The Last Continent

it does, someone’d have thought of it by now.”
    “Yes. Me,” said Rincewind. “No worries.”
    “Makes you look a bit of a drongo, mate,” said Clancy.
    “Oh, good,” said Rincewind. “Which way’s Bugarup?”
    “Just turn left at the bottom of the canyon, mate.”
    “That’s all?”
    “You can ask again when you meet the bush rangers.”
    “They’ve got some sort of cabin or station, have they?”
    “They’ve…Well, just remember they’ll find you if you get lost.”
    “Really? Oh, well, I suppose that’s part of their job. Good day to you.”
    “G’day.”
    “No worries.”
    The men watched Rincewind until he was out of sight.
    “Didn’t seem very bothered, did he?”
    “He’s a bit gujeroo, if you ask me.”
    “Clancy?”
    “Yes, boss?”
    “You made that one up, didn’t you…?”
    ’Well…”
    “You bloody did, Clancy.”
    Clancy looked embarrassed, but then rallied. “All right, then,” he said hotly. “What about that one you used yesterday, ‘as busy as a one-armed carpenter in Smackaroo’?”
    “What about it?”
    “I looked it up in the atlas and there’s no such place, boss.”
    “There damn well is!”
    “There isn’t. Anyway, no one’d employ a one-armed carpenter, would they? So he wouldn’t be busy, would he?”
    “Listen, Clancy—”
    “He’d go fishing or something, wouldn’t he?”
    “Clancy, we’re supposed to be carving a new language out of the wilderness here—”
    “Probably’d need someone to help him bait the line, but—”
    “Clancy, will you shut up and go and get the horses?”
    It took twenty minutes to roll enough of the rocks away, and five minutes after that Clancy reported back.
    “Can’t find the little bastard, boss. And we looked underneath all the others.”
    “It couldn’t have got past us!”
    “Yes it could, boss. You saw it goin’ up those cliffs. Probably miles away by now. You want I should go after that bloke?”
    Remorse thought about it, and spat. “No, we got the colt back. That’s worth the money.” He stared reflectively down the canyon.
    “You all right, boss?”
    “Clancy, after we get back to the station, go on into town and call in at the Pastoral Hotel and bring back as many corks as they’ve got, willya?”
    “Think it’ll work, boss? He was as weird as…” Clancy was pulled up by the look in his boss’s eye. “He was pretty weird,” he said.
    “Weird, yeah. But smart, too. No flies on him.”
    Behind them, in the jumble of rocks and bushes at the end of the canyon, a drawing of a small horse became a drawing of a kangaroo and then faded into the stone.

    The worst thing about losing your temper with Mustrum Ridcully was that he never noticed when you did.
    Wizards, when faced with danger, would immediately stop and argue amongst themselves about exactly what kind of danger it was. By the time everyone in the party understood, either it had become the sort of danger where your options are so very, very clear that you instantly take one of them or die, or it had got bored and gone away. Even danger has its pride.
    When he was a boy, Ponder Stibbons had imagined that wizards would be powerful demi-gods able to change the whole world at the flick of a finger, and then he’d grown up and found that they were tiresome old men who worried about the state of their feet and, in harm’s way, would even bicker about the origin of the phrase “in harm’s way.”
    It had never struck him that evolution works in all kinds of ways. There were still quite deep scars in old buildings that showed what happened when you had the other kind of wizard.
    His footsteps took him, almost without his being aware, along the gently winding path up the mountain. Strange creatures peered at him from the undergrowth on either side. Some of them looked like—
    Wizards think in terms of books, and, now, one crept out from the shelves of Ponder’s memory. It had been given to him when he was small. In fact, he’d still got it somewhere, filed away in a cardboard box. *
    It had consisted of lots of small pages on a central spiral. Each one showed the head, body or tail of some bird, fish or animal. It was possible for the sufficiently bored to shuffle and turn them so that you got, say, a creature with the head of a horse, the body of a beetle and the tail of a fish. The cover promised “hours of fun” although, after the first three minutes, you couldn’t help wondering what kind of person could make