She was in her secret refuge, a broad, flat shelf halfway up a cliff. She sat up and looked anxiously across the Valley. It was an Antonov, the predatory, slow-moving reconnaissance plane whose incessant growl was the usual herald of faster, noisier jet aircraft on a bombing run. Swelling over the river's chorus came the baritone of a propeller-driven aircraft. Listening, she heard something else, and she realized that the new sound had made her aware of the old. When eventually she left the Valley she would find the silence unnerving, she thought, like city dwellers on holiday in the countryside who cannot sleep because it is too quiet. For almost a year that sound had been constantly in Jane's ears: sometimes loud, when she went to bathe or when she took the winding cliffside paths between villages and sometimes soft, as now, when she was high on the hillside and the Five Lions River was just a glint and a murmur in the distance. THE RIVER came down from the ice line, cold and clear and always in a rush, and it filled the Valley with its noise as it boiled through the ravines and flashed past the wheatfields in a headlong dash for the faraway lowlands.
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