A Hundred Balloons at Dawn

Long before sunrise, the sky above the valley began to fill. One balloon, then ten, then well over a hundred, all rising together through air still coloured the deep blue of the hour before dawn. Polly flew out among them and simply stared. She is a small green parrot with a red-orange head, blue wing feathers, yellow feet and a pair of little round glasses on her beak, and she had seen a good deal of the world, but never this.

Beneath her stood towers of pale stone, slender and tapering, as though a race of giants had left their chimneys behind. Wind and rain had shaped the towers over millions of years. The doors and windows, though, were the work of human hands. For centuries families hollowed out entire houses inside rock soft enough to cut with simple tools. The place is called Göreme, at the heart of Cappadocia.

Polly set down on the wicker rim of a large basket riding high over the valley. A pilot stood at the burner controls with his passengers gathered around him, and he grinned at the sight of her. "You are early, little friend," he said. "Did you see our little balloon go up? Every morning we send a small one ahead of us, to read the wind."

The sun cleared the far hills. The balloons turned gold one after another, and the stone towers below took on the colour of honey held up to a window. Polly considered the pilot, and then the great burner roaring above his head, and made up her mind. Seven days. Seven days to understand how a thing with no engine and no wheel finds its way across a sky.