Assignment 3: Sketching an outline

As noted in the previous Assignment 3 post – I’m planning to tell a story using material from two separate sources – my photographs of the shoreline south of Workington, and a book which made significant impression on a youthful Nigel – read tucked up in a warm bed in an icy bedroom. Like all good stories it needs an intro, some development – and maybe a conclusion of sorts. I’ve scoured the book for useful titbits and I think they form the basis of the structure as follows:

Opening or cover:

• Detectives off to the end of the world

Intro

• Not a soul was to be seen on shore, only a deserted, petrified world with motionless stone heads gazing at us from their distant ridge, while other equally motionless stone men lay prostrate in a row at the foot of a long terrace right in the foreground, on the lava blocks along the coast.
• Each day she had been filled with continually increasing wonder at the strange unsolved problems which lay behind it all. The shadows of the departed builders still possess the land, she says.

Development section

• Inland from the center of the beach, and on each side, were three temple like terraces built of colossal blocks of stone, facing the sea.
• At the foot of the plain and right next to the camp lay an ahu with fallen statues. The original wall had been sadly damaged during the rebuilding period of the second epoch: the work had never been completed. Later, destructive hands had been at work: blocks and boulders in great numbers lay strewn about in front of the facade.
• It was a matter of utter indifference to the sculptors whether they carved the figure out of a perpendicular wall or a horizontal slab, head upward or downward, for half-finished giants lay bent in every direction.
• The stone picks still lay where the sculptors had flung them down, 
• The inhabitants had dropped all their rubbish where they sat, and the floor, therefore, had often risen toward the roof.
• But there were masses and masses of other queer things left in the cave,
• Round about, on all the stones, carvings of large circular eyes stared at him like typical sun symbols;

Conclusion:

• Rano Raraku remains one of the greatest and most curious monuments of mankind, a monument to the great lost unknown behind us, a warning of the transience of man and civilization

I still need a couple more – particular something which encapsulates the point of the investigation and maybe a question to either prompt the conclusion or point up the purpose of the development section.

All quotes taken from Heyerdahl, T., 1958. Aku-Aku. American ed. New York: Rand McNally.