For six months now Thesme had lived alone in a hut that she had built with her own hands, in the dense tropical jungle half a dozen miles or so east of Narabal, in a place where the sea breezes did not reach and the heavy humid air clung to everything like a furry shroud. She had never lived by herself before, and at first she wondered how good she was going to be at it; but she had never built a hut before either, and she had done well enough at that, cutting down slender sijaneel saplings, trimming away the golden bark, pushing their slippery sharpened ends into the soft moist ground, lashing them together with vines, finally tying on five enormous blue vramma leaves to make a roof. It was no masterpiece of architecture, but it kept out the rain, and she had no need to worry about cold. Within a month her sijaneel timbers, trimmed though they were, had all taken root and were sprouting leathery new leaves along their upper ends, just below the roof; and the vines that held them were still alive too, sending down fleshy red tendrils that searched for and found the rich fertile soil. So now the house was a living thing, daily becoming more snug and secure as the vines tightened and the sijaneels put on girth, and Thesme loved it. In Narabal nothing stayed dead for long; the air was too warm, the sunlight too bright, the rainfall too copious, and everything quickly transformed itself into something else with the riotous buoyant ease of the tropics.