The High Mountains of Portugal. Yann Martel

      He looks up at the stagecoach drivers and is shocked at what he sees. If the passengers had a number of expressions on their faces, the drivers have only one: out-and-out loathing. The man who turned and waved at him earlier—or was he in fact shaking his fist?—is barking and growling at him like a dog and is making as if to leap from his seat down onto the roof of the machine. The man doing the driving looks even more incensed. His face is red with anger and his mouth is open in a continuous shout. He is brandishing a long whip, spurring his horses on. The whip rises and coils in the air like a serpent before coming down and flattening out with a sharp and piercing snap that goes off like a gun. Only then does Tomás realize that the steeds have been pushed to full thundering gallop. He can feel the ground beneath him shaking from their efforts. Despite the cushioning of the automobile’s rubber wheels and the mediation of the suspension springs, the hard, marvellous work of the horses rattles his bones and awes his brain. In relative terms, he is slowly passing the stagecoach the way a man on a street might overtake an elderly walker, with such ease and comfort that he has the leisure to tip his hat and say a kind word. But from the point of view of someone standing by the side of the road, both he and the stagecoach are hurtling through space at a fantastic speed, as if the elderly walker and the man on the street were advancing on the roofs of two express trains racing on parallel tracks.

      The silence that enveloped him as a result of his intense concentration suddenly explodes into the hammering of the galloping horses’ hooves, the screaming creaking of the swaying stagecoach, the shouting of the drivers, the shrill distress of the frightened passengers, the cracking of the whip, and the roar of the automobile. He presses the accelerator pedal as hard as he can. The automobile surges ahead, but slowly.