Writing with Stardust: The Ultimate Descriptive Guide for students, parents, teachers and writers (21 page)

4. The desert is
Old Nick’s oven
.
METAPHORS

5.
Lizards
skittered across the golden sand.
ANIMALS

6.
Soap trees
stared silently at the sun.
PLANTS

7.
Crows
called out in their horrible voices.
BIRDS

8. Everything smelled
burned and blasted
.
SMELL

9. We were
sweat sodden
by the heat.
SENSATION

10. The food tasted
joyless
.
TASTE

                                        LEVEL 2: A BASIC PARAGRAPH

The desert was
singed-brown
.
Scrawling sounds
filled the air at night time. The land was flat and
barren
. The nomad’s called it
Satan’s solarium
. Even the
desert lions
were more ferocious than is usual. Only the odd
brittle bush
broke up the emptiness of the desert. A screaming
hawk
flew overhead. Like us, it was being
basted and blazed
by the sun. Our
tongues were swollen
from the lack of water.  Our food had a
spiritless taste
to it.

                                       LEVEL 3: CREATIVE PARAGRAPHS

The
fuscous-brown
desert was killing me. I had seen neither man nor beast for three days and my water was gone. It was the most
desolate
and lonesome environment I had ever been in. I felt like a castaway on a sea of sand. The
scratching
sounds outside the light of the campfire last night were the only signs of life.
Lucifer’s grill
itself could not have scorched away all the evidence of nature as this place had. I thought I saw the paw prints of a
desert
fox
once, the wraith of the desert. Maybe it was just my insanity seeing at the cloven hoofs of the devil in the sand.

The monotony of this parched wilderness was difficult to explain. It was a crucible of death, a bone-dry basin of vastness and death. The immensity of it burned into your brain, your only visual relief being a spiny cactus or
jumping cholla
bush. As far as the eye could see, everything was being
roasted and sautéed
with the same intensity. Just then, I thought I saw a
humming bird
flitting into a cactus, but it was probably another hallucination. My
dehydrated liver
was shutting down. The
listless taste
of my last biscuit was a distant memory as I limped and trudged towards my death

                          
        LEVELS 4 AND 5: USING THE SENSES

The desert hates me. I've been here three days without water, food or fire. I'm getting steadily weaker and I fear the worst. Getting separated from your caravan is just about the worst thing you can do out here in the devil’s garden. Deaths hungry maw seeks me everywhere. There's no respite from it. The heat might be addling my brain but I think the desert suffers from schizophrenia. By day, the heat is like standing in front of a fiery dragon and by night, the cold is like being suspended in a cryogenics chamber. It's full and spiteful wrath bears down upon you constantly. It's a bi-polar paradox of heat and cold. There is no respite and no mercy. 

The cancerous sun, the cankerous heat and the cantankerous cold are heart-haunting. Everything in this God-forsaken place is either wicked and warped or blasted and burned. Who ever heard of an environment with such devilish names living in it? The flora has chain fruit and ironwood listed in its catalogue of heartless plants. The fauna has vultures circling over you by day and vampire bats dive-bombing you at night. There is no siren call of the sea here. There is just a vast, mournful pan of emptiness where anything sentient resents anything else that's alive. Satan's sauna is what I call it. Every sun-scoured scrap of fauna has barbs, hooks or thorns. They want to rip and rend you, snag and splinter you. Every sun-seared excuse for an animal has poison, paw or claw. They're not as discriminating. They just want to eat you. The prince of darkness himself could not conjure up such a malignant sorcery, a blasphemous buffet, of grotesque life.

SENSATIONS-
It's the sensations that let you know you're dying. Your
skin feels like it's
been stabbed
by a million sun-spears and
scraped by sandpaper
. Your
tongue is cloven to
the roof of your mouth
. It's like there's a dry, leathery in-sole wagging away at the back of your throat. Your throat itself has
the sensation that
a reticulated python is trying to squeeze
the life out of it. Even your
eyes feel like they've melted into the back of your mind
, making everything seem mirage-like. Sand is your enemy. It
burns your feet raw
, it
stings the eyes
and it acts as a surrogate for pain because nothing else fills up your daily thoughts like it. Every step feels like a marathon, every second a day. At any moment you expect Armageddon to descend and sweep you away. You stumble and totter, as shriveled and contorted as the plant life around you. A nebula of wavy radiation surrounds you until you start believing that its one big field of it you're going through. At night, the mercury screams in agony as it plummets to its nadir. It's as cold as a ghoul’s soul. Your
body
trembles
feverishly and your
teeth rattle
as numbness spreads. Eventually, an overwhelming desire to give up and go to sleep forever overtakes you. Your will to live is steadily sapped away. I'm not quite at that point yet.

