A journal of the desert road, by Edmund Lanyon
An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this journal, kept in 1881, an English artist records part of a journey by camel across the desert of southern Algeria to reach an oasis town.
November 21st. We rode out through the south gate of the town at four this morning, in a darkness so complete that I could not see the camel I was told to mount, and knew it only by its voice, which is the voice of a drain complaining. Ours is a mixed company: six camels, a string of mules carrying dates and barley, a party of nine pilgrims on foot who are bound for a saint’s tomb beyond the oasis and who sing whenever the ground allows, Hadj Mabrouk our guide, myself, and my paint box, which has already been sat upon twice. Hadj Mabrouk is perhaps sixty. He rides a white she-camel and has the stillness of a man who has never once been in a hurry.
By ten the sun had become an enemy. There is no other word. It strikes upwards from the sand as well as down from the sky, so that the face is cooked from two sides at once, like a slice of bread before the fire. The water in the skins tastes of goat and tar, and we are allowed it four times a day, at the guide’s word and never at our own. I had imagined that the desert would be a flat yellow sheet. It is nothing of the kind. It is ridged and folded like a sea that has been ordered to stand still, and every ridge hides another.
November 22nd. A bad day. Towards noon the air thickened and turned the colour of brick dust, and within a quarter of an hour the wind was driving sand into our eyes, our mouths, our very pockets. We made the camels kneel and the mules stand in a ring and lay behind them with our heads wrapped in cloths. I do not know how long we lay there. When the wind dropped, the tracks of the morning had vanished entirely, and I confess that a cold fear took hold of me, for every direction looked exactly like every other. Hadj Mabrouk stood up, shook the sand from his sleeves, studied the slope of the dunes and a line of low black stones that I had not even noticed, and pointed. The pilgrims began to sing. Nobody asked him whether he was sure.
That night I lay awake outside the tent. I have seen the stars over the Downs and over the Bay of Naples, but I have never seen them like this: not scattered but poured, so thick and close that it seemed I might stir them with my hand. The silence is not an absence of sound. It is a thing in itself, enormous and almost kind. I understood then why the old man is never in a hurry.
November 24th. At four in the afternoon a dark line appeared on the horizon, which I took for another ridge of stone. It was palms. We came down among them an hour later: running water in little channels, the smell of wet earth, dates hanging in orange clusters beneath the fronds, children shouting at us from the walls. I drank until I was ashamed of myself. I have been in the desert four days and I have filled only two pages of my sketchbook. I mean to go back into it next week.
“The writer presents the desert as a place of hardship and danger.”
To what extent do you agree with this statement?
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1 Section A (30%) - Reading, covering 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.