Select three powerful words or phrases from this paragraph. Your choices
should include imagery. Explain how each word or phrase is used effectively in
the context.

Tips: Remember to start with a topic sentence to sum up the paragraph above
before moving on to your analysis.

Write about 100 – 150 words.

I recognised the precise moment at which Rolf gave up the fight and surrendered
to the torture of watching the girl die. I was with them, three days and two nights,
spying on them. I was there when she told him that in all her thirteen years no
boy had ever loved her and that it was a pity to leave this world without knowing
love. Rolf assured her that he loved her more than he could ever love anyone,
more than he loved his mother, more than his sister, more than all the women
who had slept in his arms, more than he loved me, his life companion, who would
have given anything to be; trapped in that well in her place, who would have
exchanged her life for Azucena’s, and I watched as he leaned down to kiss her
poor forehead, consumed by a sweet, sad emotion he could not name. I felt how
in that instant both were saved from despair, how they were freed from the clay,
how they rose above the vultures and helicopters, how together they flew above
the vast swamp of corruption and laments. How, finally, they were able to accept
death. Rolf Carlé prayed in silence that she would die quickly. By then I had
obtained a pump and was in touch with a general who had agreed to ship it the
next morning on a military cargo plane. But on the night of that third day,
beneath the unblinking focus of quartz lamps and the lens of a hundred cameras,
Azucena gave up, her eyes locked with those who had sustained her to the end.
Rolf Carlé removed the life buoy, closed her eyelids, held her to his chest for a few
moments, and then let her go. She sank slowly, a flower in the mud.