Terry Pratchett - The Last Continent

‘This is the memo saying I’ve been appointed as Dean!’ he said. ‘That was years ago!’

‘Surely he must come out somet—’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘Oh dear …’

The same thought had occurred to the other wizards, too.

‘Remember poor old Wally Sluvver?’ murmured the Chair of Indefinite Studies, looking around in some trepidation. ‘Three years of tutorials post mortem .’

‘Well, the students did say he was a bit quiet,’ said Ridcully. He sniffed. ‘Doesn’t smell bad in here . Quite fresh, really. Pleasantly salty. Aha …’

There was bright light under a door at the other end of the crowded and dusty room, and the wizards could hear a gentle splashing.

‘Bath night. Good man,’ said Ridcully. ‘Well, we don’t have to disturb him.’

He peered at the titles of the books that lined the room.

‘Bound to be a lot about EcksEcksEcksEcks somewhere here,’ he added, pulling out a volume at random. ‘Come along. One man, one book each.’

‘Can we at least send out for some breakfast?’ grumbled the Dean.

‘Far too early for breakfast,’ said Ridcully.

‘Well, some supper, then?’

‘Too late for supper.’

The Chair of Indefinite Studies took in the rest of the room. A lizard scuttled across the wall and disappeared.

‘Bit of a mess in here, isn’t there?’ he said, glaring at the place where the lizard had been. ‘Everything’s very dusty. What’s in all those boxes?’

‘Says “Rocks” on this side,’ said the Dean. ‘Makes sense. If you’re going to study the outdoors, do it in the warm.’

‘But what about all the fishing nets and coconuts?’

The Dean had to agree the point. The study was a mess, even by the extremely expansive standards of wizardry. Boxes of dusty rocks occupied the little space that wasn’t covered with books and paper. They had been variously labelled, with inscriptions like ‘Rocks from Lower Down’, ‘Other Rocks’, ‘Curious Rocks’ and ‘Probably Not Rocks’. Further boxes, to Ponder’s rising interest, were marked ‘Remarkable Bones’, ‘Bones’ and ‘Dull Bones’.

‘One of those people who pokes his nose where it doesn’t belong, I fancy,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, and sniffed. He sniffed again, and looked down at the book he’d picked at random.

‘This is a pressed squid collection,’ he said.

‘Oh, is it any good? I used to collect starfish when I was a boy,’ said Ponder.

The Lecturer in Recent Runes shut the book and frowned at him over the top of it. ‘I daresay you did, young man. And old fossils too, I expect.’

‘I always thought that old fossils might have a lot to teach us,’ said Ponder. ‘Perhaps I was wrong,’ he added darkly.

‘Well, I for one have never believed all that business about dead animals turning into stone,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘It’s against all reason. What’s in it for them?’

‘So how do you explain fossils, then?’ said Ponder.

‘Ah, you see, I don’t,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, with a triumphant smile. ‘It saves so much trouble in the long run. How do skinless sausages hold together, Mister Stibbons?’

‘What? Eh? How should I know something like that?’

‘Really? You don’t know that but you think you’re entirely qualified to know how the whole universe was put together, do you? Anyway, you don’t have to explain fossils. They’re there . Why try to turn everything into a big mystery? If you go around asking questions the whole time you’ll never get anything done.’

‘Well, what are we put here for?’ said Ponder.

‘There you go again,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

‘Says here it’s girt by sea,’ said the Senior Wrangler.

He looked up at their stares.

‘This continent EcksEcksEcksEcks,’ he added, pointing at a page. ‘Says here “Little is known about it save that it is girt by sea.”’ {12} 12 One of the few lines of the Australian national anthem that most Australians actually know is “Our home is girt by sea”. Possibly it sticks in the memory because, at the age when kids first learn it, nobody knows what “girt” means. (It means “encircled, enclosed”.)

‘I’m glad to see someone has their mind on the task in hand,’ said Ridcully. ‘You two get on with some studyin’, please. Right, then, Senior Wrangler … girt by sea, is it?’

‘Apparently.’

‘Well … it would be, wouldn’t it,’ said Ridcully. ‘Anything else?’

‘I used to know a Gert,’ said the Bursar. The terror of the Library had sent his somewhat erratic sanity on a downward slide into the calm pink clouds again.

‘Not … very much,’ said the Senior Wrangler, flicking through the pages. ‘Sir Roderick Purdeigh spent many years looking for the alleged continent and was very emphatic that it didn’t exist.’ {13} 13 The Discworld Mapp chronicles Sir Roderick’s career in some detail, his principal achievement being three epic voyages of discovery around the Disc, during which he completely failed to find XXXX, the Counterweight Continent, or indeed any land of any consequence at all.

‘Quite a jolly gel. Gertrude Plusher, I think her name was. Face like a brick.’

‘Yes, but he once got lost in his own bedroom,’ said the Dean, thumbing through another book. ‘They found him in the wardrobe.’

‘I wonder if it’s the same Gert?’ said the Bursar.

‘Could be, Bursar,’ said Ridcully. He nodded at the other wizards. ‘No one’s to let him have any sugar or fruit.’

For a while there was no sound but the splash of water behind the door, the turning of pages and the Bursar’s randomized humming.

‘According to this note in Wasport’s Lives of the Very Dull People ,’ said the Senior Wrangler, squinting at the tiny script, ‘he met an old fisherman who said in that country the bark fell off the trees in the winter and the leaves stayed on.’ {14} 14 This is what happens with Australian gum trees, such as the coolabah.

‘Yes, but they always make up that sort of thing,’ said Ridcully. ‘Otherwise it’s too boring. It’s no good coming home and just saying you were shipwrecked for two years and ate winkles, is it? You have to put in a lot of daft stuff about men who go around on one big foot {15} 15 C. S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , book three of the Narnia series, features the island of the Dufflepuds, who do this. Terry himself traces the story back much further: “Two things influenced this. One is that, in accounts of very early long-distance voyages, ‘people who go around on one foot’ are among the usual freaks encountered (memory creaks, and recalls some about them in The Saga of Eirik the Red…). The other is that, when I was a kid, I’ll swear we had a class reader of Robinson Crusoe and a pic showed him in his goat skins marvelling at the one footprint he’d found in the sand. The illustrator had obviously been told to draw the picture of RC finding ‘a footprint’ and had done just that.” and The Land of Giant Plum Puddings and nursery rubbish like that.’

‘My word!’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, who had been engrossed in a volume at the other end of the table. ‘It says here that the people on the island of Slakki wear no clothes at all and the women are of unsurpassed beauty.’

‘That sounds quite dreadful,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies primly.

‘There are several woodcuts.’

‘I’m sure none of us wish to know that,’ said Ridcully. He looked around at the rest of the wizards and repeated, in a louder voice, ‘I said I’m sure none of us wish to know that . Dean? Come right back here and pick up your chair!’