The Flaming Mountains stood across the whole width of the road, eight hundred li of them, burning — not a wildfire, a permanent one, mountains of fire that had blazed without pause for centuries and would blaze forever, so hot that the ground for miles around grew nothing, and the local people could not harvest, could not travel, could not live except at the fire's grudging edge. There was no way around. The road west went through the fire, and nothing living crossed the fire, and that was the end of the errand unless the fire could be put out.
asked the local people how they survived at all, and learned the shape of the trap. There was one thing in the world that could quench the Flaming Mountains: a fan, the Banana-Leaf Fan, the Plantain Fan, that raised a wind that put out the fire and called the rain. And once a year the people had to go, hats in hands, to the demon who owned the fan, and beg for a single wave of it — one gust, one season's grace — and pay for it dearly, because the fire and the fan were a business, and the demon who held the fan held the whole region's life in one hand.
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