Mara and Dann by Doris Lessing Page A

five years old.

2
    On the low hill overlooking the village was a tall rock, precipitous on three sides and sloping steeply on the village side. There on the top of it sat Mara, looking down at a group of half a dozen boys playing a game of fighting with sticks. Dann was taller than any of them, though he was younger than some, at ten years old, and he was a quick, always watchful child, who dominated them all. Mara was almost grown, with her little bumps of breasts, and she was tall and thin and wiry, and could run faster than the boys, which she had learned to do from having so often to rescue Dann from danger. He seemed to have been born without a sense of self-preservation: would leap off a rock or a roof without looking to see where he was going to land, walk up to a big hissing dragon, jump into a pool without checking if there were stingers or a water dragon. But he was much better, and that was why Mara was up here, watching quite idly, not anxious and on guard as she had been every minute of her days and nights. Only recently had she understood that her long watch was over. She had been strolling from the hill to thevillage, listening to the singing beetles and her own thoughts, when she had seen Dann rushing towards her with a stick, then past her, and she had whirled to see him attacking a dragon that was following her.
    â€˜You should be more careful, Mara,’ he had chided, and not at all as if he were mimicking her constant, Be careful, do be careful, Dann.
    She had gone in to Daima and told her, and the two had wept and laughed in each other’s arms for the wonderful ludicrousness of it. And Daima had said, ‘Congratulations, Mara. You’ve done it. You’ve brought him through.’
    This was her favourite place. Nobody came up here: not Dann, who liked to be always rushing about; not Daima, who was too old and stiff; not the villagers, who said it was full of ghosts. Mara had been here at all times of the day, and at night too, and had never seen or heard ghosts. The danger was the dragons, who were so hungry they would eat anything. That is why she sat on a rock that on three sides they could not climb up, while in front she could slide down on her bottom and be off as soon as she heard the angry hissing. Or she could wait up here, safe, throwing stones down at the dragons if they showed signs of climbing up. This rock rose out of a tumbling and piling of small, rocky hills, full of clefts and crevices where bushes and trees grew, and caves and cliffs and pits that were old traps, and in some places heaps of old walls and roofs. When she had played the What Did You See? game with Daima, she liked best to do this hill, because she was always finding new things.
    â€˜And then?’
    â€˜The pits have black rings, with bits of chain on the rings.’
    â€˜And then?’
    â€˜The rings are made of some metal we don’t have.’
    â€˜And so?’
    â€˜All the same, Daima, I think those pits are quite recent – I mean hundreds of years, not thousands.’
    When Mara said hundreds, she meant a long time; and when thousands, it meant her mind had given up, confessed failure:
thousands
meant an unimaginable, endless past.
    Up on those hills – for behind the one near the village were piled others – forcing herself between bushes and saplings, squeezing through gaps in boulders, sliding down shaly descents in showers of stones, climbing trees to look over places she could not penetrate because of thick undergrowth, what Mara had slowly understood – and it had been slow, years –was that this was not just, as Daima had told her, a ruined city thousands of years old, or hundreds, or what the villagers saw it as – a place to get stones for building – but layers of habitations, peoples, time. She had been standing between walls still mostly intact, though roots had brought down part of one into a slope of blocks where little lizards sunned