Music Welcome to snoozecast. The podcast is designed to help you fall asleep. Find us at snoozecast.com and if you enjoy our show, share us with a friend. This episode is brought to you by Blue Hills. Tonight we'll read from the opening to the 1923 Travel Memoir, Peaks of Shala by Rose Wilder Lane. It is about a walking tour of Mount Ines Albania. The daughter of writer Laura Ingles Wilder Lane was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist. Though she is perhaps best known today for her work editing and shaping her mother's little house series. Lane let a bold and independent life that took her far from the American frontier. In the early 1920s, she spent time as a foreign correspondent in post-war Europe, traveling through parts of the continent still recovering from World War I. Albania, then newly independent and largely unknown to the Western world, captured her imagination with its dramatic landscapes and fiercely traditional mountain communities. Peaks of Shala recounts her journey on foot through the northern Albanian Highlands, a region governed more by ancient tribal codes than by any central government. Her writing blends observation and introspection, offering glimpses of rugged hospitality, isolated customs, and the physical demands of mountain travel. The book remains a rare first-hand account of a Western woman's experience in one of the most remote corners of Europe during the period of great transition.

Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the sum ofness of your bed. Now, take a few deep breaths. When the sun rose over the blue snow-crested mountains that are the southernmost slopes of the generic Alps, it made on the scutory 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 security officers, and of a small trudging boy in a red Turkish Fez, all moving single-file across an interminable plane shaggy with blossoming cactus. The wooden saddles were three-sided boxes made of peeled branches, padded beneath with sheepskin, they fitted over the pony's backs. On top of them, our blankets were packed. Saddle bags hung from the four corners, enthroned in the midst we rode, comfortable as in an easy chair, sitting sideways, our knees crossed, smoking cigarettes and rocking gently with the pony's 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 Scutery as a hurried walker brushes by the stranger on the street. Scuterie had been merely a place to pass on the way to Constantinople, and now in this brightening dawn upon the scuterie plain I was riding to unknown adventure among the hidden tribes of that land. 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 and scotery, taking control, making adjustment, creating a new pattern. A thin, athletic, sun-browned girl, soulful of energy that her very fingertips seemed to crackle electrically. That was Frances's hearty. And Albaniaque, 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 is 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 dazed journey from here. The people are living as they lived 20 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 strangers 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. Higher 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, but nobody ever harms a woman. Nobody even shoots a man in our presence. She means no Albanian ever does," said Alex. "'Blessum,' said Francis, and added an Albanian, glory to their feet. I had the vaguest anotion 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 someone, testing my intelligence or psychoanalyzing, had said to me, Albanians, I should have replied, bandits. But France's hardy is irresistible in more ways than one. Therefore, on this spring morning, while mists rose slowly from the blue waters 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 Rex, in his red, Muhammad on Fez, had gravely engaged Francis Hardy in argument as to the desirability of his accompanying us. 12 years old. A staunch, Mohammedan, self-adapted father of seven smaller refugee children, for whom he maintained 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 in many saddlebags. He would keep an eye upon the mall. The care of his children he had arranged for. As to the Mahabadhan 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, Rex, 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 Bajama coat. Happy office man off for a lazification, 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. in our party was Alex. Suniny hair, softly fluffed wide blue eyes, and that complexion of pink and white like roses painted on a china plate. It drives a dagger of envy into every feminine heart and makes the fortunes of cosmetic makers. A war, a purple tam, a leaf-brown sweater with a purple tie, and the trimest of riding trousers. She looked like a magazine cover. She was, in reality, the most hard-headed, soberly sensible of girls to to her fingertips and anti-putterite. 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 right crosswork.

At about noon we left the plane, 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 pod for foothold above on the stair-like rocky trail. And 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 whale broke forth the head. The two security officers 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 merely 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. Francis Hardy, lying almost perpendicular along her pony's back, her chin on what would have been the saddled pommel had there been one. Look downward at me, similarly extended. They're making a song to the road of the mountaineers, she said. That's Mount Chafa up there. We're going over it today, 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 5,000 feet above us. The sun swung to its highest and sank again while we climbed. It was low in the sky. It seemed on level with us. When we made the last hundred yards up into the chaffa, 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, 40 miles behind and below us, like scutory lay flat, like a pool of mercury on a grey brown floor. At each side of our little gay colored cavalcade, a grey cliff rose perhaps 200 feet, two 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 faraway 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 rows and purple and Chinese green of decomposing shell, And from their tops a thousand streams poured downward, threading them with silver white. A low continuous murmur rose to us, the sound of waterfalls, softened by a measurable distance. Suddenly, clear and very far and thin, a call came out of the spaces. It was like a fight, 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.

Little Rex, his round face intent beneath the red fuzz, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide and blank, was an image of concentrated listening. to security officers to alert, like dogs straining Adelish, sending something. Our four guides and their long white trousers, black jackets, colored turbans and sashes were like men frozen in attitudes of interrupted talk. What was it? I cried to Peroli 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. Telephoneing, said Perole, it's the way they said news through the mountains. A man on one of the peak's calls, and another one somewhere hears him and answers.

You've seen him hold their ears and throw their voices, that's it, and three shots to show that the talks ended. What was he saying? Something about Shala, Shala and Sochi 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 hooves, shod with solid, thin plates of steel, the packs went over his head. My man sent me on a shoulder high rock and dashed to the abe the rescue. 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 Rex 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 pitting Rex encouraged me. And in perhaps half an hour, an hour. My trembling legs brought me around a boulder to see the two security officers stopped in the trail. 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 are men lay at ease, beautiful,

graceful, their rifle swung from their shoulders and laid ready to their hands.

Why are shawl and sochi and blood, Francis asked, biting idly at the stem of a daisy. Do we go through both tribes? I want it to know. Through Shal'a, Sochi's farther down the river, we'll go around it. Our armen, chala, or soshi, are God, glanced at them. Chala, by the pattern of the braiding on their trousers, so we don't have any trouble. Hello, that's a soshi 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 albanyan words that sound like tune yet yeta, and mean, may you live long. Our shalaman, with perfect courtesy, went through the formalities of greeting on the trail, and this is the form translated to

me by Rex. 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 Shoshimans sat down, our men offered him cigarettes, and up the trail came a woman of Shoshii. She wore a tight, bell-shaped skirt of horizontal black and white stripes, made of cloth, heavier, and thicker than felt. The 12-inch wide marriage belt of heavy leather There, studded with pounds of nails, and a jacket covered with three inch thick fringe. Two heavy braids of black hair hung forward on her chest. A colored hankerchief was bound around her head and her face, smoothly weather-browned, and a large, 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, the 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. Cheromy, our happier security officer, 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, cherimee, 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 Sochi. She is a woman of my people, he said, leading her gallantly to us. Are you a woman?

Said France is hardy, correctly, in Albanian.

I am born of Shala, married in Choshi, 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, woman nails, and delicate wrists, our wrist acratic would have been a sensation. We admired the baby, excavating it from five folds of blankets to do so. 18, 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 Jeremy, but she was married in Choshi, and in Choshi 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?" Francis asked her. She looked at us candidly beneath her long lashes.

How can I say?" she answered. I cannot read or write, I gather wood. The sure she man now rose, slinging his rifle back on his shoulder and said farewell. Go on a smooth trail, set our men, and he went on up the trail without turning his head, the woman following him. Well, we must be getting on, set our guide, we have 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 dawn that was the priest's house where we were to spend the night. Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n y