The children are climbing higher and higher. They can almost touch a wind-blown bird. Its cry is shrill against their ears. The wind plucks a steely, discordant note out of the air to send it zooming and twanging across the space between ranges. Their lips feel cold. They arrive at waterfalls which have hitherto intimated their presence in echoes buried in rock. Water froths, ice cold, over ferny, slippery stone. Tea pluckers climb the sides of the hills rising steeply from the road.

Now they arrive at a point at which they begin the ascent to the summit. They feel trepidation. The slopes are craggy. There is no pathway. The earth is loose and crumbly. The sharp twigs of the bushes prick and clutch at the neat white uniforms, tugging at the ordered pleats. The air is cold and rasping, the mist, white and thick, billowing above the point of the summit. They walk along footpaths holding each other by the hand, but they are young and agile; they manage without stumbling. They steadily pursue the path which will lead them to the seemingly safe ledge.

They reach the point where a rock juts out, forming a seat. They sit in little groups on this ledge that seems balanced precariously over nothing but space. Beneath it lies the vertigo of blue emptiness and whirling wind. This is the summit. The lesser ranges lie below them, eddying above the green coronets of windblown trees and grass. The swift currents of air blow teasingly about their bodies. Above them are stronger layers of wind which seem to trap them. Below them, in the waves of wild grass, a secret current of wind travels. It is cold. A small rain cloud condenses over them. The air tastes like fresh spring water, chill against their lips, but leaves their throats dry, achingly parched. The skin feels taut and sore from the grazes of the mana grass. They feel the flutter within the green shadow: the movement of wild things secretly scanning them from coverts.

The children’s songs and conversation do not remain within the space they create with their own bodies. The wind dissipates the sounds which are too frail to strike echoes against mountain walls. Their syllables are carried down precipices where they are lost in the murmur of streams, hidden rills and waterfalls. In the woods they become a different language, transmuted into cries that are primeval, hardly human. The voices eddy and waver in startled spurts which drown and the syllables of grass, murmuring, continue through time and space, endless, perpetual. The valley is left behind. It is safe here, now that they have reached the summit. They are all quite safe here for the moment on the rocky ledge.

I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from which cometh my help …