The Last Continent

doesn’t rain here.”
    “There you go aga—” She stopped. “What’s it you know? You’re looking shifty, Mister Wizard.”
    Rincewind stared glumly up at the tower of smoke. There were twirling, tumbling sparks in it, rising in the heat and showering down over the city. Everything will be bone dry, he thought. It doesn’t rain here. It—Hang on…
    “How do you know I’m a wizard?” he said.
    “It’s written on your hat,” she said. “Badly.”
    “You know what a wizard is ? This is a serious question. I’m not pushing a prawn.”
    “Everyone knows what a wizard is! We’ve got a university full of the useless mongrels!”
    “And you can show me where this is, can you?”
    “Find it yourself!” She tried to stride off through the milling crowd. He ran after her.
    “Please don’t go! I need someone like you! As an interpreter!”
    “What do you mean? We speak the same language!”
    “Really? Stubbies here are really short shorts or small beer bottles. How often do newcomers confuse the two?”
    Neilette actually smiled. “Not more than once.”
    “Just take me to this university of yours, will you?” said Rincewind. “I think I can feel a Famous Last Stand coming on.”
    There was a brief scream of metal overhead and a windmill fan crashed down into the street.
    “And we’d better be quick,” he added. “Otherwise all there’ll be to drink is beer.”

    The Bursar laughed again as a series of little charcoal dots extended their legs, formed up and marched down the stone and across the sand in front of him. Behind him the trees were already loud with birdsong—
    And then, sadly, with wizards as well.
    He could hear the voices in the distance and, while wizards are always questioning the universe, they mainly direct the questions at other wizards and don’t bother to listen to the answers.
    “— certainly saw no trees when we arrived .”
    “ Probably we didn’t see them because of the rain, and the Senior Wrangler didn’t see them because of Mrs. Whitlow. And get a grip on yourself, will you, Dean? I’m sure you’re getting young again! No one’s impressed !”
    “ I think I must just be naturally youthful, Archchancellor .”
    “ Nothing to be proud of there! And please, someone, stop the Senior Wrangler getting a grip on hims—Oh, looks like someone’s had a picnic …”
    The painter seemed engrossed in his work, and paid them no attention at all.
    “ I’m sure the Bursar went this way —”
    A little red mud colored a complex curve and there, as if it had always been there, was a creature with the body of a giant rabbit, the expression of a camel and a tail that a lizard would be proud of. The wizards appeared around the rock just in time to see it scratch its ears.
    “Ye gods, what’s that ?”
    “Some sort of rat?” said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.
    “Hey, look, Bursar’s found one of the locals…” The Dean ambled across to the painter, who was watching the wizards with his mouth open. “Good morning, fellow. What’s that thing called?”
    The painter followed the pointing finger. “Kangaroo?” he said. The voice was a whisper, on the very cusp of hearing, but the ground trembled.
    “Kangaroo, eh?”
    “That might not be what it’s called, sir,” said Ponder. “He might just be saying, ‘I don’t know.’”
    “Can’t see why not. He looks the sort of chap you find in this sort of place,” said the Dean. “Deep tan. Shortage of trousers. The sort of fellow who’d know what the wildlife is called, certainly.”
    “He just drew it,” said the Bursar.
    “Oh, did he? Very good artists, some of these chaps.”
    “He’s not Rincewind, is he?” said Ridcully, who seldom bothered to remember faces. “I know he’s a bit on the dark side, but a few months in the sun’d bake anyone.”
    The other wizards drew together and looked around for any nearby sign of mobile rectangularity.
    “No hat,” said Ponder, and that was that.
    The Dean peered at the rock wall. “Quite good drawings for native art,” he said. “Interesting…lines.”
    The Bursar nodded. As far as he could see, the drawings were simply alive. They might be colored earth on rock, but they were as alive as the kangaroo that’d just hopped away.
    The old man was drawing a snake now. One wiggly line.
    “I remember seeing some of those palaces the Tezumen built in the jungle,” said the Dean, watching him. “Not an ounce of mortar in the whole place and the stones