Ah, Rincewind, I thought you wouldn't want to be left behind,' said the Archchancellor, grinning nastily. 'Got any, did you?'
'The queen, in fact,' said Rincewind. 'Really? I'm impressed!'
'But she - it got away.'
'They've all gone,' said Ponder. 'I saw a blue flash on that hill up there. They've gone back to their world.'
'D'you think they'll come back?' said Ridcully.
'It doesn't matter if they do, sir. Hex will spot them and we can always get there in time.'
Ridcully cracked his knuckles. 'Good. Capital exercise. Much better than magicking paint at one another. Builds grit and team interdependency. Someone go and stop the Dean attacking that rock, will you? He does rather get carried away.'
A faint white ring appeared on the grass, wide enough to hold the wizards.
'Ah, the ride back,' said the Archchancellor, as the excited Dean was hustled towards the rest of the group. 'Time to—'
The wizards were suddenly in empty air. They fell. All but one of them were not holding their breath before they hit the river.
Wizards do, however, have good floating capabilities and a tendency to bob up and down. And the river was in any case rather like a slowly moving swamp. Floating logs and mud banks choked it. Here and there, mud banks had become sufficiently established to sprout a crop of trees. By degrees, and with much arguing about where dry land actually began -it was not very obvious -they splashed their way to the shore. The sun was hot overhead, and clouds of mosquitoes shimmered among the trees.
'Hex has brought us back to the wrong time,' said Ridcully, wringing out his robe.
'I don't think he'd do that, Archchancellor,' said Ponder, meekly. 'The wrong place, then. This is not a city, in case you hadn't noticed.'
Ponder looked around in bewilderment. The landscape around them was not exactly land and not exactly river. Ducks were quacking, somewhere. There were blue hills in the distance.
'On the upside,' said Rincewind, extracting frogs from a pocket, 'everything smells better.'
'This is a swamp, Rincewind.'
'So?'
'And I can see smoke,' said Ridcully.
There was a thin grey column in the middle distance.
Reaching it took a lot longer than the mere distance suggested. Land and water were contesting every step of the way. But, eventually, and with only one sprain and a number of bites, the wizards reached some thick bushes and peered into the clearing beyond.
There were some houses, but that was stretching the term. They were little more than piles of branches with reed roofs.
'They could be savages,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
'Or perhaps someone sent them all out into the country to forge a dynamic team spirit,' said the Dean, who had been badly bitten.
'Savages would be too much to hope for,' said Rincewind, watching the huts carefully.
'You want to find savages?' said Ridcully.
Rincewind sighed. 'I am the Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, sir. In an unknown situation, always hope for savages. They tend to be quite polite and hospitable provided you don't make any sudden moves or eat the wrong sort of animal.'
'Wrong sort of animal?' said Ridcully.
'Taboo, sir. They tend to be related. Or something.'
'That sounds rather ... sophisticated,' said Ponder suspiciously.
'Savages often are,' said Rincewind. 'It's the civilised people that give you trouble. They always want to drag you off somewhere and ask you unsophisticated questions. Edged weapons are often involved. Trust me on this. But these aren't savages, sir.'
'How can you tell?'
'Savages build better huts,' said Rincewind firmly. 'These are edge people.'
'I've never heard of edge people!' said Ridcully.
'I made it up,' said Rincewind. 'I run into them occasionally. People that live right on the edge, sir. Out on rocks. In the worst kind of desert. No tribe or clan. That takes too much effort. Of course, so does beating up strangers, so they're the best kind of people to meet.'
Ridcully looked around at the swamp. 'But there's waterfowl everywhere,' he said. 'Birds. Eggs.
Lots of fish, I'll be bound. Beavers. Animals that come down to drink. I could eat myself greasy to the eyebrows here. This is good country.'
'Hold on, one of them's coming out.' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
A stooping figure had emerged from a hut. It straightened up, and stared around. Huge nostrils flared.
'Oh my, look what just fell out of the ugly tree,' said the Dean. 'Is it a troll?'
'He's certainly a bit rugged,' said Ridcully. 'And why is he wearing boards?'
'I think he's just not very good at tanning hides,' said Rincewind.
The enormous shaggy head turned towards the wizards. The nostrils flared again.
'He smelled us,' said Rincewind, and started to turn. A hand grabbed the back of his robe.
'This is not a good time to run away, Professor,' said Ridcully, lifting him off the ground in one hand. 'We know you're good at languages. You get on with people. You have been chosen to be our ambassador. Do not scream.'
'Besides, the thing looks like cruel and unusual geography,' said the Dean, as Rincewind was thrust out of the bushes.
The big man watched him, but made no attempt to attack.
'Go on!' hissed the bushes. 'We need to find out when we are!'
'Oh, right,' said Rincewind, eyeing the giant cautiously. 'And he's going to tell me, is he? He's got a calendar, has he?'
He advanced carefully, hands up to show that he didn't have a weapon. Rincewind was a great believer in not being armed. It made you a target.
The man had obviously seen him. But he didn't seem very excited about it. He watched Rincewind as someone might watch a passing cloud.
'Er ... hello,' said Rincewind, stopping just out of range. 'Me big fella Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography belong Unseen University, you ... oh dear, you haven't even discovered washing, have you? Either that or it's the clothes belong you. Still, no obvious weapons. Er ...'
The man took a few steps forward and tugged the hat off Rincewind's head in one quick movement.
'Hey—!'
What was visible of the big face broke into a grin. The man turned the hat this way and that.
Sunlight sparkled off the word 'Wizzard' in cheap sequins.
'Oh, I see,' said Rincewind. 'Pretty glitter. Well, that's a start ...'
BLIND MAN WITH LANTERN
The wizards are now beginning to understand that, while you can eliminate evil by eliminating extelligence, the result can be about as interesting as watching daytime television. Their plan to stop the elves interfering with human evolution has worked, but they don't like the result. It is bland and unintelligent. It has no spark of creativity.
How did human creativity arise? By now you won't be surprised to learn that it came from stories. Let's take a closer look at the current scientific view of human evolution, and fill in that gap between R-O-C-K and the space elevator.
An elf, observing Earth's landmasses 25 million years ago, would have seen vast areas of forest.
From the hills of northern India to Tibet and China, and down into Africa, these forests held a great variety of small apes, ranging from about half the size of chimpanzees to the size of gorillas. The apes were at home on the ground and in the lower branches of the forest, and they were so common that today we have many fossils of them. In addition, the Old World monkeys were starting to diversify in the upper levels of the forest. Earth was a Monkey Planet.
But also a Snake Planet, a Big Cat Planet, a Nematode Planet, an Alga Planet and a Grass Planet.
Not to mention Plankton Planet, Bacterium Planet and Virus Planet. The elf might not have noticed that the African apes had produced several ground-dwelling kinds, not very different from the monkey-derived baboons. And it might also have failed to spot the presence of gibbons in the high branches, alongside the monkeys. These creatures were not particularly remarkable against a background of spectacular large mammals like rhinoceroses, a variety of forest elephants, bears. But we humans are interested in them, because they were our ancestors.