Source A: Where the bus stopped for water

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

From the bus window, the plateau looked empty enough to contain any thought I chose to place inside it. Pale ground stretched towards a low line of hills. The road crossed it without a bend for so long that the bus seemed to be travelling through the idea of distance rather than arriving anywhere. I wrote magnificent emptiness in my notebook and felt that I had begun to understand the place.

At the next town, we stopped for water. The driver said the delay would be longer than expected because a delivery vehicle was blocking the usual access. I stepped down into heat which made the notebook’s cool paper feel absurd. Across the road stood a repair shed, a small clinic and a shop with three chairs beneath an awning. There were wires, pipes, patched walls and a child carrying a bag of rolls. Emptiness was proving well supplied with details.

A man at the shop asked where I was going. When I named the place, he described the road beyond the hills and told me which side of the bus would be cooler later. I asked whether he liked the silence. A machine started in the repair shed, and he waited for it to finish before answering that silence depended on who had work to do. I looked down at the phrase in my notebook and closed it.

We sat while the delivery vehicle was moved. People arrived with bottles, exchanged messages and asked about relatives further along the route. The shopkeeper kept a pencil beside a list of orders. A woman from the clinic checked whether a parcel had come on our bus. None of this contradicted the vastness I had seen through the window. It contradicted the confidence with which I had made vastness stand for absence.

When we left, the driver pointed towards a low structure beyond the town. I had taken it for a disused wall. It was part of the system which stored and supplied water. I had admired the apparent freedom of the landscape without noticing the arrangements which allowed anyone to remain in it. The town’s ordinary morning depended on work spread across spaces which had looked to me like nothing.

The hills grew closer. I opened the notebook again and crossed out emptiness, leaving magnificent without a noun. For a while, that incomplete phrase seemed more accurate than the finished one. I could still describe the light and the long road. I would need to ask more questions before deciding what the spaces between them meant.

Source B: From Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan — Jamie Zeppa

Read Source B in the official Pearson anthology (printed pages 16–18).

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about how a visitor’s first impression can be complicated by closer attention.

Support your answer with detailed examples from both texts, including brief quotations.