The tram clattered to a stop at another station, and now she could hear the sound properly, distinctly; it was a low booming collection of tones like very distant and continuous thunder, all the individual claps rolled together and coming and going on the wind.

She got up out of the uncomfortably tilted seat and went to the front of the tram’s middle carriage, heading upstairs to get a better view. There were more of the locals here; they parted as though to let her through to the front, but she bowed, gestured, hung back. She could see well enough.

The mountains rose out of the hazy plain ahead like a dark storm of rock, the higher massifs draped with cloud, the highest peaks capped in orange-white ice and snow.

The sound swelled and fell away with a sort of tantalising grace, its strength implicitly influenced not just by the light breezes circling round the tram but by mightier winds blowing tens of kilometres away towards the far horizon and kilometres further into the sky. The sound, she thought, was like something you might have heard from an enormous choir of basses singing a slow, sonorous hymn in a language you would never understand.

The tram station in the foothills possessed a sort of modest, ordered busyness to it, full of the dark folds moving about it with their odd, side-to-side, flip-flopping walk. The station connected with a whole fan of cogged funicular lines, winding up into the mountains like something being unravelled. The sound here was a little louder, still coming and going on the wind.

The line she took rose curving away along the side of one mountain, traversed a tall viaduct to the flank of another, went squeaking and squealing through a long tunnel, then ended up at another small station where three cable-car lines terminated. A signpost told her which to take. The sound was a little louder, here; loud enough so that sometimes on the swirling winds you thought you heard a single note or collection of notes and then heard the same again, echoed from some distant cliff.

The funicular car had had less room than the tram, and the cable-car gondola had even less room than that; the locals almost had to touch her. Part of her briefing download had been a rough understanding of their language. Mostly, amongst themselves, they expressed surprise that she didn’t seem to smell.

The cable car rose over a dark valley of shales and scree, then over a tilted plain of tumbled rocks interspersed with low, scrubby bushes. Finally the gondola parked in a bare, echoing shed, and disgorged. They were high now, and it was cold. The sound was very loud, and rich; she felt she was starting to feel it in her lungs.