Week 4 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

A Heron

His stillness is what I admire. And his neck, folded back on itself like a spring not yet sprung, A tall, grey question mark planted among the reeds, And his narrow, patient eye, His slow, deliberate movements — which can turn in an instant, Swift and merciless, when he spears the water. But mostly he's motionless — and that's what I admire. I like the stillness he seems Always about to break. And the cry, The rusted, gate-hinge shriek he gives When startled from some long, undisturbed watching, a lonely, marshland warning — The harsh, ragged croak That sends the moorhens scattering.

Reading Passage

The First Ones

In the years before memory, the sky and the mountain felt a great silence, a longing. The peaks stood like a stairway to the clouds, and the valley below was a quilt of green and gold. The wind was ever-changing, sometimes still and glassy, sometimes wild with the shapes of storms. This is not to say the mountain and sky were empty of life. The condor, oldest of the high birds, perched sentinel on the furthest crag, unmoving in the thin air, watching the paths below. Within the deep forests, creatures called and answered through the trees. The valleys were loud with the rustle of leaves, the chatter of insects and the murmur of hidden streams. The sky, too, was never truly still, crossed by flocks of smaller birds in shimmering formation. Sometimes from far off a pale shape would cross the sun, but it would only be the slow drift of a cloud shaped like a wing.

Waiting. Waiting for the climbing. Waiting for the naming. Waiting for the calling to come. Then, looking up from the valley floor, the birds began to see thin trails of smoke rising from the eastern passes. The first of the Wanderers were coming, descending from the mountain kingdom beyond the ridge. After a time, the smoke was seen retreating eastward once more, leaving long scars of ash across the green slopes. The mountain and the sky sighed with relief:

We have been seen. The word is carried back to the place of the Wanderers. Our calling will come soon.

In that waiting time, mountain and sky began to feel the sharp ache of longing, a need for an ending. The forests sent up sweet mists on the morning air. The sky filled endlessly with circling birds leaping into the wind to be first to spot the coming, and the smallest hawks hovered at attention. Only the shy cliff-hares withdrew with their soft calls into the shadowed caves. The sun rose and set, rose and set. Then one day, at dawn, the first sighting was made: on the horizon, a vast shape rising from the deep canyon, huge and breathtaking, cresting the ridge before dropping earthward again. Below, the muted thunder of its wings echoed like a great door swinging shut far away, and both mountain and sky trembled from the force of that downward beat. Suddenly the air was filled with a tremendous cry, a call with age in it, a call to the land. The dark shape rising, rising again. A condor, immense beyond imagining. Just as it burst above the ridge, a hawk circling high in its own joy saw light and wind streaming like golden fire from that great bird, and knew, yes, that the time had come.

Then the hawk saw that riding upon the neck of the condor, as it broke skyward, was a woman. She was wondrous to look upon, the skyrider. The wind streamed away from her and she opened her arms to greet the cold air. Her eyes shone with brightness. Her body glittered with frost.

She seemed, with all her strength, to be pulling the condor into the sky. Rising, rising. And the woman felt the power of the great bird as it launched itself from the canyon. She saw far off the valley long sought and now found, and she began to scatter small stones seaward and landward on her magnificent journey toward the mountain.