The Last Continent

completely unable to identify. And he swore as he hacked and hacked at a can of beer, saying, “What kind of idiots put beer in tins ?”
    By the time he managed to make a hole with a sharp stone the beer came out as high-speed froth, but he fielded as much as he could.
    Apart from the beer, though, things were looking up. He’d checked the trees for drop-bears and, best of all, there was no sign of Scrappy.
    He managed to pierce another tin, more carefully this time, and sucked thoughtfully at the contents.
    What a country! Nothing was exactly what it turned out to be, even the sparrows talked, or at least tried to say, “Who’s a pretty boy, then?” and it never ever rained. And all the water hid underground, so they had to pump it out with windmills.
    He’d passed another one as he left the canyon country. This one was still managing a trickle of water, but it had dried up to an occasional drip even as he watched it.
    Damn! He should’ve picked up some water to take away while he was there.
    He looked at the food in the sack. There was a loaf of bread the size and weight of a cannonball, and some vegetables. But at least they were recognizable vegetables. There was even a potato.
    He held it up against the sunset.
    Rincewind had eaten in many countries on the Disc, and sometimes he’d been able to complete an entire meal before having to run away. And they’d always lacked something. Oh, people did great things with spices and olives and yams and rice and whatnot, but what he’d come to crave was the humble potato.
    Time was when a plate of mash or chips would have been his for the asking. All he’d needed to do was wander down to the kitchens and ask. Food was always available for the asking at Unseen University, you could say that for the place, even if you said it with your mouth full. And, ridiculous though it sounded now, he’d hardly ever done that. The dish of potatoes’d come past at mealtimes and he’d probably have a spoonful but, sometimes, he wouldn’t! He’d…let…the…dish…go…by. He’d have rice instead. Rice! All very nutritious in its way, but basically only grown where potatoes would’ve floated to the surface.
    He’d remember those times, sometimes, usually in his sleep, and wake up shouting, “Will you pass the potatoes, please!”
    Sometimes he remembered the melted butter. Those were the bad days.
    He placed the potato reverentially on the ground and tipped out the rest of the bag. There was an onion and some carrots. A tin of…tea, by the smell of it, and a little box of salt.
    A flash of inspiration struck him with all the force and brilliance that ideas have when they’re traveling through beer.
    Soup! Nutritious and simple! You just boiled everything up! And, yes, he could use one of the empty beer tins, and make a fire, and chop up the vegetables, and the damp patch over there suggested there was water…
    He walked unsteadily over to have a look. There was a circular depression in the ground that looked as though it might have been some sort of pond once, and there was the usual cluster of slightly healthier than usual trees which you got in such places, but there was no sign of any water and he was too tired to dig.
    Then another insight struck him at the speed of beer. Beer! It was only water, really, with stuff in it. Wasn’t it? And most of what was in it was yeast, which was practically a medicine and definitely a food. In fact, when you thought about it, beer was only a kind of runny bread, in fact , it’d be better to use some of the beer in the soup! Beer soup! A few brain cells registered their doubt, but the rest of them grabbed them by the collar and said hoarsely, people cooked chicken in wine, didn’t they?
    It took him some time to hack one end off a tin, but eventually he had it standing in the fire with the chopped-up vegetables floating in the froth. A few more doubts assailed him at this point, but they were elbowed aside, especially when the smell that floated up made his mouth water and he’d opened another tin of beer as a pre-prandial appetizer.
    After a while he poked the vegetables with a stick. They were still pretty hard, even though a lot of the beer seemed to have boiled away. Was there something else he hadn’t done?
    Salt! Yes, that was it! Salt, marvelous stuff. He’d read where you went totally up the pole if you didn’t have any salt for a couple of weeks. That was probably why he was feeling so odd at the moment. He