Eric

during the long, lovely, boring hours when he’d worked in the Library he’d whiled away the time by reading up on all the exotic and faraway places he’d never visited. He remembered that at the time he’d sighed with relief that he’d never have to visit them.
    And, now, here he was.
    Jungle surrounded him. It wasn’t nice, interesting, open jungle, such as leopard-skin-clad heroes might swing through, but serious, real jungle, jungle that towered up like solid slabs of greenness, thorned and barbed, jungle in which every representative of the vegetable kingdom had really rolled up its bark and got down to the strenuous business of outgrowing all competitors. The soil was hardly soil at all, but dead plants on the way to compost-hood; water dripped from leaf to leaf, insects whined in the humid, spore-laden air, and there was the terrible breathless silence made by the motors of photosynthesis running flat out. Any yodeling hero who tried to swing through that lot might just as well take his chances with a bean-slicer.
    “How do you do that?” said Eric.
    “It’s probably a knack,” said Rincewind.
    Eric subjected the wonders of Nature to a cursory and disdainful glance.
    “This doesn’t look like a kingdom,” he complained. “You said we could go to a kingdom. Do you call this a kingdom?”
    “This is probably the rain forests of Klatch,” said Rincewind. “They’re stuffed full of lost kingdoms.”
    “You mean mysterious ancient races of Amazonian princesses who subject all male prisoners to strange and exhausting progenitative rites?” said Eric, his glasses beginning to fog.
    “Haha,” said Rincewind stonily. “What an imagination the child has.”
    “Wossname, wossname, wossname!” shrieked the parrot.
    “I’ve read about them,” said Eric, peering into the greenery. “Of course, I own those kingdoms as well.” He stared at some private inner vision. “Gosh,” he said, hungrily.
    “I should concentrate on the tribute if I was you,” said Rincewind, setting off down what was possibly a path.
    The brightly colored blooms on a tree nearby turned to watch him go.
    In the jungles of central Klatch there are, indeed, lost kingdoms of mysterious Amazonian princesses who capture male explorers for specifically masculine duties. These are indeed rigorous and exhausting and the luckless victims do not last long. *
    There are also hidden plateaux where the reptilian monsters of a bygone epoch romp and play, as well as elephants’ graveyards, lost diamond mines, and strange ruins decorated with hieroglyphs the very sight of which can freeze the most valiant heart. On any reasonable map of the area there’s barely room for the trees.
    The few explorers who have returned have passed on a number of handy hints to those who follow after, such as : 1) avoid if possible any hanging- down creepers with beady eyes and a forked tongue at one end; 2) don’t pick up any orange-and-black-striped creepers that are apparently lying across the path, twitching, because there is often a tiger on the other end; and 3) don’t go.
    If I’m a demon, Rincewind thought hazily, why is everything stinging me and trying to trip me up? I mean, surely I can only be harmed by a wooden dagger through my heart? Or do I mean garlic?
    Eventually the jungle opened out into a very wide, cleared area that stretched all the way to a distant blue range of volcanoes. The land fell away below them to a patchwork of lakes and swampy fields, here and there punctuated by great stepped pyramids, each one crowned with a thin plume of smoke curling into the dawn air. The jungle track opened out into a narrow, but paved, road.
    “Where’s this, demon?” said Eric.
    “It looks like one of the Tezuman kingdoms,” said Rincewind. “They’re ruled over by the Great Muzuma, I think.”
    “She’s an Amazonian princess, is she?”
    “Strangely enough, no. You’d be astonished how many kingdoms aren’t ruled by Amazonian princesses, Eric.”
    “It looks pretty primitive, anyway. A bit Stone Age.”
    “The Tezuman priests have a sophisticated calendar and an advanced horology,” quoted Rincewind.
    “Ah,” said Eric, “Good.”
    “No,” said Rincewind patiently. “It means time measurement.”
    “Oh.”
    “You’d approve of them. They’re superb mathematicians, apparently.”
    “Huh,” said Eric, blinking solemnly. “Shouldn’t think they’ve got a lot to count in a backward civilization like