Page 14 - Sample Flip Builder Project

Days of Fear and Wonder

By Patricia Swan

This, truly, I promise you, is how it really was, or seemed to

be. It is what I remember. This was not Hobbiton, Ruritania,

or the Lost Land of Lyonesse, but the drab, post-war North
East of England, where I was born...

There was a mountain, bone ash and storm cloud grey, tall

as Everest, conical like Fuji; a monstrous, looming presence

alive with fire and smoking crevasses. Flames might burst
forth anywhere, lava mushrooms bloom without warning

then collapse to swallow bold, unwary children. Sometimes
there’d be rock slides or avalanches and the villagers would

cover survivors’ eyes lest little bodies be exposed, mouths
wide in final, unheard screams. In the cool seasons, when

the fires retreated into the mountain’s heart, brave men

would sometimes attempt the summit. None succeeded.
Some never returned, but once in a long while a man would

stumble back into the village carrying pieces of the
mountain: letters, messages imprinted on stone, the

mountain’s memory of ferns and flowers, sometimes a fish or
newt, never a child. Never, and the people would be unsure

whether to rejoice or mourn the mountain’s forgetting.

On the far side of the mountain lay a desert:
deceptive, shifting dunes, valleys of cloying mud and

pockets of quicksand. On the near side, not far from the

village, was a lake, black and bottomless, its stagnant water
reflecting the mountain and its fires, never the sun. The lake

swallowed sunlight as the mountain swallowed children.
Once, long ago it was said, the lake too was a child-eater,

but no child now reached its baleful shore. It had protected

1