In front of him was a soft black night whose mist-muted stars glowed peacefully. But his eyes turned downward, drawn by some irresistible fascination.
It was midnight on the Disc and so, therefore, the sun was far, far below, swinging slowly under Great A’Tuin’s vast and frosty plastron.
On either side of him two glittering curtains of water hurtled toward infinity as the sea swept around the island on its way to the long fall.
Huge shadows grew out of that light like pillars supporting the roof of the universe. Hundreds of miles below him the wizard made out the shape of something, the edge of something—
Like those curious little pictures where the silhouette of an ornate glass suddenly becomes the outline of two faces, the scene beneath him flipped into a whole, new, terrifying perspective. Because down there was the head of an elephant as big as a reasonablysized continent. One mighty tusk cut like a mountain against the golden light, trailing a widening shadow toward the stars. The head was slightly tilted, and a huge ruby eye might almost have been a red supergiant that had managed to shine at noonday.
Below the elephant—
Rincewind swallowed and tried not to think—
Below the elephant there was nothing but the distant, painful Disc of the sun. And, sweeping slowly past it, was something that for all its city-sized scales, its crater-pocks, its Junar cragginess, was indubitably a flipper.
