The Pigeon Houses

The following dawn the wind took them into a narrow valley, and the walls on either side turned out to be covered in small carved openings, arranged in row after row, like windows in a building that had never been given any glass.

"Pigeon houses," said the pilot. "For hundreds of years the farmers cut little rooms into these cliffs for the pigeons. The birds roosted safely inside, out of the weather and out of reach, and their droppings were gathered up and spread on the vineyards and the orchards. Half of what grows in this valley grew because of them."

Polly crossed from the basket to the valley wall and stepped inside one of the rooms. Grey pigeons shifted and murmured around her in the dim carved hollow, unbothered by the visitor. Framed in the small doorway, the entire valley lay out in the morning light, glowing as though lit from underneath.

She flew back to the basket and the pilot let the balloon climb. "Do you feel that?" he said. "Up here the wind has quite different ideas." Polly shut her eyes and paid attention. The air really had changed direction around her, turning slowly at this new height, going somewhere the wind a hundred feet below had no intention of going. She was beginning to understand what the little balloon had been sent up to find out.