When it was so late at night in Ankh-Morpork that it was early in the morning, elsewhere it was......
but there were no hours here. There was dawn and dusk, morning and afternoon, and presumably there was midnight and midday, but mainly there was heat. And redness. Something as artificial and human as an hour wouldn't last five minutes here. It would be dried out and shrivelled up in seconds.Above all, there was silence. It was not the chilly, bleak silence of endless space, but the burning organic silence you get when, across a thousand miles of shimmering red horizons, everything is too tired to make a sound.
Rincewind's journal went:
Probably Tuesday: hot, flies. Dinner: honey ants. Attacked by honey ants. Fell into waterhole.
Wednesday, with any luck: hot, flies. Dinner: either bush raisins or kangaroo droppings. Chased by hunters, don't know why. Fell into waterhole.
Thursday (could be): hot, flies. Dinner: blue-tongued lizard. Savaged by blue-tongued lizard. Chased by different hunters. Fell off cliff, bounced into tree, pissed on by small grey incontinent teddy bear, landed in a waterhole.
Friday: hot, flies. Dinner: some kind of roots which tasted like sick. This saved time.
Saturday: hotter than yesterday, extra flies. V. thirsty.
Sunday: hot. Delirious with thirst and flies. Nothing but nothing as far as the eye can see, with bushes in it. Decided to die, collapsed, fell down sand dune into waterhole.
He wrote very carefully and as small as possible:
'Monday: hot, flies. Dinner: moth grubs.'
He stared at the writing. It said it all, really.
-- shamelessly copied without permission from Discworld 22 - The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett. This says all I want to say, only he does it much, much better.
