By then, Safi was glad to get away from the muddy crowded camp and the gang of local children. And yet, almost immediately, she missed them. Mangup-Kalye was so quiet. The silence lay in wait like a relentlessly watchful beast, and in the pause between hammer strokes, the moments when conversation died, it pounced. In her head Safi knew exactly what it looked like. Its great spined back was the ridges of rock high on Mangup-Kalye, and its eye was a window of emptiness in the furthest outcrop, staring down the valley at them. Safi was scared of Mangup-Kalye. She knew it was stupid. She wasn’t a baby; she was twelve, old enough to know that there was nothing frightening about a heap of old rocks and trees. But knowing it made no difference. During the day she kept as close as she could to her family, and at night she lay frozen under her quilt in the half-built house, listening to the silence and longing to make a movement, any movement, to break it, but too terrified even to twitch a finger.
