‘We got past the age of sixty-five, Senior Wrangler.’
‘Ah, yes. And it turned out that we were trustworthy after all.’
‘Good thing we found out in time, eh?’
‘There’s a crab climbing that tree,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, who was lying on his back and staring straight upwards. ‘An actual crab.’
‘Yes,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘They’re called Tree-climbing Crabs.’
‘Why?’
‘I had this book when I was a little lad,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘It was about this man who was shipwrecked on an island such as this and he thought he was all alone and then one day he found a footprint in the sand. There was a woodcut,’ he added.
‘One footprint?’ said the Dean, sitting up, clutching his head.
‘Well . . . yes, and when he saw it he knew that he—’
‘—was alone on an island with a crazed one-legged long-jump champion?’ said the Dean. He was feeling testy.
‘Well, obviously he found some other footprints later on . . .’
‘I wish I was on a desert island all alone,’ said the Senior Wrangler gloomily, watching Ridcully running on the spot.
‘Is it just me,’ the Dean asked, ‘or are we marooned thousands of miles and thousands of years from home?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so. Is there any breakfast?’
‘Stibbons found some soft-boiled eggs.’
‘What a useful young man he is,’ the Dean groaned. ‘Where did he find them?’
‘On a tree.’
Bits of last night came back to the Dean.
‘A soft-boiled-egg tree?’
‘Yes,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘Nicely runny. They’re quite good with breadfruit soldiers.’
‘You’ll be telling me next he found a spoon tree . . .’
‘Of course not.’
‘Good.’
‘It’s a bush.’ The Senior Wrangler held up a small wooden spoon. It had a few small leaves still attached to it.
‘A bush that fruits spoons . . .’
‘Young Stibbons said it makes perfect sense, Dean. After all, he said, we’d picked them because they’re useful, and then spoons are always getting lost. Then he burst into tears.’
‘He’s got a point, though. Honestly, this place is like Big Rock Candy Mountain.’
‘I vote we leave it as soon as possible,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘We’d better have a serious look at this boat idea today. I don’t want to meet another of those horrible lizards.’
‘One of everything, remember?’
‘Then probably there’s a worse one.’
‘Building some sort of boat can’t be very hard,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘Even quite primitive people manage it.’
‘Now look,’ snapped the Dean, ‘we’ve searched everywhere for a decent library on this island. There simply isn’t one! It’s ridiculous. How is any-one supposed to get anything done?’
‘I suppose . . . we could . . . try things?’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘You know . . . see what floats, that sort of thing.’
‘Oh, well, if you want to be crude about it . . .’
The Chair of Indefinite Studies looked at the Dean’s lace and decided it was time to lighten the atmosphere.
‘I was, aha, just wondering,’ he said, ‘as a little mental exercise . . . if you were marooned on a desert island, eh, Dean . . . what kind of music would you like to listen to, eh?’
The Dean’s face clouded further. ‘I think, Chair, that I would like to listen to the music in the Ankh-Morpork Opera House.’
‘Ah. Oh? Yes. Well . . . very . . . very . . . very direct thinking there, Dean.’
Rincewind grinned glassily. ‘So . . . you’re a crocodile, then.’
‘Thif worrying you?’ said the barman.
‘No! No! Don’t they call you anything else, though?’
‘Well . . . there’f a nickname they gave me . . .’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Yeah. Crocodile Crocodile. But in here moft people call me Dongo.’
‘And . . . er . . . this stuff? What do you call this?’ ‘We call it beer,’ said the crocodile. ‘What do you call it?’
The barman wore a grubby shirt and a pair of shorts, and until he’d seen a pair of shorts tailored for someone with very short legs and a very long tail Rincewind hadn’t realized what a difficult job tailoring must be.
Rincewind held the beer glass up to the light. And that was the point. You could see light all the way through it. Clear beer. Ankh-Morpork beer was technically ale, that is to say, gravy made from hops. It had texture. It had flavour, even if you didn’t always want to know what of. It had body. It had dregs. You could eat the last half-inch of it with a spoon.
