Terry Pratchett - Discworld 01 - The Colour of Magic

VIP免费

2024-12-02 0 0 616.05KB 288 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

by Terry Pratchett

In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks

only of the Weight.

Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul,

Great T'Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose

broad and startanned shoulders the disc of the World rests, gar-

landed by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by

the baby-blue vault of Heaven.

Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they

think about.

The Great Turtle was a mere hypothesis until the day the small

and secretive kingdom of Krull, whose rim-most mountains project

out over the Rimfall, built a gantry and pulley arrangement at the

tip of the most precipitous crag and lowered several observers over

the Edge in a quartzwindowed brass vessel to peer through the mist

veils.

The early astrozoologists, hauled back from their long dangle by

enormous teams of slaves, were able to bring back much informa-

tion about the shape and nature of A'Tuin and the elephants but

this did not resolve fundamental questions about the nature and

purpose of the universe.

For example, what was Atuin's actual sex? This vital question,

said the Astrozoologists with mounting authority, would not be an-

swered until a larger and more powerful gantry was constructed for

a deep-space vessel. In the meantime they could only speculate

about the revealed cosmos.

There was, for example, the theory that A'Tuin had come from

nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into

nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics.

An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that

A'Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as

were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by

giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately

bravely responding to the situation by feverishly demolishing the

bridges. But already the ships in the Morpork docks - laden with

grain, cotton and timber, and coated with tar - were blazing merrily

and, their moorings burnt to ashes, were breasting the river Ankh

on the ebb tide, igniting riverside palaces and bowers as they drifted

like drowning fireflies towards the sea. In any case, sparks were

riding the breeze and touching down far across the river in hidden

gardens and remote rickyards. The smoke from the merry burning

rose miles high, in a wind-sculpted black column that could be seen

across the whole of the discworld. It was certainly impressive from

the cool, dark hilltop a few leagues away, where two figures were

watching with considerable interest.

The taller of the pair was chewing on a chicken leg and leaning

on a sword that was only marginally shorter than the average man.

If it wasn't for the air of wary intelligence about him it might have

been supposed that he was a barbarian from the hubland wastes.

His partner was much shorter and wrapped from head to toe in a

brown cloak. Later, when he has occasion to move, it will be seen

that he moves lightly, cat-like.

The two had barely exchanged a word in the last twenty minutes

except for a short and inconclusive argument as to whether a par-

ticularly powerful explosion had been the oil bond store or the

workshop of Kerible the Enchanter. Money hinged on the fact.

Now the big man finished gnawing at the bone and tossed it into

the grass, smiling ruefully.

"There go all those little alleyways," he said. "I liked them."

"All the treasure houses," said the small man. He added

thoughtfully, "Do gems burn, I wonder? "Tis said they're kin to

coal."

"All the gold, melting and running down the gutters," said the big

one, ignoring him. "And all the wine, boiling in the barrels."

"There were rats," said his brown companion.

The small swordsman known as the Weasel said nothing. He was

watching the road in the ruddy light. Few had come that way since

the widershins gate had been one of the first to collapse in a shower

of white-hot embers.

But two were coming up it now. The Weasel's eyes always at

their sharpest in gloom and halflight, made out the shapes of two

mounted men and some sort of low beast behind them. Doubtless a

rich merchant escaping with as much treasure as he could lay

frantic hands on. The Weasel said as much to his companion, who

sighed.

"The status of footpad ill suits us," said the barbarian, "but as

you say, times are hard and there are no soft beds tonight."

He shifted his grip on his sword and, as the leading rider drew

near, stepped out onto the road with a hand held up and his face

set in a grin nicely calculated to reassure yet threaten.

"Your pardon, sir-" he began.

The rider reined in his horse and drew back his hood. The big

man looked into a face blotched with superficial burns and punctu-

ated by tufts of singed beard. Even the eyebrows had gone.

"Bugger off," said the face. "You're Bravd the Hublander, aren't

you?"

*The shape and cosmology of the disc system are perhaps worthy

of note at this point. There are, of course, two major directions on

the disc: Hubward and Rimward. But since the disc itself revolves

at the rate of once every eight hundred days (in order to distribute

the weight fairly upon its supportive pachyderms, according to Re-

forgule of Krull) there are also two lesser directions, which are

Turnwise and Widdershins. Since the disc's tiny orbiting sunlet

maintains a fixed orbit while the majestic disc turns slowly beneath

it, it will be readily deduced that a disc year consists of not four but

eight seasons. The summers are those times when the sun rises or

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

byTerryPratchettInabrainbiggerthanacity,withgeologicalslowness,HethinksonlyoftheWeight.MostoftheweightisofcourseaccountedforbyBerilia,Tubul,GreatT'PhonandJerakeen,thefourgiantelephantsuponwhosebroadandstartannedshouldersthediscoftheWorldrests,gar-landedbythelongwaterfallatitsvastcircumferenceanddome...

展开>> 收起<<

Terry Pratchett - Discworld 01 - The Colour of Magic.pdf

共288页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Terry Pratchett - Discworld 01 - The Colour of Magic

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: