The Last Continent

as quite a relief compared to some of the colors he’d seen, although he’d never seen anyone quite so black as the man now staring at him. At least, the Bursar assumed he was staring. The eyes were so deep set that he couldn’t be sure.
    The Bursar, who had been properly brought up, said, “Hooray, there’s a rosebush?”
    The old man gave him a rather puzzled nod. He walked over to the dead tree and pulled off a branch, which he pushed into the fire. Then he sat down and watched it as though watching wood char was the most engrossing thing in the world.
    The Bursar sat down on a rock and waited. If the game was patience, then two could play at it.
    The old man kept glancing up at him. The Bursar kept smiling. Once or twice he gave the man a little wave.
    Finally the burning branch was pulled out of the fire. The old man picked up the leather sack in his other hand and walked off among the rocks. The Bursar followed him.
    There was an overhang here under a small cliff, shielding a stretch of vertical rock from the rain. It was the kind of tempting surface that would, in Ankh-Morpork, have already been covered so thickly with so many posters, signs and graffiti that if you’d removed the wall the general accretion would still have stood up.
    Someone had drawn a tree. It was the simplest drawing of a tree the Bursar had ever seen since he’d been old enough to read books that weren’t mainly pictures, but it was also in some strange way the most accurate. It was simple because something complex had been rolled up small; as if someone had drawn trees, and started with the normal green cloud on a stick, and refined it, and refined it some more, and looked for the little twists in a line that said tree and refined those until there was just one line that said TREE.
    And now when you looked at it you could hear the wind in the branches.
    The old man reached down beside him and took up a flat stone with some white paste on it. He drew another line on the rock, slightly like a flattened V, and smeared it with mud.
    The Bursar burst out laughing as the wings emerged from the painting and whirred past him.
    And again he was aware of a strange effect in the air. It reminded him of…yes…old “Rubber” Houser, that was his name, dead now, of course, but remembered by many of his contemporaries as the inventor of the Graphical Device.
    The Bursar had joined the University when likely wizards started their training early, somewhere after the point where they learned to walk but before they started to push over girls in the playground. The writing of lines in detention class was a familiar punishment and the Bursar, like everyone else, toyed with the usual practice of tying several pens to a ruler in a group attempt to write lines in threes. But Houser, a reflective sort of boy, had scrounged some bits of wood and stripped a mattress of its springs and devised the four-, sixteen-and eventually the thirty-two-line writing machine. It had got so popular that boys were actually breaking rules in order to have a go on it, at threepence a time to use it and a penny to help wind it up. Of course, more time was spent setting it up than was ever saved by using it, but this is the case in many similar fields and is a sign of Progress. The experiments tragically came to an end when someone opened a door at the wrong moment and the entire pent-up force of Houser’s experimental prototype 256-line machine propelled him backwards out of a fourth-floor window.
    Except for the absence of screams, the hand tracing its infinitely simple lines on the rock brought back memories of Houser. There was a sense of something small being done that was making something happen that was huge.
    He sat and watched. It was, he remembered later whenever he was in a state to remember anything, one of the happiest times of his life.

    When Rincewind lifted his head a watchman’s helmet was spinning gently on the ground.
    To his amazement the men themselves were still there, although they were lying around in various attitudes of unconsciousness or at least, if they had sense, feigned unconsciousness. The Luggage had a cat’s tendency to lose interest in things that didn’t fight back even after you’d kicked them a few times.
    Shoes littered the ground, too. The Luggage was limping around in a circle.
    Rincewind sighed, and stood up. “Take the shoes off. They don’t suit you,” he said.
    The Luggage stood still for a moment, and then the rest