Peaks of Shala
_Rose Wilder Lane_
[Illustration: THE ROLLER THAT IS SMOOTHING THE NEW BOULEVARD IN
TIRANA]
Peaks of Shala
By
Rose Wilder Lane
_Profusely Illustrated by
Photographs taken on a
Special Expedition to
Albania_
[Illustration]
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
MCMXXIII
PEAKS OF SHALA
Copyright, 1923
By Rose Wilder Lane
Printed in the U.S.A.
D-X
To My Mother
Laura Ingalls Wilder
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
Introduction
I. Shadows on Scutari plain--The voice in the Chafa Bishkasit--The
lands of the hidden tribes--A woman of Shala 1
II. Trails of the mountaineers--The man of Ipek kills his donkey--The
house of the Bishop of Pultit--Marriage by the Law
of Lec--The blood feud between Shala and Shoshi 15
III. The story of Pigeon and Little Eagle--The prehistoric city of
Pog, and the tale of the golden image--The gendarmes sing
of politics 33
IV. Welcome to the house of Marke Gjonni--We hear the voice
of an oread--A guardian spirit of the trails 54
V. The unearthly marriage of the man of Ipek--First night in a
native Albanian house 65
VI. The song of the flight of Marke Gjloshi--The hunted man of
Shoshi--The way through the Wood of the Ora--A woman
who believes in private property 87
VII. Can a man own a house?--We sing for our hosts of Pultit--Dawn
and a meeting on the trail--The village of Thethis
welcomes guests--Life or death for Perolli 111
VIII. In the house of Padre Marjan--Lulash gives a word of honor
and discusses marriage--The stolen daughter of Shala 131
IX. The chiefs of Thethis probate a will--We visit the house of
Lulash--A journey to upper Thethis 156
X. The water ora of Mali Sharit--The coming of the tribes to
Europe before the seas were born, and how the first Greeks
came in boats--Why Alexander the Great was born in
Emadhija, and of his journey to Macedonia--The sad
house of Koi Marku 171
XI. Mass in the church of Thethis--A mountain chief seeks a
wife--Down the valley of the Lumi Shala, while the drangojt
fight the dragon--How Rexh came to Scutari 203
XII. The song of the last great war with the dragon--An unexpected
bandit--How Ahmet, chief of the Mati, went by
night to Valona--The raising of Scanderbeg’s flag--An
Albanian love song 220
XIII. The backward trail--The man of Shala has a sense of humor--The
byraktor of Shoshi hears that the earth is round 243
XIV. A night by the byraktor’s fire--The byraktor calls a
council--Rexh to the rescue--The byraktor’s gendarme tears a
poncho--Moonlight on the Scutari plain 259
Postscript. In which is related what may be found behind
the curtain of silence which hides Albania, also how the
men of Dibra came with their rifles to Tirana, and how
Ahmet, the Hawk, chief of the Mati and present Prime
Minister of Albania, saved the Balkan equilibrium 285
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE ROLLER THAT IS SMOOTHING THE NEW BOULEVARD
IN TIRANA _Frontispiece_
THE CHAFA BISHKASIT _Facing p._ 8
AN OLD SHEPHERD ” 38
RROK PEROLLI ” 58
AN ALBANIAN HODJI OF THE MATI ” 76
A GROUP OF MOUNTAIN FOLK ” 106
THE PLATEAU OF THETHIS ” 120
THE SHOPPING CENTER IN TIRANA ” 150
ONCE A DAY SHE COMES WALKING OVER FIFTEEN MILES
OF MOUNTAIN TRAILS ” 176
THE BANDIT WHOM WE MET IN THE CAVE ABOVE THE LUMI
SHALA AND WHO SANG US THE SONG OF DURGAT PASHA ” 224
THE SHALA VALLEYS ” 234
THE SHALA GUIDE ” 248
THE KIRI BRIDGE ” 278
A TOSHK ” 296
THE PAINTED MOSQUE IN TIRANA AND THE LOW WALL ON
WHICH, ALL DAY LONG, MEN SIT AND DISCUSS POLITICS ” 302
THE FIGHTING MEN FROM THE MOUNTAINS WHO CAME
INTO TIRANA TO DEFEND THE GOVERNMENT WHILE
ELEZ JUSUF WAS IN TIRANA ” 326
INTRODUCTION
I would not have this book considered too seriously. It is not an
attempt to untangle one thread in the Balkan snarl; it is not a
study of primitive peoples; it is not a contribution to the world’s
knowledge, and I hope no one will read it to improve the mind. It
should be read as the adventures in it were lived, with a gayly
inquiring mind, a taste for strange peoples and unknown trails, and a
delight in the unexpected.
