The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

would you say? Approximately?’ he said.
    About a dozen fathoms, I believe.’
    ‘Then I could probably swim about a dozen fathoms, whatever they are.’
    *
    Abrim laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound. It sounded as though he had had laughter explained to him, probably slowly and repeatedly, but had never heard anyone actually do it.
    *
    ‘They’ll throw you into a seraglio!’
    Conina shrugged. ‘Could be worse.’ ‘But it’s got all these spikes and when they shut the door—’ hazarded Rincewind. ‘That’s not a seraglio.
    That’s an Iron Maiden. Don’t you know what a seraglio is?’
    ‘Um …’
    She told him. He went crimson.
    *
    It was said that everything in Ankh-Morpork was for sale except for the beer and the women, both of which one merely hired.
    *
    Of course, Ankh-Morpork’s citizens had always claimed that the river water was incredibly pure in any case. Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed.
    *
    The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist’s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the lift, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. †
    *
    In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find …
    *
    ‘Death walks abroad,’ added Nijel helpfully.
    ‘Abroad I don’t mind,’ said Rincewind. ‘They’re all foreigners. It’s Death walking around here I’m not looking forward to.’
    *
    ‘If we get a chance,’ whispered Rincewind to Nijel, ‘we run, right?’
    ‘Where to?’
    ‘From,’ said Rincewind, ‘the important word is from.’
    *
    Nijel was one of those people who, if you say ‘don’t look now’, would immediately swivel his head like an owl on a turntable. These are the same people who, when you point out, say, an unusual crocus just beside them, turn round aimlessly and put their foot down with a sad little squashy noise. If they were lost in a trackless desert you could find them by putting down, somewhere on the sand, something small and fragile like a valuable old mug that had been in your family for generations, and then hurrying back as soon as you heard the crash.
    *
    Rincewind tries to explain a wizard’s inbuilt desire to construct a tower:
    ‘Wizards always used to build a tower around themselves, like those … what do you call those things youfind at the bottom of rivers?’
    ‘Frogs.’
    ‘Stones.’
    ‘Unsuccessful gangsters.’
    ‘Caddis flies is what I meant,’ said Rincewind.
    *
    Rincewind wasn’t very good at precognition; in fact he could barely see into the present.
    *
    There came a thunderous knock at the door.
    There is a mantra to be said on these occasions. It doesn’t matter if the door is a tent flap, a scrap of hide on a wind-blown yurt, three inches of solid oak with great iron nails in or a rectangle of chipboard with mahogany veneer, a small light over it made of horrible bits of coloured glass and a bellpush that plays a choice of twenty popular melodies that no music lover would want to listen to even after five years’ sensory deprivation.
    One wizard turned to another and duly said: ‘I wonder who that can be at this time of night?’
    *
    The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Ly Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc’s greatest philosopher, who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.
    *
    The Four Horsemen of the Disc’s Apocralypse have had three of their horses stolen while they were in an inn.
    W EIGHT DOESN’T COME INTO IT . M Y STEED HAS CARRIED ARMIES . M Y STEED HAS CARRIED CITIES . Y EA, HE HATH CARRIED ALL THINGS IN THEIR DUE TIME , said Death. B UT HE’S NOT GOING TO CARRY YOU THREE .
    ‘Why not?’
    I T’S A MATTER OF THE LOOK OF THE THING .
    ‘It’s going to look pretty good, then, isn’t it,’ said War testily, ‘the One Horseman and Three Pedestrians of the Apocralypse.’
    *
    ‘If we’re going to die anyway, I’d rather die like this. Heroically,’ [said Nijel.]
    ‘Is it heroic to die like this?’