The salt road

The bus stopped where the road disappeared beneath the sand. At first Leena thought they had reached a station, but there was no building outside, only a yellow post leaning away from the wind. The driver opened the door and stepped down. He had been driving for four hours without speaking, except to ask a passenger to close a window. Now he walked ahead of the bus with his hands in his pockets. Leena pressed her forehead to the glass. They were supposed to reach her aunt's town before dark, and the sun was already low.

The salt flats stretched out like an unfinished sheet of paper. Nothing offered the eye a place to rest. Far away, a line of hills floated in the milky glare, their bases rubbed out by heat. The wind combed pale threads of sand across the road, covering the tyre marks almost as quickly as they appeared. Even the yellow post seemed uncertain of its position. Leena watched its shadow tremble over the crusted ground. Beyond it, the shining emptiness swallowed every measure of distance: a dark stone might have been a boulder, a hundred steps away or a thousand.

The driver returned and asked everyone to stay seated. A lorry would come from the other direction, he said, and show where the firm surface ended. Leena looked at the road behind them. It remained visible for a few metres before dissolving into the brightness. She had travelled this route once as a child, asleep against her mother's coat. Her memory contained a packet of biscuits and the smell of oranges, but nothing useful about the land. She took out her phone. There was no signal, only her own face faintly reflected in the screen.

An older passenger began describing a journey when rain had covered the flats with shallow water. Nobody could tell where the sky stopped, he said. The woman beside him asked whether the driver had been able to continue. He considered this for so long that Leena turned to listen. Yes, eventually. He could not remember how. The driver stood outside beside the leaning post, looking west. Leena noticed that he had brought a flask with him. His stillness was irritating, then unexpectedly reassuring. He did not seem to be waiting for the land to become less strange.

At last a dark point appeared between the floating hills. It became a lorry, then a grille, then a windscreen flashing in the sun. The two drivers spoke for a minute. Afterwards the bus moved forward at walking pace, following the lorry's tracks. Leena watched the sand begin to soften them behind the wheels. She knew now that the route could exist without being obvious. When her phone found a signal, she sent her aunt a message saying that they were late but coming. She did not try to explain what the road looked like.

Read the second paragraph, from ‘The salt flats’ to ‘or a thousand’. How does the writer use language to present the landscape as disorientating? Support your analysis with evidence from this paragraph. You may consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.