The Fifth Elephant

1

Not rock and iron in their dead form, as they are now, but living rock and iron. The dwarfs have quite an inventive mythology about minerals.

2

Vampires evolve long names. It’s something to do to pass the long years.

3

At least, of the sort she normally wore.

4

And, just lately, Corporal Nobbs.

5

They couldn’t bring themselves to utter the word ‘her’.

6

At least by proper explorers. Just living there doesn’t count.

7

At least, if you hit them hard enough.

8

Especially if it was green, and bubbled.

9

Except that the ones around it were not good stones to tread on if it was a Tuesday.

10

As a member of the dead community Reg Shoe naturally thought of himself as an ethnic majority.

11

Miles and Miles of Bloody Uberwald.

12

One that no other creature in the world would ever adopt.

13

After all, this made it so much harder for the hand to feed you tomorrow.

14

Detritus’s silicon-based brain was, as with most trolls, highly sensitive to changes in temperature. When the thermometer was very low he could be dangerously intellectual.

15

A kind of pastry made from curtains.

16

Buckwheat dumplings stuffed with stuff.

17

Bread made from parsnips, and widely considered to be much tastier than the dull wheat kind.

18

He’d noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination — but at the end of the day they’d settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.

19

Vimes had once discussed the Ephebian idea of ‘democracy’ with Carrot, and had been rather interested in the idea that everyone^[*] had a vote until he found out that while he, Vimes, would have a vote, there was no way in the rules that anyone could prevent Nobby Nobbs from having one as well. Vimes could see the flaw there straight away.

* Apart from the women, children, slaves, idiots and people who weren’t really our kind of people.

21

The Marquis of Fantailler got into many fights in his youth, most of them as a result of being known as the Marquis of Fantailler, and wrote a set of rules for what he termed ‘the noble art of fisticuffs’, which mostly consisted of a list of places where people weren’t allowed to hit him. Many people were impressed with his work and later stood with noble chest out-thrust and fists balled in a spirit of manly aggression against people who hadn’t read the Marquis’s book but did know how to knock people senseless with a chair. The last words of a surprisingly large number of people were ‘Stuff the bloody Marquis of Fantailler—’

22

The key was in the pattern of scars.

23

The treacle mines below Ankh-Morpork had long been exhausted, leaving only a street name to remember them by. But the collision with the Fifth Elephant had buried thousands of acres of prehistoric sugarcane around the borders of Uberwald and the resulting dense crystalline sugar was the foundation of a large mining, confectionery and dentistry industry.