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Copywork
About This Passage
This passage is the chapter's quietest warning, hidden in plain geography. Poe makes the narrator describe the gorge with a surveyor's precision — its winding length, its sharp turns every twenty yards, its walls seventy or eighty feet high that shut out the daylight. Copying it lets a reader feel how a setting can do the work of dread: every measured detail marks a place where a trapped party could neither flee nor fight, and the narrator's careful, after-the-fact exactness shows him reliving the trap he walked into. Poe places this cold, factual description just before the disaster, so the danger is built into the very ground.
This gorge was very rocky and uneven, so much so that it was with no little difficulty we scrambled through it on our first visit to Klock-klock. The whole length of the ravine might have been a mile ...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell this chapter in order: how Too-wit keeps his word and supplies fresh food that even cures the sick crew, while the two sides set up a friendly market and trade for biche de mer; how Captain Guy strikes a bargain with Too-wit to build drying-houses and leave three men behind while the schooner sails south; how the narrator pauses to give a careful, factual account of what biche de mer is and how it is cured; how, after many peaceful days, the crew goes to the village to take leave and a hundred of Too-wit's men meet them unarmed because 'all are brothers'; how the crew marches into a dark, narrow gorge with islanders before and behind; and how the chapter ends in a sudden, world-shaking concussion. Pause where the chapter most quietly warns of danger and explain your choice.
Discussion Questions
- At the leave-taking a hundred of Too-wit's men meet the crew carrying no weapons, and Too-wit explains there is no need of arms because 'all are brothers.' What might that unarmed welcome really mean, and why? Use details from the chapter.
- For many days Too-wit's people trade fairly, help build 'with alacrity,' and give goods 'frequently without price.' How do those actions change the crew's judgment, and what do they make possible later? Use details from the chapter.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Outstandingly bad; glaringly wrong.
Item 2
Far beyond what is normal or proper; excessive.
Item 3
In a friendly, peaceable way.
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Critical Thinking
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