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When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool. (LF)
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'When did Columbus discover America anyway?' said Wobbler.
'Fourteen ninety-two,' said Johnny. 'There's a rhyme: In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.' Wobbler and Bigmac looked at him. 'Actually, he could have got there in fourteen ninety-one,' said Yo-les, without looking up, 'but he had to sail around a bit because no-one could think up a rhyme for "one".' (JD) 'If you're going to discover somewhere, you might as well wait until there's proper hotels and stuff.' (JD)
... he was looking for the Fountain of Youth and the odd thing about this sort of business is that it’s never, ever close
to. You’d think, on average, that some of these lost fountains of youth, tree of life and cities of gold would be really close, but they never are. And you never get people from a long way off coming to our part of the world lookin’ for, as it might be, the Cottage of Doom or the Lost Chicken Shed. (NOC) It was so thickly forested, so creased by little mountain ranges and beset by rivers, that it was largely unmapped. It was mostly unexplored, too*.
*At least by proper explorers. Just living there doesn’t count. (FE) As every student of exploration knows, the prize goes not to the explorer who first sets foot upon the virgin soil but to the one who gets that foot home first. If it is still attached to his leg, this is a bonus. (J)
Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves, and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that they often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all. (MP)
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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