Shortlisted
The Great Wall
Daniel P
am a tree, a tree fresh on a mountain in Qinhuangdao, northern China. I grow in height and slowly pass the
other trees as I grow older; and I experience a wonderful but terrifying experience. It began with a few
bulky and miserable people carrying heavy rocks up the mountain and stacking them on top of each other.
“
How strange?!” I thought to myself. The people grew in number, and in a few weeks the rock stacking
appeared to be some sort of wall. “Why would they build a wall that stretched up into one of the many
mountains here?” I thought.
addock, Group 2: Fiction, Yew Chung International School of Hong Kong
I
The builders were tired and miserable, and this wall didn’t improve their tempers as I found out one
afternoon. I was watching the builders when suddenly two of them got into a fight on top of the half-wall, which
wasn’t at all stable and the part they were standing on suddenly collapsed. I watched in horror as some other
men carried them away, but they were still screaming insults at each other! After their wounds had healed, I saw
them back at the construction site, but this time they were rebuilding the part they had collapsed as a punishment.
The wall grew longer and longer, taller and taller until it snaked from the bottom of the mountain to the
other side and I could see them still building. “I thought they would have finished by now, but I seem to be
wrong.” I still wondered, “Why are they building this wall here in the first place?” I had hundreds of questions
bursting out of me but I knew they could not be answered; I would have to wait until the event to happen to find
out.
Qinhuangdao were losing a lot of workers to build this wall, for there were at least 10 lives being cut short
every day by falling off the wall. “What could be the reason that building this wall is so important that they
don’t care about losing their people?” Winter is coming, and I hoped that they wouldn’t be foolish enough to
lose more. After a month, my thought proved to be wrong, the weather was wild and it would snow heavily
every day, not to mention the dagger-like wind. But no matter how wild and angry the weather was, I could still
see the blur of workers piling rocks with their cold, numb hands.
As winter closed, the weather became worse and it snowed so heavily that I could not even see the ground,
so I had no idea what was happening to the workers. More storms came, the sky flashed with lightning, and the
wind ripped my branches off. My neighbours were uprooted and left lying on the floor as if an axe-man had
been here. Then, by some miracle, it was suddenly over, I was alive but it was then I realised how lethal the
storms had been for the workers. Hundreds of them lay either on the wall or on the floor, breathless. But their
benefit from working through the winter was that their wall now stretched far from where I could see, and I
knew that it would be a true master construction when it was finished.
I soon found the answer to my biggest question, why are they building here? One day, soldiers appeared on
the wall for 5 days, looking for signs of danger. On the 6th day there was a thudding noise that pounded and
shook the ground. The sentries shouted and a whole troop of archers appeared. Now I realised that this wall was
a defence against a huge army from the north, the Mongols, who were planning an attack on China.
I was really frightened, I was about to be caught up in the battle. The Chinese started by firing a neat
formation of arrows that flew through the sky, and I heard screams of pain cry out from the Mongols. The
Mongols answered by firing so many arrows that it blotted out the sky, and almost all the archers on the wall
collapsed and screamed in pain. Even I got pelted with arrows that cut into by bark, freeing my sap. I seemed
like a human too, I had bark instead of skin and sap for blood, but there’s one thing that I was sure of, that I
wouldn’t go down as easily and that I had a bigger chance of survival. Then the Mongols did something that
changed my mind, they were carrying torches and they set the ground on fire. I was terrified as the hands of
death reached towards me, looking for me, hunting me. I was praying in panic as the flames reached closer to
my roots, centimetre by centimetre. When I looked like I had breathed my last, my prayers were answered and a
humongous clap of thunder brought down bucketfuls of rain. The flames died out but the war went full on after
that. The Chinese were charging at the Mongols, slashing their swords and flicking their daggers. The Mongols
were terrific archers and started picking them off with their bows.
It was a few days before the battle finished, and it was obvious that the Mongols had won. The Mongols
took out much of the Chinese army and rode through the wall where huge gaps had been smashed through. They
captured the village easily and claimed victory.
That is the story of how I, a normal tree had first experienced the legend of the wall. I shall never forget
those early days but in the years to come I witnessed many other great battles here, until eventually peace fell.