Here I give you only what I saw, felt, and most casually learned
while adventuring among the tribes in the interior northern Albanian
mountains. It is not even all of Albania, that little country too
small to be found on every map. It is simply a fragment of this large,
various, and romantic world, sent back by a traveler to those who stay
at home.
R. W. L.
Annette Marquis accompanied the author on her trip through Albania and
it is to her skill that the photographs are due.
Peaks of Shala
CHAPTER I
SHADOWS ON SCUTARI PLAIN--THE VOICE IN THE CHAFA BISHKASIT--THE LANDS
OF THE HIDDEN TRIBES--A WOMAN OF SHALA.
When the sun rose over the blue, snow-crested mountains that are the
southernmost slopes of the Dinaric Alps, it made, on the Scutari plain,
a pattern of our shadows; shadows of four small wooden-saddled ponies,
each led by a mountaineer with a rifle on his back, of two tall, ragged
gendarmes, and of a small trudging boy in a red Turkish fez--all moving
single file across an interminable plain shaggy with blossoming cactus.
The wooden saddles were three-sided boxes made of peeled branches;
padded beneath with sheepskins, they fitted over the ponies’ backs.
On top of them our blankets were packed; saddlebags hung from the
four corners; enthroned in the midst we rode, comfortable as in an
easy-chair, sitting sidewise, our knees crossed, smoking cigarettes
and rocking gently with the ponies’ pace. And all this was to me an
enchantment suddenly appearing above the surface of well-arranged days,
as new South Sea islands rise before a mariner in hitherto familiar
waters.
Three days earlier the mountains of Albania, indeed, Albania itself,
had been unknown to me, and disregarded. I had meant to go by Scutari
as a hurried walker brushes by the stranger on the street. Scutari
had been merely a place to pass on the way from Podgoritza to
Constantinople. And now, in this brightening dawn upon the Scutari
plain, I was riding to unknown adventure among the hidden tribes of
Dukaghini.
This was the doing of Frances Hardy. That impetuous and efficient girl
had seized upon me and my small affairs as six months earlier she had
seized upon the refugee situation in Scutari, taking control, making
adjustment, creating a new pattern. A thin, athletic, sun-browned
girl, so full of energy that her very finger tips seemed to crackle
electrically--that was Frances Hardy. An Albaniac, I called her at our
first meeting, perceiving that one might disagree with her, argue with
her, even poke fun at her, and still be her friend. She had seized on
the word with delight--the perfect word, she said--and had returned at
once to her attack.
“Constantinople’s nothing. Everyone goes to Constantinople. But if
you don’t see Albania, you’re wasting the chance of a lifetime. Up in
those mountains--right up there in those mountains, a day’s journey
from here--the people are living as they lived twenty centuries ago,
before the Greek or the Roman or the Slav was ever known. There are
prehistoric cities up there, old legends, songs, customs that no one
knows anything about. No stranger’s ever even seen them. Great Scott,
woman! And you sit there and talk about Constantinople!”
“But if nobody goes there, how can we do so?” I said.
“How does anyone ever do anything? Simply do it. Hire horses, get on
them, and go.”
“Carrying our own guns?”
“Oh, we’ll be safe enough! We may run into a blood feud or two, and get
our guides shot up, but nobody ever harms a woman. Nobody even shoots a
man in her presence.”
“She means no Albanian ever does,” said Alex.
“Bless ’em!” said Frances, and added, in Albanian, “Glory to their
feet!”
I had the vaguest notion of Albania. I knew it was the smallest and
newest member of the League of Nations; I knew it was in the Balkan
wars, and I knew that recently the Albanians had driven from their
shores the Italian army of occupation. If some one, testing my
intelligence or psycho-analyzing, had said to me, “Albanians,” I should
have replied, “Bandits.”
But Frances Hardy is irresistible in more ways than one. Therefore,
on this spring morning, while mists rose slowly from the blue waters
of Lake Scutari and the shadows of the mountains retreated from its
shores, we were riding northward toward the lands of the mountain
tribes.
