“We waited for eternity”
Paragraph 2, line 7 (page 14)
Hyperbole. By Levine’s own count a line later, nearly an hour had passed, so “eternity” tells us how it felt rather than how long it lasted. The short, flat clause slows the pace at exactly the point the reader wants action, and the self-mockery (she is sitting in a car boot, camera ready, watching a road on which almost nothing happens) makes her a narrator we trust, because she does not take herself too seriously.
“a villager on a wobbly bicycle”
Paragraph 2, line 9 (page 14)
Bathos. After all the build-up, the only thing that passes is a man on a bike who nearly falls off. The adjective “wobbly” is comic in sound as well as sense, and the detail that he gazes round at them turns the camera round: for a moment it is Levine and the lads who are the odd spectacle. The anticlimax also makes the eventual arrival of the race feel all the more sudden.
“almost dwarfed by their entourage”
Paragraph 4, line 17 (page 14); the anthology footnotes entourage
A contrast of scale. An entourage is the group of followers who surround a celebrity or a ruler, so the two small donkeys become stars with a vast, noisy crowd in tow, about fifty vehicles by Levine’s estimate. “Dwarfed” makes them look tiny, but “almost” holds back, and the next clause insists on their speed. The effect is affectionate comedy: the animals are the reason for the event, and yet the event has nearly swallowed them.
“horns tooting, bells ringing”
Paragraph 5, line 21 (page 14)
A list of sounds, each a noun followed by a present participle, with onomatopoeia in “tooting”. There is no main verb, so the phrase reads like a rush of impressions arriving at once, and the -ing forms make every noise continuous. Levine then adds the rattles, with a bracketed explanation for readers who have never heard them, so the sentence both immerses and informs, which is exactly the double job of travel writing.
“Formula One without rules, or a city-centre rush hour gone anarchic”
Paragraph 6, line 28 (page 14)
Two metaphors, offered as alternatives, each built on a contradiction. Formula One is the top class of single-seater motor racing, run by a governing body, so “without rules” removes the one thing that makes it a sport. A rush hour is ordinary and tedious, so “gone anarchic” turns boredom into riot. The pair tells her readers what the scene feels like in terms they know, and the humour lies in how far both comparisons fall short. The words after the semi-colon drop the jokes and say it plainly: traffic rules and common sense are being ignored.
“survival of the fittest”
Paragraph 7, line 30 (page 14)
An idiom from evolutionary theory, Herbert Spencer’s phrase for natural selection, which Darwin later adopted, applied to traffic. It makes the road a jungle where only the quickest and boldest get through, and it introduces the list of skills that follows. The scientific grandeur of the phrase set against the business of cutting up other cars is comic, but it also carries a real warning, since on a main road the price of losing is a crash.
“nerves of steel, and an effective horn”
Paragraph 7, line 33 (page 14)
The end of a list of driving skills, and a deliberate anticlimax. The first items, about steering, reflexes and nerve, sound heroic; then the list closes on a car horn. The deflation mocks the idea of a noble contest while admitting that, on this road, noise is as useful as courage. The semi-colons that separate the items keep the sentence moving at the speed of the driving it describes.
“And then the trouble began”
Paragraph 9, line 43 (page 15)
A short sentence that opens a new paragraph, and a new page of the anthology, and turns the extract. “And then” is the language of oral storytelling, promising a sequel just when the race has ended, and “trouble” is a deliberately vague, understated word for what becomes an angry crowd. Structurally it tells the reader that the real contest of the extract is not the race but the argument about who won it.
“Voices were raised, fists were out and tempers rising”
Paragraph 9, line 48 (page 15)
A tricolon in which each short clause takes the crowd a step closer to violence. The passive first clause and the dropped verb of the last mean that no one is named as raising a voice or a fist, so the anger seems to belong to the crowd as a whole, which is how a frightening crowd feels from outside. The quickening rhythm enacts the escalation, and it explains why the lads decide it is time to leave.
“I don’t even have my licence yet because I’m underage”
Yaqoob, paragraph 10, line 56 (page 15)
The punchline, held back until the danger is over. Yaqoob delivers it casually, in direct speech, as a joke, and it forces the reader to rethink everything before it: the skilful driving we admired was the work of someone too young to hold a licence. Levine withholds the fact partly because she learned it only then, and partly because the structure depends on it. It turns a story about a race into a story about a risk the writer did not know she was taking.