^[63] Miss Daisy Snapes was officially the first person to be born on a moving train, thanks to a midwife who rushed the mother to the guard’s van. Young Daisy was born at thirty miles an hour and her doting parents named her Locomotion Snapes, until Moist got to hear about it and gave her and her parents a free season ticket on the railway, along with the suggestion that Locomotion might sound better as a middle name. <<

^[64] The swamps in this part of the world are famous for their birdlife but also notorious, because they move constantly and quickly. Dry land is hard to find. The human inhabitants live on large rafts that serve as both shelters and gardens. The older generations have splayed feet, which they try to encourage in their offspring because the webs show that the owner is a great hunter of the swamps. They have no known enemies, probably because most people don’t want to step into a swamp. They are in fact helpful to travellers, and they distil extremely useful medications from the floating flora and fauna of the swamps, which include the twisting honeydew and the egregious flytrap, whose venom can be used in the making of delicate ironwork etchings, and which must be approached with extreme caution as the venom can be spat over several yards.

There clearly has been magic at work in the Netherglades and its future as the pharmacopoeia of the world is being tested by Professor Rincewind of Unseen University. A dispatch from him reveals that the juice pressed from a certain little yellow flower induces certainty in the patient for up to fifteen minutes. About what they are certain they cannot specify, but the patient is, in that short time, completely certain about everything. And further research has found that a floating water hyacinth yields in its juices total uncertainty about anything for half an hour. Philosophers are excited about the uses of these potions, and the search continues for a plant that combines the qualities of both, thereby being of great use to theologians. <<

^[65] In their minds, at least, although it has to be said that they had been too careful to attempt to overthrow the Low King until he was far away in Quirm. <<

^[66] At least, that’s where Moist assumed he’d come from. Vetinari was one of the greatest students of concealment the Assassins had ever produced, so it could simply have been a shadowy state of mind. <<

^[67] The only carriages that were open to the weather were the ones for those extra-large passengers (mostly trolls) who couldn’t fit inside anything else, and that was because they were in fact the coal cars. No one minded – trolls were impervious to rain, which helped them cultivate a better quality of lichen in any case, and the coal doubled as a welcome snack during the journey. <<

^[68] In that it went against every instinct of a born-and-bred Ankh-Morporkian. <<