And these things have to happen at the right time. Because history, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles. At the very least, if it was deep enough in the forest, millions of small gods would have heard it. It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but someone. One of the recurring philosophical questions is: "Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?" Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in a forest. When it begins and ends is more problematical, but at least one of its beginnings took place above the snowline, thousands of miles away in the mountains around the Hub. The story takes place in desert lands, in shades of umber and orange.
One day a tortoise will learn how to fly. But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection. It's simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises. There's good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there's much better eating on practically anything else. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle. And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away.
A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. The tortoise is a ground-living creature. TERRY PRATCHETT SMALL GODS v1.0 (22-mar-01) Scanned, OCR’d and proofed in Word2000 by 4i Publications
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