The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett [46]
“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 anyone 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 face 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 flavor, 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