cakes from their burrow. They had dried coconut flakes on them.
He turned the plate cautiously.
Well, you couldnât argue with it. He was finding food in the desert. In fact, he was even finding dessert in the desert.
Perhaps it was some special talent hitherto undiscovered by the kind people who had occasionally shared their food with him in the last few months. They hadnât eaten this sort of thing.Theyâd ground up seeds and dug up skinny yams and eaten things with more eyeballs than the Watch had found after that business with Medley the Medical Kleptomaniac.
So something was going right for him. Out here in the red-hot wilderness something wanted him to stay alive . This was a worrying thought. No one ever wanted him alive for something nice .
This was Rincewind after several months: his wizardly robe was quite short now. Bits had been torn off or used as string or, after some particularly resistant hors dâoeuvres , as bandages. It showed his knees, and wizards are nowhere near championship standard at knees. They tend to appear, as the book might put it, a knobbly savage.
But heâd kept his hat. Heâd woven a new wide brim for it, and heâd had to restore the crown once or twice with fresh bits of robe, and most of the sequins had been replaced with bits of shell stitched on with grass, but it was still his hat, the same old hat. A wizard without a hat was just a sad man with a suspicious taste in clothes. A wizard without a hat wasnât anyone.
Although this particular wizard had a hat, he didnât have keen enough eyes to see the drawing appear on a red rock half hidden in the scrub.
It started off like a bird. Then, without at any time being other than smears of ochre and charcoal that had been there for years, it began to change shape . . .
He set off towards the distant mountains. Theyâd been in view for several days. He hadnâtthe faintest idea if they represented a sensible direction but at least they were one.
The ground shivered underfoot. It had been doing that once or twice a day for a while, and that was another odd thing, because this didnât look like volcano country. This was the kind of country where, if you watched a large cliff for a few hundred years, you might see a rock drop off and youâd talk about it for ages. Everything about it said that it had got over all the more energetic geological exercises a long time ago and was a nice quiet country which, in other circumstances, a man might be at home in.
He became aware after a while that a kangaroo was watching him from the top of a small rock. Heâd seen the things before, bounding away through the bushes. They didnât usually hang around when there were humans about.
This one was stalking him. They were vegetarian, werenât they? It wasnât as though he was wearing green.
Finally it sprang out of the bushes and landed in front of him.
It brushed one ear with a paw, and gave Rincewind a meaningful look.
It brushed the other ear with the other paw, and wrinkled its nose.
âYes, fine, good,â said Rincewind. He started to edge away, and then stopped. After all, it was just a big . . . well, rabbit, with a long tail and the kind of feet you normally see associated with red noses and baggy pants.
âIâm not frightened of you,â he said. âWhyshould I be frightened of you?â
âWell,â said the kangaroo, âI could kick your stomach out through your neck.â
âAh. You can talk?â
âYouâre a quick one,â said the kangaroo. It rubbed an ear again.
âSomething wrong?â said Rincewind.
âNo, thatâs the kangaroo language. Iâm trying it out.â
âWhat, one scratch for âyesâ, one for ânoâ? That sort of thing?â
The kangaroo scratched an ear, and then remembered itself. âYep,â it said. It wrinkled its nose.
âAnd that wrinkling?â said