Free Last Continent by Terry Pratchett Page B

the egg inside them?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Although I must say I’ve always thought that it was rather cruel to the chicken—’
    There was a soft little sound, very similar to the one you get, aged around seven, when you stick your finger in your mouth and flick it out again quickly and think it is incredibly funny.
    Ponder turned his head, dreading the sight he was about to see.
    Mrs Whitlow had a tray of cutlery in one hand and was prodding ineffectually at the air with the stick that she held in the other.
    â€˜Ai only moved it to get things through,’ she said. ‘Now Ai can’t seem to quate find where the silly thing is supposed to go.’
    Where there had been a dark rectangle opening into the geographer’s dingy study, there was now only waving palms and sunlit sand. Strictly speaking, it could be said to be an improvement. It depended on your point of view.
    Rincewind surfaced, gasping for breath. He’d fallen into a waterhole.
    It was in . . . well, it looked as though once there had been a cave, and the roof had collapsed. There was a big circle of blue right above him.
    Rocks had fallen down here, and sand hadblown in, and seeds had taken root. Cool, damp and green . . . the place was a little oasis, tucked away from the sun and the wind.
    He pulled himself out of the water and looked around while he drained off. Vines had grown among the rocks. A few small trees had managed to take root in the crack. There was even a little bit of a beach. By the look of the stains on the rocks, the water had once been a lot higher.
    And there . . . Rincewind sighed. Wasn’t that just typical? You got some quiet little beauty spot miles from anywhere, and there was always some graffiti artist ready to spoil it. It was like that time when he was hiding out in the Morpork Mountains, and right in the back of one of the deepest caves some vandal had drawn loads of stupid bulls and antelopes. Rincewind had been so disgusted he’d wiped them off. And they’d left lots of old bones and junk lying around. Some people had no idea how to behave.
    Here, they’d covered the rock walls with drawings in white, red and black. Animals again, Rincewind noticed. They didn’t even look particularly realistic.
    He stopped, water dripping off him, in front of one. Someone had probably wanted to draw a kangaroo. There were the ears and the tail and the clown feet. But they looked alien, and there were so many lines and cross-hatchings that the figure seemed . . . odd. It looked as though the artist hadn’t just wanted to draw a kangaroo from the outside but had wanted to show the inside as well, and then had wanted to show the kangaroo lastyear and today and next week and also what it was thinking, all at the same time, and had set out to do the whole thing with some ochre and a stick of charcoal.
    It seemed to move in his head.
    He blinked, but it still hurt. His eyes seemed to want to wander off in different directions.
    Rincewind hurried further along the cave, ignoring the rest of the paintings. The piled rubble of the collapsed ceiling reached nearly to the surface, but there was space on the other side, going on into darkness. It looked as though he was in a piece of tunnel that had collapsed.
    â€˜You walked right past it,’ said the kangaroo.
    He turned. It was standing on the little beach.
    â€˜I didn’t see you get down here,’ said Rincewind. ‘How did you get down here?’
    â€˜Come on, I’ve got to show you something. You can call me Scrappy, if you like.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜We’re mates, ain’t we? I’m here to help you.’
    â€˜Oh, dear.’
    â€˜Can’t make it alone across this land, mate. How d’you think you’ve survived so far? Water’s bloody hard to find out here these days.’
    â€˜Oh, I don’t know, I just keep falling into—’
    Rincewind