Text 1: Don’t look down, by Rosa Delahunt

An original contemporary blog.

I should explain that I am afraid of heights. Not a little nervous: properly, embarrassingly afraid. I have had to sit down on the top floor of a shopping centre. So when I booked a trek in the mountains of Nepal, I somehow failed to read the line in the itinerary that said ‘Day 4: crossing of the gorge by suspension bridge (150 m)’.

The bridge, when we reached it, was strung between two cliffs like a washing line, a narrow walkway of steel mesh with wire sides about waist high. Hundreds of prayer flags were tied along the cables, red, blue, yellow, green and white, faded by the sun and snapping in the wind. Far below, a river the colour of milky tea was tearing itself to pieces on the rocks. I could hear it from the edge. I could feel it in my teeth.

Our guide, Mingma, watched me grip the first post. ‘Look at the flags,’ he said. ‘Not at the river. The flags are for you.’

So I walked, one step at a time, with my eyes fixed on a single blue flag ahead of me. The bridge bounced gently with every step, which nobody had mentioned either. Halfway across, it began to bounce much more, and I looked up to see a train of mules coming the other way, bells clanking, loaded with gas cylinders. Mingma calmly told me to stand against the uphill side. The mules squeezed past my knees, one after another, close enough for me to smell their dusty coats, while their driver, a boy of about fourteen, strolled behind them texting on his phone.

I made it to the far side and sat down very suddenly on a rock. The boy gave me a cheerful thumbs up. On my bridge of terror, he walks to school.

Text 2: The twig bridge, by Captain Henry Moberly

An original piece of travel writing written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this extract from an account published in 1862, an army officer describes a journey through the mountains of northern India.

Of all the dangers of travelling in these hills, I had been most warned against the bridges, and I confess that the first sight of one did nothing to calm my apprehensions. It consisted of three ropes, made not of hemp but of birch twigs twisted together, slung across a chasm some two hundred feet wide. One rope served for the feet; the other two, at the height of the shoulders, for the hands; and the whole was joined by loose loops of twig at intervals of a yard or so.

The river, which ran a great depth below, was a raging torrent of grey water fresh from the snows, and its noise was such that I could not hear my own voice. The ropes were old. Several of the twigs had rotted and hung down in ragged ends like the threads of a worn carpet.

Our porters crossed first, each with a load upon his back, as easily as if they had been walking along a lane at home. Then it was my turn. At every step the bridge swung sideways, so that at one moment I was looking down into the torrent and at the next up into the sky, and about halfway the lower rope sagged so much that I seemed to be walking downhill into the river itself. I fixed my eyes upon the back of the porter ahead, who had returned to help me, and moved my hands along the ropes one after the other like a man climbing a ladder lying on its side.

My dog, who had followed me faithfully for two hundred miles, would not set a paw upon it, and in the end was carried over in a basket, howling the whole way. I cannot pretend that I felt very differently myself.

Both of these texts are about crossing high bridges over mountain rivers.

Compare:

• the writers’ experiences of crossing the bridges
• how the writers make these experiences clear to readers

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