‘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}
‘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}
‘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} 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!’
‘There’s a mention of EcksEcksEcksEcks in Wrencher’s Snakes of All Nations,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘It says the continent has very few poisonous snakes…{16} Oh, there’s a footnote.’ His finger went down the page. ‘It says, “Most of them have been killed by the spiders.” How very odd.’
‘Oh,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘It also says here that “The denizens of Purdee Island also existeth inne a State of Nature”’ — he struggled with the ancient handwriting — ‘“yette is in Fine Healthe & of Good Bearing & Stature & is Trulee a … knobbly Savage …”’
‘Let me have a look at that,’ said Ridcully. The book was passed down the table. The Archchancellor scowled.
‘It’s written “knoble”,’ he said. ‘Noble savage. Means you … act like a gentleman, don’tcher-know …’
‘What … go fox-hunting, bow to ladies, don’t pay your tailor … That sort of thing?’
‘Shouldn’t think that chap owes his tailor very much,’ said Ridcully, looking at the accompanying illustration. ‘All right, chaps, let’s see what else we can find …’
‘He’s having rather a long bath, isn’t he?’ said the Dean, after a while. ‘I mean, I like to be as well scrubbed as the next man, but we’re talking serious prunes here.’
‘Sounds like he’s sloshing about,’ said the Senior Wrangler.
‘Sounds like the seaside,’ said the Bursar happily.
‘Try to keep up, will you, Bursar?’ said Ridcully wearily.
‘Actually …’ said the Senior Wrangler, ‘there is a certain seagully component, now that you mention it …’
Ridcully stood up, strode over to the bathroom door and held up his fist to knock.
‘I am the Archchancellor,’ he grumbled, lowering it. ‘I can open any doors I damn well please.’ And he turned the handle.
‘There,’ he said, as the door swung back. ‘See, gentlemen? A perfectly ordinary bathroom. Stone bath, brass taps, bath cap, humorous scrubbin’ brush in the shape of a duck … a perfectly ordinary bathroom. It is not, let me make myself quite clear, some kind of tropical beach. It doesn’t look remotely like a tropical beach.’
He pointed out of the bathroom’s open window, to where waves lapped languorously against a tree-fringed strand under a brilliant blue sky. The bathroom curtains flapped on a warm breeze.
‘That’s a tropical beach,’ he said. ‘See? No similarity at all.’
After his nourishing meal that contained masses of essential vitamins and minerals and unfortunately quite a lot of taste as well, the man with ‘Wizzard’ on his hat settled down for some housekeeping, or as much as was possible in the absence of a house.
It consisted of chipping away at a piece of wood with a stone axe. He appeared to be making a very short plank, and the speed with which he was working suggested that he’d done this before.
A cockatoo settled in the tree above him to watch. Rincewind glared at it suspiciously.
When the plank had apparently been smoothed to his satisfaction he stood on it with one foot and, swaying, drew around the foot with a piece of charcoal from the fire. He did the same with the other foot, and then settled down to hack at the wood again.
The watcher in the waterhole realized that the man was making two foot-shaped boards.
Rincewind took a length of twine from his pocket. He’d found a particular creeper which, if you carefully peeled the bark off, would give you a terrible spotted rash. What he’d actually been looking for was a creeper which, if you carefully peeled off the bark, would give you a serviceable twine, and it had taken several more goes and various different rashes to find out which one this was.
If you made a hole in the soles and fed a loop of twine through it,{17} into which a toe could be inserted, you ended up with some Ur-footwear. It made you shuffle like the Ascent of Man but, nevertheless, had some unexpected benefits. First, the steady flop-flop as you walked made you sound like two people to any dangerous creatures you were about to encounter, which, in Rincewind’s recent experience, was any creature at all. Second, although they were impossible to run in they were easy to run out of, so that you were a smoking dot on the burning horizon while the enraged caterpillar or beetle was still looking at your shoes and wondering where the other person was.
He’d had to run away a lot. Every night he made a new pair of thonged sandals, and every day he left them somewhere in the desert.
When he’d finished them to his satisfaction he took a roll of thin bark from his pocket. Attached to it by a length of twine was a very precious small stub of pencil. He’d decided to keep a journal in the hope that this might help. He looked at the recent entries.
Probably Tuesday: hot, flies. Dinner: honey ants. Attacked by honey ants. Fell into waterhole.