The Last Continent

the staff up on the roof mending the leaks…”
    And that was it.
    Rincewind sat for a while watching the last of the passengers get aboard, and took a final look around the rain-soaked harbor. Then he stood up.
    “Come on, then,” he said.
    The Luggage followed him up the gangplank, and they went home.

    It rained.
    The flood gurgled along ancient creek beds and overflowed, spreading out in a lacework of gullies and rivulets.
    Further rain ensued.
    Near the center of the last continent, where waterfalls streamed down the flanks of a great red rock that steamed with the heat of a ten-thousand-year summer, a small naked boy sat in the branches of a tree along with three bears, several possums, innumerable parrots and a camel.
    Apart from the rock, the world was a sea.
    And someone was wading through it. He was an old man, carrying a leather bag on his back.
    He stopped, waist deep in swirling water, and looked up at the rain.
    Something was coming. The clouds were twisting, spinning, leaving a silvery hole all the way up to the blue sky, and there was a sound that you might get if you took a roll of thunder and stretched it out thin.
    A dot appeared, growing bigger. The man raised a skinny arm and, suddenly, it was holding an oval of wood that trailed a cord, which hit his hand with a slap .
    The rain stopped.
    The last few drops hammered out a little rhythm that said: now we know where you are, we’ll be coming back…
    The boy laughed.
    The old man looked up, caught sight of him, and grinned. He tucked the bullroarer into the string around his waist and took up a boomerang painted in more colors than the boy had ever seen in one place together.
    The man tossed it up and caught it a couple of times and then, glancing sideways to make sure his audience was watching him, he hurled it.
    It rose into the sky and went on climbing, long past the point where any normal thing should have started to fall back. It grew bigger, too. The clouds parted to let it through. And then it stopped, as if suddenly nailed to the sky.
    Like sheep which, having been driven to a pasture, can now spread out at their leisure, the clouds began to drift. Afternoon sunlight sliced through into the still waters. The boomerang hung in the sky, and the boy thought he would have to find a new word for the way the colors glowed.
    In the meantime, he looked down at the water and tried out the word he’d been taught by his grandfather, who’d been taught it by his grandfather, and which had been kept for thousands of years for when it would be needed.
    It meant the smell after rain .
    It had, he thought, been well worth waiting for.
    * Much easier to discover than fire, and only slightly harder to discover than water.
    * Not why is it anything . Just why it is.
    † A cross between a porter and a proctor. A bledlow is not chosen for his imagination, because he usually doesn’t have any.
    * Ankh-Morpork’s leading vet, generally called in by people faced with ailments too serious to be trusted to the general medical profession. Doughnut’s one blindspot was his tendency to assume that every patient was, to a greater or lesser extent, a racehorse.
    * In the case of cold fusion, this was longer than usual.
    * Wizards are certain of the existence of the temporal gland, although not even the most invasive alchemist has ever found where it is located and current theory is that it has a non-corporeal existence, like a sort of ethereal appendix. It keeps track of how old your body is, and is so susceptible to the influence of a high magical field that it might even work in reverse, absorbing the body’s normal supplies of chrononine. The alchemists say it is the key to immortality, but they say that about orange juice, crusty bread and drinking your own urine. An alchemist would cut his own head off if he thought it’d make him live longer.
    * Broadly speaking, the acceleration of a wizard through the ranks of wizardry by killing off more senior wizards. It is a practice currently in abeyance, since a few enthusiastic attempts to remove Mustrum Ridcully resulted in one wizard being unable to hear properly for two weeks. Ridcully felt that there was indeed room at the top, and he was occupying all of it.
    * Sometimes Ponder thought his skill with Hex was because Hex was very clever and very stupid at the same time. If you wanted it to understand something, you had to break the idea down into bite-sized pieces and make absolutely sure there was no room