The Folklore of Discworld

the seabed, encircling the whole Earth, where it will remain till the end of the world, when it will emerge, and a particularly stupid Norse god named Thor will clobber it with a hammer. It is some comfort that it is also written that its dying breath will poison him.
    This myth is hard to believe. The distribution of land masses on the Earth is so untidy that no dragon could encircle the whole planet while lying on the seabed without suffering painful and possibly fatal dislocations of its spine. However, somewhere there exists another universe which was once briefly summoned into a prism by the gifted young wizard Simon, and this one does appear to contain a Middle-Earth Worm.
    A prism … held another slowly turning disc, surrounded by little stars. But there were no ice walls around this one, just a red-gold thread that turned out on closer inspection to be a snake – a snake big enough to encircle a world. For reasons best known to itself it was biting its own tail. [ Equal Rites ]
    This is confirmed by something the sea-troll Tethis told Rincewind (see The Colour of Magic ). While tumbling through space after being swept off the edge of his own world, Tethis passed within a few leagues of a world with a strange ring of mountains round it – mountains that turned out to be ‘the biggest dragon you could ever imagine, covered in snow and glaciers and holding its tail in its mouth’. A dim awareness of this universe may explain the Earthmyth of Draco maritimus immensis , and also the image of the ouroboros or tail-biting serpent known to alchemists and hermetic philosophers as the symbol of the ever-circling eternity of time and space.
T HE B ASILISK AND THE C HIMERA
    The basilisk is a particularly dangerous species of serpent, which can kill any other animal merely by glancing at it with its fierce, fell and fiery eyes; its breath destroys all vegetation, so it is necessarily a desert-dweller; its blood is said to be of great value to magicians. On Earth, it was first identified by the Ancient Greeks, who gave it a name meaning ‘little king’, because (as the Roman naturalist Pliny explained) it has a golden mark like a crown on its head.
    Later, during the Middle Ages of western Europe, people believed that it wore an actual coronet of pure gold, and some described it as a snake with four pairs of legs. They gave it a second name, ‘cockatrice’, and said it was a mortal enemy of crocodiles. They also claimed to know how it is born: when a farmyard cock lives longer than is normal for his species, in the last stage of his life he starts to lay eggs, and if, in the hottest days of summer, some venomous serpent or toad coils itself round such an egg and hatches it, what comes out is the cockatrice or basilisk. It has the head and legs of a cockerel, but its body tapers down to a snake’s tail, ending in a dart. It was much feared for its death-dealing glance, until a method of destroying it was devised. Writing a Historie of Serpents in 1608, the naturalist Edward Topsell mocked the legend:
    I cannot without laughing remember the old wives’ tales of the vulgar cockatrices that have been in England, for I have often-times heard it confidently related, that once our nation was full of cockatrices, and that a certain man did destroy them bygoing up and down in glasse, whereby their own shapes were reflected upon their own faces, and so they died.
    Topsell was wrong to laugh. The method is perfectly valid. It exploits an instinct which can also be seen in young male swamp dragons in the breeding season, when they are so eager to drive off a rival that they will attack their own reflections (as Chubby did in Men at Arms ).
    On the Discworld, the basilisk inhabits the burning deserts of Klatch. On one occasion, as we read in Sourcery , a hungry basilisk which lay panting in the baking shade of a rock, dribbling corrosive yellow slime, heard the thumping of hundreds of little feet. This, the creature thought, must mean that its dinner was on the way. But what was approaching was the wizard Rincewind’s fearsome Luggage, which was in a particularly foul mood because it had become separated from its master and had recently had to fight its way across a river infested with alligators.
    The basilisk blinked its legendary eyes and uncoiled twenty feet of hungry body, winding out and on to the sand like fluid death.
    The Luggage staggered to a halt and raised its lid threateningly. The basilisk hissed, but a