Masina sinks into the soft thresh of the orchards ahead, like a photo-realistic figure dissolving into an impressionist landscape.<br/><br/>The gentle calamity of greens and browns and nebulous yellows folds about her.  She is locked within its world.  The river and its conversation are insulated, muted.  Masina now inhabits a different kind of place - indistinct and organic in its sprawl.<br/><br/>There is the intrusive stink of the rich soil crushed under her feet; the savage bite of the heat; and the eerie, edgeless silence.<br/><br/>She surveys the land around - the low hills in the distant, distant south; the higher ones across the river.  All the horizon has as an enemy is its stark, unsympathetic desolation.  Its blank white line allies with the absolute silence.<br/><br/>Then, as she is about half the way to the outpost, the silence is punctured.<br/><br/>Hard in its definition as a bullet, a buzzing pierces the perfect quiet.  It is thick and deep; more like the sound of a stone than some instinct.  Then another comes.  Then another.<br/><br/>The sound appears first, and then the black and yellow bodies.  Like little bent blades of bronze blackened with stripes of poison, bees cluster in a busy cloud around Masina.  She finds herself stalking through a small horde of them as she makes her way up to the silent outpost.