There were four of us, not counting our retainers. No, five, for at the
last moment small, chubby-cheeked Rexh,[1] in his red Mohammedan fez,
had gravely engaged Frances Hardy in argument as to the desirability
of his accompanying us. Twelve years old, a stanch Mohammedan,
self-adopted father of seven smaller refugee children for whom he
maintained a family life in a hut he had found, he had made all
arrangements for the trip without consulting us. He said that he had
never seen the mountains and that he thought it necessary to learn
about them as part of the education of a good Albanian. He pointed out
that he spoke excellent English, which he had learned in some three
months of association with Miss Hardy, and that he would be valuable
as an interpreter. It was true that we had one interpreter, but there
were six men and many saddlebags; he would keep an eye upon them all.
The care of his children he had arranged for; as to the Mohammedan
school in which he was a pupil, it taught him nothing; he would take
a vacation from it. He would be of use to us upon the trip; the trip
would be of value to him. Having said this, he gravely awaited Miss
Hardy’s decision. When she said, “All right, Rexh,” he permitted
himself to smile and looked over the packs, suggesting some changes
that would make us more comfortable. He now walked behind Miss Hardy’s
pony, a pistol and a knife in the belt of his American pajama coat.
Our interpreter was also a friend; Rrok Perolli, secretary to the
Albanian Minister of the Interior. He was on a vacation, he said,
but as the northern interior tribes were antagonistic to the new
government, it might be as well not to mention who he was. We were
going very near to the Serbian lines; he had recently escaped from
sentence of death in a Serbian prison; there was a price on his head in
Serbia. It would be easy for one of the tribes to hand him across the
line. They could not kill him in our presence, of course, but, once out
of our sight, they could in ten minutes find Serbians who would do it
for them.
He was a care-free young man, black haired, dark eyed, dressed in the
smartest of English tweed suits, with a businesslike revolver and
one of the handiest of daggers swinging in leather holsters at the
belt. His father was a merchant in Ipek, rich territory now held by
the Serbs; the son had been educated in London, Berlin, and Paris,
and spoke their languages as well as his own Albanian, also Serbian,
Italian, Turkish, and Greek. He enlivened the morning with songs in
all these languages, illustrating a running discussion of comparative
music. Swaying gently on his pony’s back, he sniffed the sweet air,
cool from the waters of Lake Scutari; he gazed cheerfully at the blue
hills beyond the lake, held by the Serbian armies; he was altogether
the happy office man off for a lazy vacation. Just the same, I wondered
a bit, taking everything into consideration. It cannot be said that I
was entirely unprepared for the interesting developments before us.
Fourth in our party was Alex. Sunshiny hair, softly fluffed; wide blue
eyes; and that complexion of pink and white, like roses painted on a
china plate, that drives a dagger of envy into every feminine heart
and makes the fortunes of cosmetic makers. She wore a purple tam,
a leaf-brown sweater with a purple tie, and the trimmest of riding
trousers; she looked like a magazine cover. She was in reality the
most hard-headed, soberly sensible of girls; to her finger tips an
anti-Potterite. She and Frances were going into the mountains to decide
where to establish three schools. They had themselves collected in
America the money for them, and this was their vacation from Red Cross
work.
At about noon we left the plain, and almost at once our ponies began
to stand up like pet dogs begging for cake, their hind legs supporting
their weight while front hoofs pawed for foothold above on the
stairlike, rocky trail. An Albanian held each of us tightly by elbow
or knee, ready to save us from squashy death if the pony lost its
balance, and as the little animals strained, clambered, gathered their
feet together for desperate leaps, a sudden long high wail broke forth
ahead. The two gendarmes were singing.
Walking easily up a trail that I could have overcome only on hands
and knees, carrying their rifles and twenty pounds of canned goods on
their backs, they were merrily singing. Thumbs pressed tightly against
their ears, to prevent the air pressure of their lungs from bursting
ear drums, they sent far over the crags the long, shrill, high notes,
like nothing human I had ever heard. Frances Hardy, lying almost
perpendicular along her pony’s back, her chin on what would have been
the saddle pommel had there been one, looked downward at me, similarly
extended.
“They’re making a song to the Chafa Bishkasit, the Road of the
Mountaineers,” she said. “That’s the Chafa up there. We’re going over
it to-day, and then we’ll be in the mountains. Aren’t you happy?”
I could find no word emphatic enough for reply as I gazed up at the
tiny notch in a wave of snow-crest that curled against the sky five
thousand feet above us.
