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and waddled away.
    The tree sighed, and shook a few dead leaves out of its twigs.

    The cottage was small, tumbledown and as ornate as a doily. Some mad whittler had got to work on it, Rincewind decided, and had created terrible havoc before he could be dragged away. Every door, every shutter had its clusters of wooden grapes and half-moon cutouts, and there were massed outbreaks of fretwork pinecones all over the walls. He half expected a giant cuckoo to come hurtling out of an upper window.
    What he also noticed was the characteristic greasy feel in the air. Tiny green and purple sparks flashed from his fingernails.
    “Strong magical field,” he muttered. “A hundred millithaums * at least.”
    “There’s magic all over the place,” said Swires. “An old witch used to live around here. She went a long time ago but the magic still keeps the house going.”
    “Here, there’s something odd about that door,” said Twoflower.
    “Why should a house need magic to keep it going?” said Rincewind. Twoflower touched a wall gingerly.
    “It’s all sticky!”
    “Nougat,” said Swires.
    “Good grief! A real gingerbread cottage! Rincewind, a real—”
    Rincewind nodded glumly. “Yeah, the Confectionary School of Architecture,” he said. “It never caught on.”
    He looked suspiciously at the licorice doorknocker.
    “It sort of regenerates,” said Swires. “Marvelous, really. You just don’t get this sort of place nowadays, you just can’t get the gingerbread.”
    “Really?” said Rincewind, gloomily.
    “Come on in,” said the gnome, “but mind the doormat.”
    “Why?”
    “Candyfloss.”

    The great Disc spun slowly under its toiling sun, and daylight pooled in hollows and finally drained away as night fell.
    In his chilly room in Unseen University Trymon pored over the book, his lips moving as his finger traced the unfamiliar, ancient script. He read that the Great Pyramid of Tsort, now long vanished, was made of one million, three thousand and ten limestone blocks. He read that ten thousand slaves had been worked to death in its building. He learned that it was a maze of secret passages, their walls reputedly decorated with the distilled wisdom of ancient Tsort. He read that its height plus its length divided by half its width equaled exactly 1.67563, or precisely 1,237.98712567 times the difference between the distance to the sun and the weight of a small orange. He learned that sixty years had been devoted entirely to its construction.
    It all seemed, he thought, to be rather a lot of trouble to go to just to sharpen a razor blade.
    And in the Forest of Skund Twoflower and Rincewind settled down to a meal of gingerbread mantelpiece and thought longingly of pickled onions.
    And far away, but set as it were on a collision course, the greatest hero the Disc ever produced rolled himself a cigarette, entirely unaware of the role that lay in store for him.
    It was quite an interesting tailormade that he twirled expertly between his fingers because, like many of the wandering wizards from whom he had picked up the art, he was in the habit of saving dogends in a leather bag and rolling them into fresh smokes. The implacable law of averages therefore dictated that some of that tobacco had been smoked almost continuously for many years now. The thing he was trying unsuccessfully to light was, well, you could have coated roads with it.
    So great was the reputation of this person that a group of nomadic barbarian horsemen had respectfully invited him to join them as they sat around a horseturd fire. The nomads of the Hub regions usually migrated rimward for the winter, and these were part of a tribe who had pitched their felt tents in the sweltering heat wave of a mere -3 degrees and were going around with peeling noses and complaining about heatstroke.
    The barbarian chieftain said: “What then are the greatest things that a man may find in life?” This is the sort of thing you’re supposed to say to maintain