Every quotation below was checked word for word against the extract as Pearson publishes it in the anthology (Issue 8, February 2026), and the line numbers are the anthology's. The anthology keeps Zeppa's American spellings, such as “flavorless” and “humor”, and explains them in footnotes: when you quote, copy the spelling your anthology prints.
“Bhutan is all and only mountains”
Zeppa, opening paragraph, lines 1 to 2 (anthology p.16)
A short, absolute declarative sentence. “All and only” is a doubled emphasis: the mountains are not a feature of Bhutan but the whole of it. The hyperbole prepares for an idea the extract builds on, that the landscape seems to shape everything, from how hard the country is to reach to the isolated valleys of its history.
“It is easier to picture a giant child gathering earth in great armfuls”
Zeppa, opening paragraph, lines 4 to 5
Zeppa sets aside the scientific explanation of colliding landmasses, which she knows but says she cannot imagine, and chooses a metaphor instead, like a creation myth or a picture book. The “giant child” makes the vast landscape playful and handmade, and the verbs that follow turn geology into sculpture. Calling the image “easier” shows a narrator for whom knowing a fact is not the same as being able to picture it.
“on the other side of mountains are mountains”
Zeppa, her first night in Thimphu, remembering the flight in, lines 13 to 14
The question she used to wonder about, what lies beyond the mountains, gets a flat and almost comic answer, and the sentence goes on repeating the word. The repetition traps the reader as the landscape traps the traveller. It stresses remoteness: the plains of India are behind her, and ahead there is only more of the same.
“hoping to pick up some of their enthusiasm”
Zeppa, walking with Lorna and Sasha after breakfast, line 29
An admission that she does not yet share their delight. “Pick up” makes enthusiasm sound catching, like an accent, something she hopes to absorb simply by staying close to them. The honesty matters structurally: a narrator who confesses doubt here is more believable when she later declares her admiration.
“startling against the Bhutanese-ness of everything else”
Zeppa, on the signs of the outside world in Thimphu, lines 41 to 42
The coined noun “Bhutanese-ness” suggests a quality so complete that ordinary English has no word for it. There are more Western signs than she expected, yet she calls them few overall, and “startling” shows how out of place they look. Her name for them, “cultural infiltration”, borrows the language of spies and armies, implying something unwelcome slipping in.
“Thimphu will never look like New York to me, I think”
Zeppa, straight after describing Tashichho Dzong, answering Gordon, lines 52 to 53 (p.17)
The sentence echoes Gordon's prediction almost word for word and reverses it. Placed straight after the description of the great fortress and the terraced fields, it can be read as a quiet act of loyalty to the traditional town. The tag “I think” keeps it private and tentative: she is forming her own view, not yet announcing it.
“the best built race of men I ever saw”
George Bogle (1774), quoted by Zeppa when she describes the Bhutanese people, line 54
These are an eighteenth-century envoy's words, not Zeppa's, and she adds that she agrees with them. The quotation lends her first impression historical authority, but it is worth questioning: “race” and “best built” judge a people by their bodies, in the language of an imperial age. A strong answer notices both the admiration and the outsider's gaze it comes from.
“can find no single word to hold all of my impressions”
Zeppa, after the young man at the hotel gives directions, lines 68 to 69
After listing four qualities, among them “dignity” and “grace”, she admits that language fails her. The metaphor of a word that can “hold” impressions, like a container, suggests her feelings are too full to fit. Admitting defeat is itself a compliment, and it quietly concedes that a people cannot be summed up by a visitor.
“his face rubbed with wet dough”
Zeppa, final paragraph, on Ashley Eden's visit of 1864, line 93 (p.18)
The three physical indignities suffered by the British envoy build to this absurd last one, before the forced treaty. Zeppa tells a diplomatic disaster as farce, and the bathos takes Bhutan's side: the representative of a vast empire is made ridiculous. The comic tone also softens a story that ended in war.
“I am full of admiration for this small country”
Zeppa, the final sentence of the extract, line 97
The extract ends on a judgement rather than an event, and after the history lesson it returns to the present tense and to Zeppa's own voice. “Small” is the key word: set against the empires around it, Bhutan's survival becomes a story of the weak outlasting the strong. The exhausted, doubtful newcomer of the opening has become a confident admirer.