Peaks of Shala

by Rose Wilder Lane

And the next morning, in the rain that still continued to flood down from apparently inexhaustible skies, we all stood on the edge of the cliff, half a mile down the trail, and said farewell to the village of Thethis. Everyone had come so far on the trail with us; Padre Marjan thanked us in the name of the village; Lulash spoke, his hand on his heart; Frances and Alex and I addressed them with as many happy phrases of thanks as we could devise. All the guns were fired and fired again; all along the cliff tops the boys were giving a last display of the astounding feats that human muscles can do.

“Go on a smooth trail!” they all called after us as we went over the rustic bridge that crosses the green stream dotted with white bowlders and black bowlders and rose-colored bowlders and the one huge bowlder of jade, and, looking back from far down the trail, we saw the people of Thethis still standing there, a black and white and gorgeously colored mass against the gray rocks.

Our way led down the Lumi Shala. Going northeastward from Scutari, we had reached that river’s headwaters at Thethis, and now, crossing it, we came southeastward, high on the shoulders of the mountains that wall its narrow valley. Higher still, seen at intervals through breaks in the lower mountains, a wall of pure white snow rose into the sky; the wall of the second great mountain range, which we were to cross to reach still more hidden fastnesses and wilder tribes.

We went across the lands of the Shala tribe, but there were no villages on the way and no scattered houses; it was fifteen miles to our next stopping place, the village of Shala. “An hour and a half,” said Cheremi, gayly; he had learned to speak short English sentences in the few days he had been with us, but he could not learn that fifteen miles of exhausting mountain climbing meant more than ninety pleasant minutes to anybody.

Padre Marjan has lent us his little horse, a beautiful bay, hardly larger than a Shetland, but perfectly built, with a saddle of red leather held on by finely woven woolen straps. He went across slides of slippery shale, climbed giant bowlders, walked on a log that crossed a two-hundred-foot gorge, and made his way straight up the courses of waterfalls as easily and cheerfully as a pet dog. But after our days of walking our muscles did not like even the very slight idleness of such riding, and our own feet carried us most of the way.

An indescribably wild, beautiful way it was, with hundred-mile vistas opening before us, changing, disappearing again, as we rounded cliffs or passed the ends of smaller mountain ranges that ran down to the opposite banks of the Lumi Shala. There were villages over there; we saw them built against the mountains like clumps of gray swallows’ nest—the villages of Shoshi, with whom Shala was in blood. At the foot of the waterfall streams that dashed down their cliffs we saw now and then a little mill, flooded with water, its roof of slate hardly showing above the flood, where in drier season Shoshi ground its grain or put the loosely woven white woolen cloth to be soaked in the running water and pounded by paddle wheels until it shrank into the feltlike fabric that makes their garments.

Here and there a red-brown or gray-white moving patch at the foot of a clump of mangled trees announced that a little shepherd was there, clinging to a tall stump and cutting twigs to throw down to the goats and sheep; we were too far away to see him. And there were other clumps of trees green with uncut leaves; always near these we saw, bronze brown among the gray rocks, structures taller than a man and shaped like a beehive. These were trees that the axes spare until the leaves are fully grown and filled with sap. Then the branches are cut and piled in a circle, the cut ends outward and the leaves to the center, layer upon layer, until the beehive shape is completed, when they are weighted down with rocks. The leaves dry, remaining green and nutritious, and slowly through the winter the curious silos are demolished armful by armful and carried into the houses to be fed to the sheep and goats.

The sky was still a leaden gray, with darker clouds moving sluggishly among the mountains, and the air still seemed more than half full of falling water. The soaked rawhide opangi were like soft rags on my feet; at every step my woolen stockings emptied and filled with water like sponges, and all our fingers were shrunk in ridges from the long wetting. But we were gay, we sang along the way, the weak little songs that so amused the steel-lunged mountaineers, and when a low growl of thunder and a flicker of fire among the clouds announced a stronger onslaught of the rain, Perolli waved his hand toward the mountain tops and joyously shouted something—we thought, to the effect that we were not flowers.

“Dranit?” said I. “Great Scott! do you need announce that we aren’t flowers? Shout that we are not drowned puppies, if you want to startle onlookers.”

“Not dranit—drangojt,” Perolli corrected. “I said to the dragon he may growl as he likes; we’re not drangojt.”