Her aunt nodded. "No problem with that. you get rid of your jetlag. The country won't be going anywhere while you get caught up on your sleep."
And so they drove through the city. Nita was surprised to see how much it looked like suburban New York, except that — except. .Nita found that she kept saying 'except' about every thirty seconds. Things looked the same, and then she would see something completely weird that she didn't understand at all. The street signs, half in Irish and half in English, were a constant fascination. It was a very peculiar-looking language, with a lot of extra letters, and small letters in front of capital letters at the beginnings of words, something she had never seen before. And the pronunciations. . She tried pronouncing a few of the words, and her aunt howled with laughter and coached her. "No, no! If you try to pronounce Irish the way it looks, you'll go crazy. That one's pronounced 'bally aha-cleeah'."
Nita nodded and went on with a brief version of how things were at home as they drove through the city, out past shops and department stores and parts of town that looked exactly like New York to Nita's eyes, though much cleaner; and then started to pass through areas where small modern housing developments mixed with old homes that had beautiful clear or stained-glass fanlights above their front doors, and elaborate molded plaster ceilings that could be glimpsed here and there through open curtains.
Then these houses, too, gave way, starting to be replaced by housing developments again, older ones now. The dual carriageway, which had become just one lane on each side for a while, now reasserted itself. And then fields started to appear, and big vacant areas that to Nita's astonishment and delight had shaggy horses casually grazing on them, right by the side of the road. "Whose are they?" Nita said.
"They're tinkers' ponies," her aunt said. "The traveling people leave them where they can get some grass, if the grass where their caravans are is grazed down already. Look over there." She pointed off to one side.
Nita looked, expecting to see some kind of a barrel-shaped, brightly-coloured wagon. Instead there was just a caravan parked off to one side of the road, with no car hitched to it. There seemed to be clothes laid over the nearby hedge in the sun: laundry, Nita realized. As they passed, she got just a glimpse of a small fire burning near the caravan, and several small children sitting or crouching around it, feeding it sticks. Then they had swept by. "Are they gypsies?" Nita said.
Her aunt shrugged. "Some of them say they are. Others are just people who don't like to live in houses, in one place. they'd rather move around and be free. We have a fair number of them down by us."
Nita filed this with about twenty other things she was going to have to ask more about at her leisure. They passed more small housing developments — 'estates', her aunt called them — where houses sited by themselves seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. Rather, two houses were usually built squished together so that they shared one wall, and each one was a mirror image of the other.
And then even the housing estates started to give out. There was a last gasp of them as they passed through a town called Shankill, where the road had narrowed down to a single lane each way again. Shortly after that it curved off to the right, away from what looked like an even larger town. "That's Bray," Aunt Annie said. "We do some of our shopping there. But this is officially County Wicklow, now: you're out of Dublin when you get near the Dargle."
Nita hadn't noticed the river: it was hidden behind rows of little houses. "That's Little Bray," her aunt said. "And now, here's Kilcroney."
The road widened out abruptly into hill and forest, and two lanes on each side again. "Everything has names," Nita said.
"Every acre of this place has names," her aunt said. "Every town has "townlands" around it, and every one of them has a different name. Almost every field, and every valley and hill." She smiled. "I rather like it."
"I think I might too," Nita said. A wizard could best do spells when everything in them was completely named: and it was always easier to use existing names than to coin new ones — which you had to do if no-one had previously named a thing or place, or if it didn't know its own name already. And the name you coined had to be right, otherwise the wizardry would backfire. "There," her aunt said, maneuvering around a couple of curves in the road. "There's our mountain."
Nita peered past her aunt, out towards the right. There was Great Sugarloaf. It looked very different from how it had looked from the air — sharper, more imposing, more dangerous. Heather did its best to grow up its sides, but the bare granite of the mountain's peak defeated it about two- thirds of the way up. Scree and boulders lay clear to see all about the mountain's bald head. The road ran past a service station where geese and a goat grazed behind a fence, watching the traffic; then through a shallow ravine that ran between two thickly-forested hills. Sunlight would fall down the middle of it at noon, Nita guessed, but at the moment the whole deep vale was in shadow. "Glen of the Downs," Aunt Annie said. "We're almost home. That's a nice place to hike to, down there, where the picnic benches are."
After a couple more miles down the dual carriageway, Aunt Annie turned off down a little lane. To Nita's eyes this road looked barely wide enough for one car, let alone two, but to her shock several other cars passed them, and Aunt Annie never even slowed down, though she crunched so far over on the left side of the road that the hedges scraped the doors.
"See that town down there on the left? That's Greystones," said Aunt Annie. "We do the best part of our shopping there. But here. ." She turned off down another lane, this one literally just wide enough to let one car through. In half a minute they came out in the graveled 'parking lot' in front of a little house. Around it, on all sides, fenced fields and farm buildings stretched. It was forty acres, Nita knew: her aunt's life savings had gone into the farm, her great love. "Welcome to Ballyvolan," her aunt said. "Come on in and we" ll get you something to eat." They did more than that. They gave her a place to stay which was uniquely her own, and Nita was very pleased.
They put her up, not in the house, but in a caravan out the back: a trailer, as she would have called it. She was getting the feeling that everything here had different names that she was going to have to get used to. But she was used to that; everything had different names in wizardry, too. yet it struck her as quite strange being here in this odd place where people she knew to be speaking English as their first language were nonetheless speaking it in accents so odd she couldn't make out more than one word in three. The accents came in all variations of thick, thin, light, impenetrable, lilting, dark; and people would run all their words together and talk very fast. Or very softly, so that Nita shortly began feeling as if she was shouting every time she opened her mouth.They gave her the caravan, and left her alone. "You'll want to just fall over and sleep, I should think," Aunt Annie said. "Come in when you're ready and we'll feed you." So Nita had unpacked her bag, and sat down on the little bed built into the side of the caravan. It was a good size for her. Its windows afforded a clear view of the path from the house, so that if she was to do a wizardry, she would have a few seconds to shut it down before anyone got close enough to see what was going on. There were cupboards and drawers, a shelf above the head of the bed, a little cupboard to hang things in, a table with a comfortable bench-seat to work at, and lights set in the walls here and there, and an electric heater to keep everything warm if it got cool at night.