Pyramids

1

Such as being buried in the sand and having eggs laid in it.

2

Breathing, for a start.

3

Lit. ‘Child of the Djel’

4

It was quite a big frog, however, and got into the air ducts and kept everyone awake for weeks.

5

It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.

6

Bloat is extracted from the deep sea blowfish, Singularis minutia gigantica, which protects itself from enemies by inflating itself to many times its normal size. If taken by humans the effect is to make every cell in the body instantaneously try to swell some 2,000 times. This is invariably fatal, and very loud.

7

The gates of the Assassins’ Guild were never shut. This was said to be because Death was open for business all the time, but it was really because the hinges had rusted centuries before and no one had got around to doing anything about it.

8

Counterwise wine is made from grapes belonging to that class of flora — reannuals — that grow only in excessively high magic fields. Normal plants grow after the seeds have been planted — with reannuals it’s the other way round. Although reannual wine causes inebriation in the normal way, the action of the digestive system on its molecules causes an unusual reaction whose net effect is to thrust the ensuing hangover backwards in time, to a point some hours before the wine is drunk. Hence the saying: have a hair of the dog that’s going to bite you.

9

When the Thieves’ Guild declared a General Strike in the Year of the Engaging Sloth, the actual level of crime doubled.

10

One of the two^[*] legends about the founding of Ankh-Morpork relates that the two orphaned brothers who built the city were in fact found and suckled by a hippopotamus^{**} (lit. orijeple, although some historians hold that this is a mistranslation of orejaple, a type of glass-fronted drinks cabinet). Eight heraldic hippos line the bridge, facing out to sea. It is said that if danger ever threatens the city, they will run away.

* The other legend, not normally recounted by citizens, is that at an even earlier time a group of wise men survived a flood sent by the gods by building a huge boat, and on this boat they took two of every type of animal then existing on the Disc. After some weeks the combined manure was beginning to weigh the boat low in the water so — the story runs — they tipped it over the side, and called it Ankh-Morpork.

** The legend of Ankh-Morpork being founded by two orphaned brothers who had been found and suckled by a hippopotamus refers to the legend of Romulus and Remus who were two orphaned brothers raised by a wolf, who later went on to found Rome (the brothers did, not the wolf).

11

Like many river valley cultures the Kingdom has no truck with such trivia as summer, springtime and winter, and bases its calendar squarely on the great heartbeat of the Djel; hence the three seasons. Seedtime, Inundation and Sog. This is logical, straightforward and practical, and only disapproved of by barbershop quartets.^[*]

* Because you feel an idiot singing ‘In the Good Old Inundation’, that’s why.

12

Lit. ‘Dhar-ret-kar-mon’, or ‘clipping of the foot’. But some scholars say that it should be ‘Dar-rhet-kare-mhun’, lit. ‘hot-air paint stripper’.

13

Dunnikindiver: a builder and cleaner of cesspits. A particularly busy profession in Ankh-Morpork, where the water table is generally at ground level, and one which attracts considerable respect. At least, everyone passes by on the other side of the street when the dunnikindiver walks by.

14

Hoarse whispers are not suitable for a desert environment.

15

Lit.: ‘I am going to be here again.’

16

Some translation is needed here. If a foreign ambassador to the Court of St James wore (out of a genuine desire to flatter) a bowler hat, a claymore, a Civil War Breastplate, Saxon trousers and a Jacobean haircut, he’d create pretty much the same impression.

17

Younger assassins, who are usually very poor, have very clear ideas about the morality of wealth until they become older assassins, who are usually very rich, when they begin to take the view that injustice has its good points.

18

The carvers had to use quite a lot of imagination. The late king had had many fine attributes, but doing mighty deeds wasn’t among them. The score was: Number of enemies ground as dust under his chariot wheels = 0. Number of thrones crushed beneath his sandalled feet = 0. Number of times world bestrode like colossus = 0. On the other hand: Reigns of terror = 0. Number of times own throne crushed beneath enemy sandals = 0. Faces of poor ground = 0. Expensive crusades embarked upon = 0. His life had, basically, been a no-score win.

19

Never trust a species that grins all the time. It’s up to something.

20

Renowned as the greatest camel mathematician of all time, who invented a math of eight-dimensional space while lying down with his nostrils closed in a violent sandstorm.

21

An effect achieved by distilling the testicles of a small tree-dwelling species of bear with the vomit of a whale^{*}, and adding a handful of rose petals. Teppic probably would have felt no better for knowing this.

* Animal substances are extensively used as fixatives in perfume. Examples include musk (from deer-testicles; ‘musk’ is Sanskrit for ‘scrotum’), ambergris (from the intestines of whales) and castor (from a beaver’s perineal gland).

22

This is of course a loose translation, since Ptaclusp did not know the words for ‘ice’, ‘windscreens’ or ‘hotel bedrooms’; interestingly, however, Squiggle Eagle Eagle Vase Wavyline Duck translates directly as ‘a press for barbarian leg coverings’.

23

To everyone without such a logical frame of reference the fastest animal^[*] on the Disc is the extremely neurotic Ambiguous Puzuma, which moves so fast that it can actually achieve near light-speed in the Disc’s magical field. This means that if you can see a puzuma, it isn’t there. Most male puzumas die young of acute ankle failure caused by running very fast after females which aren’t there and, of course, achieving suicidal mass in accordance with relativistic theory. The rest of them die of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle,^{**} since it is impossible for them to know who they are and where they are at the same time, and the see-sawing loss of concentration this engenders means that the puzuma only achieves a sense of identity when it is at rest — usually about fifty feet into the rubble of what remains of the mountain it just ran into at near light-speed. The puzuma is rumoured to be about the size of a leopard with a rather unique black and white check coat, although those specimens discovered by the Disc’s sages and philosophers have inclined them to declare that in its natural state the puzuma is flat, very thin, and dead.

* The fastest insect is the.303 bookworm. It evolved in magical libraries, where it is necessary to eat extremely quickly to avoid being affected by the thaumic radiations. An adult.303 bookworm can eat through a shelf of books so fast that it ricochets off the wall.

** Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (HUP) says that for a quantum particle (e.g. an electron), it is impossible to know with complete accuracy both where it is and how fast it is going. The act of observing it interferes with the event you want to measure (in fact, one might say that at the quantum level the observation is the event) in such a way that it is physically impossible to determine both velocity and position of the particle in question.

24

The role of listeners has never been fully appreciated. However, it is well known that most people don’t listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they’re going to say next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value; bards and poets are ten a cow, but a good Listener is hard to find, or at least hard to find twice.

25

He was wrong. Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so that they don’t upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the Marie Celeste,^{*} and the chuck keys for electric drills.

* The Marie Celeste left port in 1872 with a full crew, but was later found (by the crew of the Dei Gratia), abandoned on the open sea, with no crew, the single lifeboat missing, and half-eaten meals in the mess hall. It was later discovered that captain Morehouse of the Dei Gratia had dined with the captain of the Celeste the night before she sailed, and Morehouse and his crew were eventually tried for murder, but acquitted because there was no hard evidence. The missing crewmen were never found.

26

It was, therefore, colloquially known as the Djinn palace.

27

You know. The bit you can’t reach with the straw.

28

But not immediately, of course, because messages change in the telling and some ancestors were not capable of perfect enunciation and others were trying to be helpful and supplying what they thought were lost words. The message received by Teppicymon originally began, ‘Handcuffed to the bed, the aunt thirsted.’

29

A less desiccated culture would have used the phrase ‘at sea’.