fighting men. But most of the Greeks were plainsmen. From the first, they loved to sit and think, to talk, and to write, and to read to one another what they had written. That was their pleasure.

“For this reason, all mountain men who liked to take their pleasure in that way went down to their cities and learned from the Greeks how to write, and having learned, they stayed there and wrote, and read what they had written, and in this way their days passed and no songs were sung about them. But the Greeks did not come to the mountains. When at last the mountain men went down to Greece behind their king, then there was no more Greece. And for these many years of years there would be no Greece if the Five Powers would take their hands from the Balkans.”