Once More With Footnotes

tree. Twenty years of assiduous reading just overflowed. Long before "horse whispering" become widely publicised because a rather narcissisti c actor thought he'd like to star in a film, I found the following unfolding in the early pages of the Discworld book Witches Abroad, dealing with one minor character who was a blacksmith:
     
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                  To his glowing forge were brought the stud stallions, the red- eyed and foam-flecked kings of the horse nation, beasts with hooves like soup-plates who had kicked lesser men through walls. But Jason Ogg knew the secret of the mystic Horseman's Word, and he would go alone into the forge, politely shut the door, and le a d the creature out again after half an hour, newly-shod and strangely docile.
     
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                  Jason Ogg is also, incidentally, the leader of the Lancre Morris Men, up in the mountains where Morris dancing is a dangerous sport. I've always had the true Englishman's ge netic distrust of Morris Dancers, being especially wary in any pubs with an invitingly large car park around early May, and I was a little surprised to find myself beginning the book Reaper Man like this:
     
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                  The Morris dance is common to all inhabited wo rlds in the multiverse.
     
                  It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it's springtime and with any luck the carbon dioxide will unfreeze again. The imperative is felt by deep-sea beings who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycles of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep.
     
                  It is danced innocently by raggedy-bearded young mathematicians to an inexpert accordion rendering of Mrs. Widgery's Lodger and ruthl essly by such as the Ninja Morris Men of New Ankh, who can do strange and terrible things with a simple handkerchief and a bell.
     
                  And it is never danced properly.
     
                  Except on the Discworld, which is flat and supported on the backs of four elephants which travel through space on the shell of Great A'Tuin, the world turtle.
     
                  And even there, only in one place have they got it right. It's a small village high in the Ramtop Mountains, where the big and simple secret is handed down across the generations.
     
                  The re, the men dance on the first day of spring, backwards and forwards, bells tied under their knees, white shirts flapping. People come and watch. There's an ox roast afterwards, and it's generally considered a nice day out for all the family.
     
                  But that is n't the secret.
     
                  The secret is the other dance.
     
                  And that won't happen for a while yet.
     
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                  The book closes, after various adventures among the living and the dead, with the following:
     
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                  In the village in the Ramtops where they understand what the Mo rris dance is all about, they dance it just once, at dawn, on the first day of spring They don't dance it after that, all through the summer. After all, what would be the point? What use would it be?
     
                  But on a certain day when the nights are drawing in, t he dancers leave work early and take, from attics and cupboards, the other costume, the black one, and the other bells. And they go by separate ways to a valley among the leafless trees. They don't speak. There is no music. It's very hard to imagine what k ind there could be.
     
                  The bells don't ring. They're made of octiron, a magic metal. But they're not, accurately, silent bells. Silence is merely the absence of noise. They make the opposite of noise, a sort of heavily textured silence.
     
                  And in the cold af ternoon, as the light drains from the sky, among the frosty leaves and in the damp air, they dance the other Morris. Because of the balance of things.
     
                  You've got to dance both, they say. Otherwise you can't dance either.
     
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                  I was surprised — perhaps I sh ouldn't have been — to be contacted after that by various Morris sides who, after reading the book, had tried dancing the Dark Morris in November, wearing black.