“I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Quit bragging.”
“Stop being rude.”
“When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don’t count—I mean something with print in it.”
Buttercup walked away from him. “There’re other things to read than print,” she said, “and the Princess of Hammersmith is displeased with you and is thinking seriously of going home.” With no more words, she whirled into his arms then, saying, “Oh, Westley, I didn’t mean that, I didn’t, I didn’t, not a single syllabub of it.”
Now Westley knew that she meant to say “not a single syllable of it,” because a syllabub was something you ate, with cream and wine mixed in together to form the base. But he also knew an apology when he heard one. So he held her very close, and shut his loving eyes, and only whispered, “I knew it was false, believe me, every single syllabub.”
And that out of the way, they started running as fast as they could along the flat-rock floor of the ravine.
Westley, naturally enough, was considerably ahead of Buttercup with the realization that they were heading into the Fire Swamp. Whether it was a touch of sulphur riding a breeze or a flick of yellow flame far ahead in the daylight, he could not say for sure. But once he realized what was about to happen, he began as casually as possible to find a way to avoid it. A quick glance up the sheer ravine sides ruled out any possibility of his getting Buttercup past the climb. He dropped to the ground, as he had been doing every few minutes, to test the speed of their trackers. Now, he guessed them to be less than half an hour behind and gaining.
He rose and ran with her, faster, neither of them spending breath in conversation. It was only a matter of time before she understood what they were about to be into, so he decided to beat back her panic in any way possible. “I think we can slow down a bit now,” he told her, slowing down a bit. “They’re still well behind.”
Buttercup took a deep breath of relief.
Westley made a show of checking their surroundings. Then he gave her his best smile. “With any luck at all,” he said, “we should soon be safely in the Fire Swamp.”
Buttercup heard his speech, of course. But she did not, she did not, take it well…
A few words now on two related subjects: (1) fire swamps in general and (2) the Florin/Guilder Fire Swamp in particular.
(1) Fire swamps are, of course, entirely misnamed. As to why this has happened, no one knows, though probably the colorful quality of the two words together is enough. Simply, there are swamps which contain a large percentage of sulphur and other gas bubbles that burst continually into flame. They are covered with lush giant trees that shadow the ground, making the flame bursts seem particularly dramatic. Because they are dark, they are almost always quite moist, thereby attracting the standard insect and alligator community that prefers a moist climate. In other words, a fire swamp is just a swamp, period; the rest is embroidery.
(2) The Florin/Guilder Fire Swamp did and does have some particular odd characteristics: (a) the existence of Snow Sand and (b) the presence of the R.O.U.S., about which, a bit more later. Snow Sand is usually, again incorrectly, identified with lightning sand. Nothing could be less accurate. Lightning sand is moist and basically destroys by drowning. Snow Sand is as powdery as anything short of talcum, and destroys by suffocation.
Most particularly though, the Florin/Guilder Fire Swamp was used to frighten children. There was not a child in either country that at one time or another was not, when misbehaving very badly, threatened with abandonment in the Fire Swamp. “Do that one more time, you’re going to the Fire Swamp” is as common as “Clean your plate; people are starving in China.” And so, as children grew, so did the danger of the Fire Swamp in their enlarging imaginations. No one, of course, ever actually went into the Fire Swamp, although, every year or so, a diseased R.O.U.S. might wander out to die, and its discovery would only add to the myth and the horror. The largest known fire swamp is, of course, within a day’s drive of Perth. It is impenetrable and over twenty-five miles square. The one between Florin and Guilder was barely a third that size. No one had been able to discover if it was impenetrable or not.
