The valley is left far behind. It is safe down there. The high convolvulus hedge shuts in the school from the busy road. They have seen, from the netball pitch, from the verandah of the school hall, from the classroom fronting the yard, Hantane rearing itself from the low roofs of Katukelle. The road, leading up to the dazzling white cube of the tea factory, is a silvery thread winding through the tea bushes. Hantane is a barrier, protecting yet threatening. The morning air is crisp, flecked with light; slender, wind-blown trees appear insubstantial in their pale transparency. Waterfalls turn into white froth. The grass is wet with dewfall. The valley is slow to wake. The doors and windows of the little Katukelle houses are still shuttered. The road climbing out of the valley takes its silence with it. It goes past the marketplace, rising above the hospital, the railway lines, the empty station and the shunting engines. The silence of lonely places overtakes them, trees growing closer together. The fern banks rise from the road, heavy with moisture. They listen to each other’s words more intently. The whole landscape seems to be listening, carrying echoes to the lonely mountain. The wind intervenes with its syllables through the pale, gold-green light flittering among feathery-branched trees. The whole landscape is compounded of light. They hear water sounding from hidden streams and waterfalls which they are yet to encounter. They peer over the precipices which fall abruptly into the valley. They can place a finger on the spot where the school lies hidden among the red roofs peering out of the green.

The small group of figures struggle up the hillside. They have passed through rows of tea bushes and now the wild hillside slopes confront them. The mana grass clings to their limbs, their skirts, slashing them as they climb higher and higher to where the peak rears great outcrops of rocks impaling soft, cirrus clouds. They look down on the valley already distanced from them in a world of miniature perspectives. The Mahaweli, coiling through fields and densely wooded banks, is caught and held within a silver light. The mana with sharp knife-like edges, cuts the flesh as the children move, sunk upto their breasts, through this sea of swords. It sways and rasps against the skin. They feel its moisture at the roots, the earth damp at their feet.

In the dry season, fires are lit in the evenings to clear patches of mana. Their boisterous flares spread over the hills till darkness creeps over the purple ranges; red, orange, gold, they creep over the road, insidious flames coiling within themselves, ropes of fire fed by the animus of their own heat. They extend their peripheries of brightness until they burn out, leaving raw, black scars on the red soil.