The sun swung to its highest and sank again while we climbed. It was
low in the sky--it seemed on a level with us--when we made the last
interminable hundred yards up into the Chafa Bishkasit. We were in the
sky; there is no other way to say it, and no way in which to describe
that sensation of infinite airiness. Forty miles behind and below us
Lake Scutari lay flat, like a pool of mercury on a gray-brown floor. At
each side of our little gay-colored cavalcade a gray cliff rose perhaps
two hundred feet, too sheer to hold the snow that thickly crusted its
top. These cliffs were the posts of a gateway through which we looked
into the country of the hidden tribes.
I had never seen or dreamed such mountains. Like thin, sharp rocks
stood on edge, they covered hundreds of miles with every variation of
light and shadow, and we looked across their tops to a far-away wave of
snow that broke high against the sky. The depths between the mountains
were hazy blue; out of the blueness sharp cliffs and huge flat slopes
of rock thrust upward, streaked with the rose and purple and Chinese
green of decomposing shale, and from their tops a thousand streams
poured downward, threading them with silver white. A low, continuous
murmur rose to us--the sound of innumerable waterfalls, softened by
immeasurable distances.
Suddenly, clear and very far and thin, a call came out of the spaces.
It was like a fife, and yet not like it. Instantly our guides were
still, attentive. A moment of silence, and farther and thinner,
hardly to be heard above the beating of blood in our ears, there was
an answer. Then the first note began again and went on and on; there
seemed to be a pattern to it, not a tune--words? I looked at the others.
Rrok Perolli was motionless, a cigarette between his lips, his hand
arrested in the act of striking a match. Little Rexh, his round face
intent beneath the red fez, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide and
blank, was an image of concentrated listening. The two gendarmes stood
alert, like dogs straining at a leash, scenting something. Our four
guides, in their long white trousers, black jackets, colored turbans
and sashes, were like men frozen in attitudes of interrupted talk.
[Illustration: THE CHAFA BISHKASIT
The “Road of the Mountaineer”--the gateway to the northern lands.]
The voice ceased. The other one came back like an echo, so faint I
thought I imagined it. Then--Bang! Bang! Bang! The very mountains
lifted up their voices and roared. It was like the cataclysm at the
end of the world; mountain striking against mountain, the air smashed
like glass and falling, clattering. Rrok Perolli lighted his cigarette.
The others shifted their rifles, tightened their sashes, said “Hite!”
to the horses, and we started on. All around us the echoes were still
contending, striking and breaking against one another like ore in a
mill.
“What was it?” I cried to Perolli, whose horse was slipping down the
trail ahead, kept from going headlong by its owner, who held it by the
tail, bracing his bare feet on every foothold.
“Telephoning,” said Perolli. “It’s the way they send news through the
mountains. A man on one of the peaks calls, and another one somewhere
hears him and answers. You’ve seen ’em hold their ears and throw their
voices. That’s it. And three shots to show that the talk’s ended.”
“What was he saying?”
“Something about Shala. Shala and Shoshi are in blood, evidently.”
“Do we go through those tribes?”
My horse slipped just then and a man snatched me from the saddle. The
horse, held by the tail, floundered on the trail, striking sparks from
his hoofs, shod with solid thin plates of steel; the packs went over
his head. My man set me on a shoulder-high rock and dashed to aid the
rescue. It looked for a moment as though they would all go down upon
Perolli below, but the horse got his footing and stood trembling, his
head covered with streaming blankets.
I said then that I would walk, but it was not walking. It was jumping,
scrambling, dropping. Those mountains were evidently created to be
looked at, not to be walked upon. Bathed in perspiration, I stopped
from time to time to eat a bit of snow, and twelve-year-old Rexh looked
at me with compassion. He had walked nearly twenty miles that day and
was still gay and fresh; the men were still singing.
“In a minute, Mrs. Lane, we will come to a resting place,” the pitying
Rexh encouraged me, and in perhaps half an hour my trembling legs
brought me around a bowlder to see the two gendarmes stopped in the
trail, crossing themselves. A wooden cross, blackened by storms and
years, leaned forward above them, supported by a pile of stones on a
small grassy knoll. Alex and Frances dropped from their ponies to lie
panting beside me on the grass, while the guides, smiling at our whim,
stopped also. Each of them crossed himself before sitting down, for the
mountain tribes have been Catholic almost ever since St. Paul preached
in the Balkans, and missionary priests have put the cross at each
resting place on the trails, to bring thoughts of God to weary men.
