（外文电子版资料）24.The.Fifth.Elephant.docVIP

The Fifth Elephant A Discworld Novell by Terry Pratchett They say the world is flat and supported on the back of four elephants who themselves stand on the back of a giant turtle. They say that the elephants, being such huge beasts, have bones of rock and iron, and nerves of gold for better conductivity over long distances. They say that the fifth elephant came screaming and trumpeting through the atmosphere of the young world all those years ago and landed hard enough to split continents and raise mountains. No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical question: when millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there is no one to hear it, does it  philosophically speaking  make a noise? And if there was no one to see it hit, did it actually hit? *Not rock and iron in their dead form, as they are now, but living rock and iron. The dwarfs have quite an inventive mythology about minerals. In other words, wasnt it just a story for children, to explain away some interesting natural occurrences? As for the dwarfs, whose legend it is, and who mine a lot deeper than other people, they say that there is a grain of truth in it. On a clear day, from the right vantage point on the Ramtops, a watcher could see a very long way across the plains. If it was high summer, they could count the columns of dust as the ox trains plodded on, at a top speed of two miles an hour, each pair pulling a train of two wagons carrying four tons apiece. Things took a long time to get anywhere, but when they did, there was certainly a lot of them. To the cities of the Circle Sea they carried raw material, and sometimes people who were off to seek their fortune and a fistful of diamonds. To the mountains they brought manufactured goods, rare things from across the oceans, and people who had found wisdom and a few scars. There was usually a days travelling between each convoy. They turned the landscape into an unrolled time machine. On a clear da