The Last Continent

it, into which a toe could be inserted, you ended up with some Ur-footwear. It made you shuffle like the Ascent of Man but, nevertheless, had some unexpected benefits. First, the steady flop-flop as you walked made you sound like two people to any dangerous creatures you were about to encounter, which, in Rincewind’s recent experience, was any creature at all. Second, although they were impossible to run in they were easy to run out of, so that you were a smoking dot on the burning horizon while the enraged caterpillar or beetle was still looking at your shoes and wondering where the other person was.
    He’d had to run away a lot. Every night he made a new pair of thonged sandals, and every day he left them somewhere in the desert.
    When he’d finished them to his satisfaction he took a roll of thin bark from his pocket. Attached to it by a length of twine was a very precious small stub of pencil. He’d decided to keep a journal in the hope that this might help. He looked at the recent entries.
Probably Tuesday: hot, flies. Dinner: honey ants. Attacked by honey ants. Fell into waterhole .
Wednesday, with any luck: hot, flies. Dinner: either bush raisins or kangaroo droppings. Chased by hunters, don’t know why. Fell into waterhole .
Thursday (could be): hot, flies. Dinner: blue-tongued lizard. Savaged by blue-tongued lizard. Chased by different hunters. Fell off cliff, bounced into tree, pissed on by small gray incontinent teddy bear, landed in a waterhole .
Friday: hot, flies. Dinner: some kind of roots which tasted like sick. This saved time .
Saturday: hotter than yesterday, extra flies. V.thirsty .
Sunday: hot. Delirious with thirst and flies. Nothing but nothing as far as the eye can see, with bushes in it. Decided to die, collapsed, fell down sand dune into waterhole .
    He wrote very carefully and as small as possible: “ Monday: hot, flies. Dinner: moth grubs.” He stared at the writing. It said it all, really.
    Why didn’t people here like him? He’d meet some small tribe, everything’d be friendly, he’d pick up a few tips, get to know a few names, he’d build up a vocabulary, enough to chat about ordinary everyday things like the weather—and then suddenly they’d be chasing him away. After all, everyone talked about the weather, didn’t they?
    Rincewind had always been happy to think of himself as a racist. The One Hundred Meters, the Mile, the Marathon—he’d run them all. Later, when he’d learned with some surprise what the word actually meant , he’d been equally certain he wasn’t one. He was a person who divided the world quite simply into people who were trying to kill him and people who weren’t. That didn’t leave much room for fine details like what color anyone was. But he’d be sitting by the campfire, trying out a simple conversation, and suddenly people would get upset over nothing at all and drive him off. You didn’t expect people to get nasty just because you’d said something like, “My word, when did it last rain here?” did you?
    Rincewind sighed, picked up his stick, beat the hell out of a patch of ground, lay down and went to sleep.
    Occasionally he screamed under his breath and his legs made running motions, which just showed that he was dreaming.
    The waterhole rippled. It wasn’t large, a mere puddle deep in a bush-filled gully between some rocks, and the liquid it contained could only be called water because geographers refuse to countenance words like “souphole.”
    Nevertheless it rippled, as though something had dropped into the center. And what was odd about the ripples was that they didn’t stop when they reached the edge of the water but continued outwards over the land as expanding circles of dim white light. When they reached Rincewind they broke up and flowed around him, so that now he was the center of concentric lines of white dots, like strings of pearls.
    The waterhole erupted. Something climbed up into the air and sped away across the night.
    It zigzagged from rock to mountain to waterhole. And as the eye of observation rises, the traveling streak briefly illuminates other dim lines, hanging above the ground like smoke, so from above the whole land appears to have a circulatory system, or nerves…
    A thousand miles from the sleeping wizard the line struck ground again, emerged in a cave, and passed across the walls like a searchlight.
    It hovered in front of a huge, pointed rock for a moment and then, as if reaching a decision, shot