Below our feet the cliffs fell away, down into blue haze; above us
were forested slopes, and above them sheer, great cliffs throwing
shadows across a dozen valleys. Our small grassy knoll was white with
daisies and with fallen petals from a blossoming apple tree that
arched above the cross. On it our men lay at ease, beautiful, graceful
animals, their rifles swung from their shoulders and laid ready to
their hands.
“Why are Shala and Shoshi in blood?” Frances asked, casually, biting
idly at the stem of a daisy. Perolli did not know; he had gathered only
the fact that there was a feud.
“Do we go through both tribes?” I wanted to know.
“Through Shala. Shoshi’s farther down the river. We’ll go around it.”
“Are our men Shala or Shoshi?”
Perolli glanced at them. “Shala, by the pattern of the braiding on
their trousers. So we won’t have any troub----Hello! That’s a Shoshi
man coming up the trail, now.”
It was Alex who acted quickest. She was sitting on a rock beside me,
her arms clasped about her knees; she rose instantly and, flinging out
a hand in the gesture of greeting, cried in her most feminine voice
those Albanian words that sound like, “Tune yet yetta!” and mean, “May
you live long!”
The Shoshi man’s hand was on his rifle, but his step had not faltered.
He replied, coming on steadily, and the appropriateness of the greeting
struck me, for if it had not been uttered by a woman he would at that
moment have been dead. Our Shala men, with perfect courtesy, went
through the formalities of greeting on the trail, and this is the form,
translated to me by Rexh:
“Long life to you!”
“And to you, long life!”
“How could you?” meaning, “How could you get here?”
“Slowly, slowly, little by little.”
No one who has ever seen those trails can doubt it.
The Shoshi man sat down, our men offered him cigarettes, and up the
trail came a woman of Shoshi. She wore a tight, bell-shaped skirt of
horizontal black and white stripes, made of cloth heavier and thicker
than felt, the twelve-inch-wide marriage belt of heavy leather studded
with pounds of nails, and a jacket covered with three-inch-thick
fringe. Two heavy braids of black hair hung forward on her breasts, a
colored handkerchief was bound around her head, and her face, smoothly
weather browned, large eyed, delicately shaped, was the most beautiful
that I had ever seen. On her back, held by woven woolen straps that
crossed between her breasts, was a cradle tightly covered by a thick
blanket; in one hand she held a bunch of raw wool, and from the other
dangled a whirling spindle. Her feet were bare, and as she came up that
trail which had exhausted me she sang softly to herself, dexterously
spinning thread from the bunch of wool.
Cheremi, our gayer gendarme, rose quickly and went to meet her. He
took her by the hand and laid his cheek caressingly against hers. He
was like a child, Cheremi, with his happy face, deep wrinkled with
laughter, the mischievous twinkle in his eyes, his bursts of wit and
song. But he looked all of his forty years as he gazed tenderly at the
woman of Shoshi.
“She is a woman of my people,” he said, leading her gallantly to us.
“Are you a woman?” said Frances Hardy, correctly, in Albanian.
“I am born of Shala, married in Shoshi,” she answered. Her voice was
soft, and her hands and feet would have been madness to a sculptor. In
any Paris restaurant those slender fingers, almond nails, and delicate
wrists, aristocratic, well bred, would have been a sensation.
We admired the baby, excavating it from five folds of blankets to do
so. How they live beneath the smothering I do not know; a Western
baby would die in three hours. We asked the mother how old she was.
Eighteen, she said, and she had been married three years.
“And have you been home since?”
“Ah no,” she said, with a wistful smile.
“Born in Shala,” said Cheremi. “But she was married in Shoshi, and in
Shoshi she will die.”
“I wonder what she thinks of us,” I said, for, though she must have
felt great curiosity about these strange beings, dropped apparently
from the sky upon her well-known trails, she did not reveal it by the
flicker of an eyelash, and she asked no questions. It was we who were
so rude.
“How old do you think we are?” Frances asked her. She looked at us
candidly beneath her long lashes.
“How can I say?” she answered. “I cannot read or write; I am stupid; I
gather wood.”
The Shoshi man now rose, slinging his rifle back on his shoulder, and
said farewell. “Go on a smooth trail,” said our men, his blood enemies,
who must have killed him at sight if no woman had been there, and he
went on up the trail without turning his head, the woman following him.
“Well, we must be getting on,” said Perolli. “We’ve a long way to go,
and we ought to get in before dark.” And he showed us, far away across
the darkening valley, the white dot that was the priest’s house where
we were to spend the night.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Rexh--pronounced Redge.