SOUNDS-
I’ve heard it said that the desert is crypt-quiet, motionless and soundless. It's true to a large degree but only because your mind feels like it's taken a fistful of tranquillizers, dumbing the brain. Like any madness, there are moments of clarity. You have to really concentrate to become aware of the desert noises. Listen carefully and it's a veritable monkey’s cage of maddening sounds. Every animal here is
screeching
or
shambling
,
screaming
or
shuffling
. Those who fall victim to the deserts cruel ways get eviscerated by a fat fang or scavenging beak. Scorpions
scuttle
and snakes
hiss
and
slither
while they go about their grisly business of desert survival. When night descends, the sonar-
ping
of marauding vampire bats
lacerates
the air. Deadly eyes glitter and shut as the night mammals take over. Their eerie
howls
and
harrowing
grunts fill up the loneliness you feel in your soul. Then you sense they may be
stalking
you. Hatred of them and their ill-begotten ilk takes over. Any sound of
sniffing
nostril, any
shuddering
bush becomes a threat to your existence. You begin to
slink
and
skulk
just like those around you. The constant paranoia is enough to unhinge the most obdurate of minds.

SIGHTS-
Natures laws have been overthrown in the desert.  It's an orgy of wanton violence between its denizens, all of whom have been disfigured and crippled by their attempts to live there. The gene pool of life has been corrupted beyond repair. You will only ever get to see five colours in the desert. The dominant one is the sand which pollutes the earth with an unending plain of
wasteland-brown
. Occasionally, reluctantly, it offers up a contorted,
viper-green
cactus, spiny of skin and bitter to the eye. Look up and you will see a burning,
sulfur-yellow
sun, resentful of life and soaking the land with its spite. The night brings with it a cloak of
despair-black
. In your final indignity, the stars appear, beautiful and scattered. Their shining brilliance is
mockery-silver
. They are a condescending reminder that for you there is no hope, no succour to be found in this melting pot of insanity. You are alone, abandoned and doomed. You are battling against nature itself and you're aware that no one has ever won that particular bout. Tomorrow at dawn a colourless heat haze will blur out the background and your vision will become myopic again. Your mind will draw in on itself like bowstrings and if you had to describe the haze you would say that it's a wobbly, shimmering mirror of your own death.

SMELLS-
There is one main smell in the desert. It is the smell of your own death and it follows you everywhere. It's
ungodly
and it's as
virulent
as the heat itself.
Cloying
and
sticky
, the multitudinous seas incarnadine could not wash it away. It wafts and wallows, billows and blows all around you, your only ever-present companion besides hopelessness. There are more smells to be detected in this a la carte menu of death. Fear pervades from every pore and its smell is nearly as
fetid
and
pungent
. Mingled in amongst them is the
noxious
swirl of body odour. It is
rancid
and
rank
and makes you want to vomit with disgust. Around you, the scanty scrub-bushes smell
flamed
and
fried
. An unhealthy fume of burning sand, as stuffy as old
car exhausts
, rises up like a fog and oscillates just below your nose. It never seems to go away, so much so that you think that the gaseous emanations are part of the landscape. The smells seem as if they are chained inside your nostrils. Every breath you take is a living agony. It's like drowning in a stew-pot of smoky
cordite
and melting
asphalt
. You feel like you can't go on and your brain swells up until it feels as
grilled
and
griddled
as the air around you.

TASTES-
There is nothing
ambrosial
or
appetizing
about the tastes of the desert. Defeat is the last taste on your palate. The only thing
lavish
or
extravagant
is the manner of your death. There's nothing
mouth-watering
as there's no water to be drank. There's nothing
opulent
or
tantalizing
to be had. There's nothing at all for you to do except to bow down to the blasphemous desire of the desert to kill you. I'm tired now. I'm sick of the stumbling and the staggering, the tottering and the trembling. I'm sick of the cracked lips and the kidney-skewering pain of dehydration. Most of all, I'm sick of life. The sand is burning my head now for I have fallen for the last time. My large, Berber-brown eyes can feel the tears. I've had enough of survival in Satan's solarium. Seventeen years as a camel in this inferno of fire and fumes was just too much to ask of me.

                              ONOMATOPOEIA

Onomatopoeia is when the meaning of a word is obvious from its sound
.
Its main purpose is to recreate the sounds of the scene the writer conjures up. By using onomatopoeia, the reader is catapulted into this world without having a choice. Next to colour, it is the most important sensory weapon in the armoury of a descriptive writer. Murmurs of wind in the trees can become the howling tempests of winter with the flick of a pen. That is the beauty of using onomatopoeia; the writer can control the atmosphere and the mood of the passage through his/her choice of words. The grids underneath give some of the most effective sounds and formulas for evoking an atmosphere in a battle scene.

    
SOFT WINDS IN                   LOUD WINDS IN                COLLISION WORDS

ESCALATING VOLUME     ESCALATING VOLUME      WITH 3 SYLLABLES