ACCOMMODATION: The Station Hotel. Modern Zemphis is a lawless and dangerous place for any but the most experienced and well-armed traveller.
THIS ANCIENT CITY, its high stone walls visible for miles around, is located at the junction of three trade routes as well as the river route to Ankh-Morpork. In times past the vast central square held a great covered market where traders bought and sold precious metals from the Ramtops, wool from Lancre, coffee, spices and silk from Klatch, as well as the produce of the Sto Plains. Merchants from all over the world settled here creating a wealthy if transient cosmopolitan community. Sadly those days are gone and modern Zemphis has become a place where everything and everyone has a price. The friendly hubbub of international commerce with its many tongues has been replaced with something more akin to a local bazaar; the high-earning cross-border trade is now mainly in contraband such as adulterated treacle, raw Slab and undomesticated imps, and the only common languages that the dealers understand are money and the knife. Travellers are strongly advised not to venture into the city unescorted, and anyone tempted to explore the ruins of Downsized Abbey (now a souk) does so entirely at their own risk.
Even Zemphis Station is very different from anywhere else we’ve been, and it has a foreign smell of strong goat’s cheese and Klatchian cigarettes. The main concourse is full of small-time traders, a few displaying silk carpets (some seemingly of the flying variety). The railway guards chase away the many unlicensed beggars who have moved here from Ankh-Morpork to dodge the Beggars’ Guild rules and rates, and to ply their oozing trade wherever they can find a nook or cranny to slump into.
There is, however, one excursion that I can more safely recommend to the visitor determined to see something of this exotic corner of ‘foreign parts’: the famous Zemphis Falls.
The traditional viewing point for the falls is a little way outside the city. Here the waters plummet one hundred and fifty feet from the clifftop high above into the foaming river below. The spray hangs in the air, creating rainbows, and a watery mist lies over ancient stone arches and doorways like tissue paper. It is a memorable vision and after twenty-four hours in the train a welcome and refreshing break.
6
THE LOCAL SERVICE between Zemphis and Ohulan Cutash has now been in operation for some time. However, at the time of writing work is still continuing on the infrastructure of the track onward from Ohulan Cutash to Bonk, to bring it to the necessary standard for commercial traffic. When the promised international express comes into service on this route, be assured that your author will be among its first passengers. The first train from Zemphis leaves early in the morning, and is favoured by those serious mountaineers who aim to climb the eight summits of the Paps of Scilla (earning themselves a Papist Medal), or even attempt the icy peaks of the Ramtops, as well as by holidaymakers planning a gentler walking tour among the foothills. Other travellers will include people visiting family in Lancre and The Chalk and dwarfs making the long pilgrimage to the home mines of Copperhead Mountain.
The danger of rock falls and ambush by brigands on this journey means that there are two railway watchmen keeping lookout on the footplate of the locomotive as we leave the station. About half an hour out of Zemphis and just before the train starts the long climb to the mountains it stops at Hugglestones Halt, which serves the renowned Hugglestones School just across the bleak, windswept moorland. It was the start of the school’s Spring Prime vacation on my visit and fifty or so boys poured on to the platform from open-topped coaches. The senior boys had their baggage carried by diminutive first-formers, bent double with the weight. Porters transported several stretcher- and wheelchair-bound boys into the luggage van, followed by two small coffins draped with the school flag. I have myself met some adult survivors of Hugglestones, where the boys of wealthy and titled families are educated in life’s more rigorous challenges on blood-soaked playing fields, and have some sympathy for what they endured, but cannot for the life of me understand why they subject their children to the same brutality.
Within minutes of leaving Hugglestones Halt we are in the foothills of the Paps. This range was created when a huge mountain fell apart leaving eight razor-sharp peaks. The views from the train are spectacular: trees appear to cling to the sheer rock-face and rushing white-water streams run through deep ravines. Further towards the high pass the mountains close in, the towering slopes above us shutting out the sun, and from time to time there is a sudden blackness as the train enters a natural tunnel with water dripping from the roof and running down the windows. Eventually the descent begins towards the welcome sight of the small town of Twoshirts. It is not more than a hundred miles, as the crow flies, from Zemphis to Twoshirts, but the journey takes a good four hours because of the steepness of the gradients and the fact that the track, by a wonder of engineering, traverses chasms and steep ravines in a series of zigzags.
•TWOSHIRTS•
POPULATION: 65
CLACKS TERMINAL: at the post office.
POST OFFICE: Counter in souvenir shop.
ACCOMMODATION: The Jolly Macerator Inn.
MARKET DAY: Friday.
SITUATED ON THE Whitstone River, a tributary of the Ankh, Twoshirts was, and still is, a staging post on the way from Lancre to The Chalk. Since the arrival of the railway it has become a centre for walkers keen to explore the green downlands of The Chalk and the wooded river valleys near by. Mrs Umbridge’s souvenir shop sells guidebooks and maps, walking sticks and waterproof clothing in a range of unnatural shades to the visitors, as well as small carved wooden items and postcards. There is a daily haulier’s cart that will carry passengers the slow five-hour journey to the village of Arken at the base of the Downs. The track passes a well-known landmark in the form of a great white horse cut into the chalk of the hillside.
Brassica from the Sto Plains is brought into Twoshirts by barge and then preserved by crushing the already stale yellowing cabbage leaves in barrels of salted vinegar. This bucolic activity is celebrated in the name of the village’s inn, The Jolly Macerator, and dotted around the walls are pictures of this process. Proudly displayed in a glass case is a fine pair of huge leather lace-up boots, which, according to the brass plaque on the front, were worn by Mister Jackson Muchworthy who, if the size is anything to go by, must have been a champion macerator indeed.
Leaving Twoshirts on the final stage of our journey we approach the lower reaches of the great Ramtop mountains which loom large on the horizon, their snow-capped peaks clearly visible. The countryside is hilly with wooded areas, and in the winter months many grazing animals have to be brought down from the extreme cold of the mountains to these sheltered plains. The town of Ohulan Cutash which serves the needs of this rural community nestles beneath the rimward slope of a steep hill. Situated on the Upper Ankh River it is the transit point for the main road to the Kingdom of Lancre and has a small quay from which barges travel downstream all the way to Ankh-Morpork.
OHULAN
•CUTASH•
POPULATION: 672
CLACKS TERMINAL: at the railway station.
ACCOMMODATION: The Fiddler’s Riddle, Barrack Farm Camp Site.
BANK: Thrift Bank.
MARKET DAYS: Wednesday (fruit and veg), Saturday (general).
Artisan Cheese Festival, Spune.
THE BANDBOX-NEW RAILWAY station has a small bookshop where they sell guidebooks and maps of the region. There is a large market square and on market day one may meet mountain folk, including dwarfs who work the Ramtop mines, as well as shoppers from Lancre, and invariably one or two black-hatted missionaries pressing explanatory pamphlets into shoppers’ hands and inviting them to visit the mission tent to partake of a cup of weak tea and the word of Om. The dwarf-run workshop offering a broom repair service is a salutary reminder that the long tradition of witchcraft in this part of the Disc has by no means expired. Indeed it seems you can buy almost anything here: musical instruments, ably demonstrated by the stall holder, herbal medicines from a small dark
tent, tools, silver jewellery, crockery, clothing, haberdashery and all manner of foodstuffs including some very fine cheese. I imagine that this town will benefit from the additional trade that the railway has brought. Already there are establishments which specialize in selling camping equipment and climbing gear.
Sadly not all the holidaymakers who embark on mountaineering adventures respect the landscape or take proper precautions; in the clear mountain air it all seems so safe and distances are deceptive. Following a series of unfortunate incidents it was decided something should be done. Apart from anything else reports had reached the Ankh-Morpork newspapers and it was not good for business.
The local lumberjacks and shepherds, who were often the ones to find the sad remains and who understand the treacherous nature of the weather, were the first to form an unofficial ‘Rescue Off the Mountain Team’, after a particularly distressing ‘find’. Old habits die hard among mountain trolls and it seems that on this occasion a party of boy scouts had pitched their camp and lit their fires on a particularly sensitive area of Big Alum who responded ‘with extreme prejudice’. A local troll was quickly recruited to the rescue team to encourage mountain trolls to accept this invasion of city folk or at least to identify and map no-go areas. Dwarfs also joined the team in the wake of their retrieving a group of prospectors who had been sold a map of a goldmine while in Zemphis and had fallen into a disused shaft. They too produced a map of no-go areas, as well as helpfully marking spots where there was definitely no gold at all. A large donation from the AM&SPHR Co. topped up with money from local businesses has now funded a fully equipped mountain refuge and paid for the publication of a series of maps and guidebooks. The Ohulan Cutash Mountain Rescue Team now numbers more than twenty members, including goblins, who travel the hillsides with barrels of snail ‘brandy’.
It is time for me to leave the comfort, speed and safety of the railway, although there are still many journeys to be made. If like me you yearn to visit the lofty heights and magical realm of the Kingdom of Lancre, with its romantic tales of villages like Bad Ass, you may travel onwards on the mail coach up the long and steep road through the pine forests that cover this part of the Ramtops.
For those who wish to venture yet further afield to the dark forests and mountains of Uberwald I can recommend a little guide by the travel writer Boris Von Trappe called My Adventures in Uberwald.
I have enjoyed my voyages on the railway and I would like to thank all the people I have met along the way who have helped make my journey so pleasant and so interesting. I would especially like to thank Mr Lipwig for giving me this opportunity. I hope that my observations and notes will be of benefit to travellers for many years to come.
Thank you for purchasing this little book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terry Pratchett is the acclaimed creator of the global bestselling Discworld series, of which the first book, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. His forthieth Discworld novel, Raising Steam, was published in 2013. His books have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he is the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, as well as being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. After falling out with his keyboard he now talks to his computer. Occasionally, these days, it answers back.
www.terrypratchett.co.uk
@terryandrob
BOOKS BY TERRY PRATCHETT
The Discworld® series
1. THE COLOUR OF MAGIC
2. THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
3. EQUAL RITES
4. MORT
5. SOURCERY
6. WYRD SISTERS
7. PYRAMIDS
8. GUARDS! GUARDS!
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TURTLE RECALL: THE NEW DISCWORLD COMPANION . . . SO FAR (with Stephen Briggs)
NANNY OGG’S COOKBOOK (with Stephen Briggs, Tina Hannan and Paul Kidby)
THE PRATCHETT PORTFOLIO (with Paul Kidby)
THE DISCWORLD ALMANAK (with Bernard Pearson)
THE UNSEEN UNIVERSITY CUT-OUT BOOK (with Alan Batley and Bernard Pearson)
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THE WIT AND WISDOM OF DISCWORLD (compiled by Stephen Briggs)
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A TOURIST GUIDE TO LANCRE – A DISCWORLD MAPP (with Stephen Briggs, illustrated by Paul Kidby)
DEATH’S DOMAIN (with Paul Kidby)
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GOOD OMENS (with Neil Gaiman)
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THE CARPET PEOPLE
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WINGS
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First published in Great Britain
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