This stuff was thin and sparkly and looked as though someone had already drunk it. Tasted all right, though. Didn’t sit on your stomach the way the beer at home did. Weak stuff, of course, but it never did to insult someone else’s beer.
‘Pretty good,’ he said.
‘Where’d you blow in from?’
‘Er . . . I floated here on a piece of driftwood.’
‘Was there room with all the camels?’
‘Er . . . yes.’
‘Good on yer.’
Rincewind needed a map. Not a geographical map, although one of those would be a help, but one that showed him where his head was at. You didn’t usually get crocodiles serving behind a bar, but everyone else in this cavern of a place seemed to think it was perfectly normal. Mind you, the people in the bar included three sheep in overalls and a couple of kangaroos playing darts.
And they weren’t exactly sheep. They looked more like, well . . . human sheep. Sticking-out ears, white curls, a definite sheepish look, but standing upright, with hands. And he was pretty sure that there was no way you could get a cross between a human and a sheep. If there was, people would definitely have found out by now, especially in the more isolated rural districts.
Something similar had happened with the kangaroos. There were the pointy ears and they definitely had snouts, but now they were leaning on the bar drinking this thin, strange beer. One of them was wearing a stained vest with the legend ‘Wagga Hay – it’s the Rye Grass!’ just visible under the dirt.
In short, Rincewind had the feeling he wasn’t looking at animals at all. He took another sip of the beer.
He couldn’t raise the subject with Crocodile Dongo. There was a philosophical wrongness about drawing a crocodile’s attention to the fact that there were a couple of kangaroos in the bar.
‘Youse wanta nother beer?’ said Dongo.
‘Yeah, right,’ said Rincewind.
He looked at the sign on the beer pump. It was a picture of a grinning kangaroo. The label said: Roo Beer.
He raised his eyes to a torn poster on the wall. It also advertised Roo Beer. There was the same kangaroo, holding a pint of said beer and wearing the same knowing grin.
It looked familiar, for some reason.
1 can’t help nossisting . . .’ He tried again. ‘I can’t help noticing’, he said, ‘that some people in this barrardifferentshap from other p’ple.’
‘Well, old Hollowlog Joe over there’f put on a bit of weight lately,’ said Dongo, polishing a glass.
Rincewind looked down at his legs. ‘Whose legsare dese?’
‘You okay, mifter?’
‘Prob’ly been bitten by so’thing,’ said Rincewind. A sudden urgent need gripped him.
‘It’f out the back,’ said Dongo.
‘Out back in the outback,’ said Rincewind, staggering forward. ‘Hahahaha—’
He walked into an iron pillar, which picked him up in a fist and held him at arm’s length. He looked along the arm to a large angry face and an expression that said a lot of beer was looking for a fight and the rest of the body was happy to go along with it.
Rincewind was muzzily aware that in his case a lot of beer wanted to run away. And at a time like this, it’s always the beer talking.
‘I bin lisnin’ to you. Where’re you from, mister?’ said the giant’s beer.
‘Ankh-M’pork . . .’ At a time like this, why lie?
The bar went quiet.
‘An’ you’re gonna come here and make a lot of cracks about us all drinkin’ beer and fightin’ and talkin’ funny, right?’
Some of Rincewind’s beer said, ‘No worries.’
His captor pulled him so they were face to face. Rincewind had never seen such a huge nose.
‘An’ I expect you don’t even know that we happen to produce some partic’ly fine wines, our Chardonnays bein’ ‘specially worthy of attention and compet’tively priced, not to mention the rich, firmly structur’d Rusted Dunny Valley Semillons, which are a tangily refreshin’ discovery for the connesewer . . . yew bastard?
‘Jolly good, I’ll have a pint of Chardonnay, please.’
‘You takin’ the piss?’
‘No, I’d like to leave it here—’
‘How about you putting my mate down?’ said a voice.