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Welcome to snoozecast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep.

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This episode is dedicated to our listener, Barbara Jean, and 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 mountainous Albania.

The daughter of writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lane was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist.

Let's get cozy. Close your eyes.

Relax your body into the softness 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 fuzz,

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 sheepskin,

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 sideways, 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.

...