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NOW CONSIDER THE TORTOISE AND the eagle

The tortoise is a ground-living creature It is i under it Its horizons are a few inches away It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too le A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a s Talons and claws enough tosmaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger

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 s the bushes down there on the desert And it will leap

And aaway froer one inch froround but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle

And then the eagle lets go

And ales to its death Everyone knohy the tortoise does this Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off No one knohy the eagle does this There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’selse It’s siles to torle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection

One day a tortoise will learn how to fly

The story takes place in desert lands, in shades of uins and ends is s took place above the snowline, thousands of miles away in thephilosophical questions is:

"Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?"

Which says so about the nature of philosophers, because there is always so what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but soh in the forest, s just happen, one after another They don’t care who knows But historyah, history is different History has to be observed Otherwise it’s not history It’s justwell, things happening one after another

And, of course, it has to be controlled Otherwise itBecause history, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles And these things have to happen at the right time This is difficult In a chaotic universe there are too eneral’s horse to lose a shoe at the wrong time, or for someone to e to be waylaid by some men with sticks and a cash flow problerowths on the tree of history, trying to bend it their way

So history has its caretakers

They livewell, in the nature of things they live wherever they are sent, but their spiritual hoh Ramtops of the Discworld, where the books of history are kept

These aren’t books in which the events of the past are pinned like so many butterflies to a cork These are the books from which history is derived There are h, bound in lead, and the letters are so slass

When people say "It is written" it is written here

There are fewer metaphors around than people think

Every o into the cave where the books are kept It used to be the duty of the abbot alone, but two other reliable monks were included after the unfortunate case of the

59th Abbot, who made a ht up with hio in alone The sheer concentratedness of History, sleeting past soundlessly out into the world, can be overwhel Too much of it kills you

The 493rd Abbot folded his wrinkled hands and addressed Lu-Tze, one of his most senior monks The clear air and untroubled life of the secret valley was such that all the monks were senior; besides, when you ith Time every day, some of it tends to rub off

"The place is Omnia," said the abbot, "on the Klatchian coast"

"I re fellow called Ossory, wasn’t there?"

"Things must becarefully observed," said the abbot "There are pressures Free will, predestinationthe power of sy-pointyou know all about this"

"Haven’t been to Omnia for, oh, must be seven hundred years," said Lu-Tze "Dry place Shouldn’t think there’s a ton of good soil in the whole country, either"

"Off you go, then," said the abbot

"I shall take ood for the o in for possessions They find s wear out in a century or two

It took hiet to Omnia He had to watch a couple of battles and an assassination on the way, otherwise they would just have been random events

It was the Year of the Notional Serpent, or two hundred years after the Declaration of the Prophet Abbys

Which meant that the time of the 8th Prophet was i about the Church of the Great God Om It had very punctual prophets You could set your calendar by theenerally the case around the time a prophet is expected, the Church redoubled its efforts to be holy This was very e concern when the auditors are expected, but tended towards taking people suspected of being less holy and putting theenious ways This is considered a reliable barometer of the state of one’s piety in ions There’s a tendency to declare that there is an championships, that heresyand eye and tongue, and that it’s tienerally considered very efficient for this purpose

And it came to pass that in that time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One:

"Psst!"

Brutha paused in arden

"Pardon?" he said

It was a fine day early in the lesser Spring The prayer mills spun merrily in the breeze off the mountains Bees loafed around in the bean blossoive the ile circled