Silent Land

AQA Paper 1, Nov 2019/8700/1

[ This extract is from the beginning of a novel by Graham Joyce. A young married couple, Zoe and Jake, are on a skiing holiday in the French Pyrenean mountains.]

(1) It was snowing again.Gentle six-pointed flakes from a picture book were settling on her jacket sleeve. The mountain air prickled with ice and the smell of pine resin. Several hundred metres below lay the dark outline of Saint-Bernard-en-Haut, their Pyrenean resort village; across to the west, the irregular peaks of the mountain range.

(6) Zoe pulled the air into her lungs, feeling the cracking cold of it before letting go.And when the mountain seemed to nod and sigh back at her, she almost thought she could die in that place, and happily.

(9) If there are few moments in life that come as clear and as pure as ice, when the mountain breathed back at her, Zoe knew that she had trapped one such moment and that it could never be taken away. Everywhere was snow and silence.Snow and silence; the complete arrest of life; a rehearsal and a pre-echo of death.She pointed her skis down the hill.They looked like weird talons of brilliant red and goldin the powder snow as she waited, ready to swoop.I am alive. I am an eagle.

(15 ) The sun was up now; in a few minutes there would be more skiers to break the eerie morning spell. But right now they had the snow and the morning entirely to themselves.There was a whisper behind her. It was the effortless track of Jake’s skis as he came over the ridge and caught up with her. ‘This is perfection.’

‘You ready to go?’she asked.

‘Yep. Let’s do it.’

They’d got up early to beat the holiday-making hordes for this first run of the morning. Because this–the tranquillity, the silence, the undisturbed snow and the feeling of proximity to an eagle’s flight–was what it was all about. Jake hit the west side of the steep but broad slope and she took the east, carving matching parallel tracks through the fresh snow.

(28)But at the edge of the slope, near the curtain of trees, she felt a small slab of snow slip from underneath her.It was like she’d been bucked, so she took the fall-line*to recover her balance. Before she’d dropped three hundred metres, the whisper of her skis was displaced by a rumble.

Zoe saw at the periphery of her vision that Jake had come to a halt at the side of the piste and was looking back up the slope. Irritated by the false start they’d made, she etched a few turns before skidding to a halt and turning to look back at her husband.

The rumble became louder. There was a pillar of what looked like grey smoke unfurling in silky banners at the head of the slope, like the heraldry of armies. It was beautiful. It made her smile.

(39) Then her smile iced over. Jake was speeding straight towards her. His face was rubberised and he mouthed something as he flew at her.

‘Get to the side! To the side!’

She knew now that it was an avalanche. Jake slowed, batting at her with his ski pole. ‘Get into the trees! Hang on to a tree!’

(44) The rumbling had become a roaring in her ears, drowning Jake’s words. She pushed herself down the fall line, scrambling for traction, trying to accelerate away from the roaring cloud breaking behind her like a tsunami at sea. Jagged black cracks appeared in the snow in front of her. She angled her skis towards the side of the slope, heading for the trees, but it was too late.She saw Jake’s black suit go bundling past her as he was turned by the great mass of smoke and snow. Then she too was punched off her feet and carried through the air, twisting, spinning, turning in the white-out. She remembered something about spreading her arms around her head. For a few moments it was like being agitated inside a washing machine, turned head over heels a few times, until at last she was dumped heavily in a rib-cracking fall. Then there came a chattering noise, like the amplified jaws of a million termites chewing on wood. The noise itself filled her ears and muffled everything, and then there was silence, and the total whiteness faded to grey, and then to black.

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