고등학교 영어 독해와 작문 (NE능률 양현권) 연계 글

In Jeju's local speech, the word "olle" means the narrow lane that leads from a village street to the gate of a house. Walking along such a lane, a visitor moves at an easy pace, with low walls of black stone rising on both sides and the scent of tangerines drifting over them. Beyond the fields, waves break softly on the shore, and no one seems to be in a hurry.

The idea of linking such lanes into a long trail came from Suh Myung-sook, a magazine journalist and editor from Jeju. In 2006, she walked the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route in Spain, and returned with a dream of a path where people could wander slowly through her home island. In 2007, she set up a nonprofit foundation, and that September the first route opened on the island's eastern side, linking small volcanic hills to the sea. More routes were added over the following years, and since 2022 the network has consisted of 27 routes that together cover about 437 kilometers. What began as one walker's memory of Spain has thus become a path that many others now follow.

At forks in the path, walkers find a ganse, a wooden marker shaped like the small horse native to Jeju, with its head pointed in the direction in which the route runs from start to finish. Its name comes from a Jeju word for a lazy, slow-moving person, a reminder that the trail is meant to be walked without hurry. Pairs of ribbons, one blue for the sea and one orange for the island's famous tangerines, hang from branches and utility poles. Arrows on stone walls and poles do the same work: blue ones point the way for walkers going forward, and orange ones guide those walking in reverse.

In 1325, a young man from the Moroccan city of Tangier set out alone on the pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the basic duties of Islam. His name was Ibn Battuta, and he came from a family of Islamic legal scholars. Instead of heading home after reaching Mecca, however, he kept moving, and his travels lasted almost three decades. By the time he finally settled in Morocco, he had covered an estimated 120,000 kilometers across Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Trained in Islamic law, he found work in several of the lands that he visited. In Delhi, where the sultan was known for his generosity toward Muslim scholars, he served for years as a judge. Later he held the same post in the Maldives, a chain of small islands southwest of India, and his journeys eventually took him as far as China.

After he returned to Morocco for good, the sultan ordered him to describe the cities he had seen. Ibn Battuta told his stories aloud, with a young writer named Ibn Juzayy recording them. The finished book, completed around 1355, is known as the Rihla, an Arabic word meaning "journey" that also names a kind of travel writing. Ibn Juzayy polished the plain wording with an elaborate style and borrowed some passages from earlier travelers to fill gaps, so not every page records what Ibn Battuta himself saw. For centuries the book was little known in Europe; only in the nineteenth century did scholars translate it into French, German, and English. Thanks to those pages, a journey that ended almost seven centuries ago can still be followed by readers around the world.