Half an hour later, Franck was going down the second hill. When he got to the bottom of the gully, he sat on a tree stump in the shade and drank the rest of his water in one gulp, not even pausing for breath. But the dog wanted to carry on, and immediately set off again, going even deeper into the valley. The humidity and constant shade had transformed the soil and made the vegetation lush and plentiful; there were thick creepers and sweet chestnut trees with knobbly trunks, trees that must have been very old, frozen in time with their sap slowly flowing. It gave them a ghostly aura. When he came across a pile of old treated pine sleepers, he realised it was the remains of a railway that had probably been closed for decades. It was damp inside the cathedral of plants, the foliage rising in flying buttresses more than thirty metres high. Franck felt as if he were at a distant latitude. It was probably ten degrees cooler here than in the south-facing areas; the valley must face directly north. He thought about the tropical forest in Guyana where they had shot fifteen years ago, and about the other film in Serbia, a German co-production about two prisoners escaping from a gulag. The valley had a similar feel, recalling the stifling stickiness of the forest canopy in Guyana where all sorts of animals would be moving above you and you had to watch out for snakes … The trees here weren’t as tall or as wide, and of course there weren’t any capuchin monkeys or vampire bats, but he could make out a small animal right at the top of the branches, a squirrel that wasn’t moving, surprised at being disturbed and trying to decide whether to run away or not.