An alternative, favoured by those of a religiOUS persuasion, was that A'Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. There was, for example, the theory that A'Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. In the meantime they could only speculate about the revealed cosmos. For example, what was Atuin's actual sex? This vital question, said the Astrozoologists with mounting authority, would not be answered until a larger and more powerful gantry was constructed for a deep-space vessel. The early astrozoologists, hauled back from theiR long dangle by enormous teams of slaves, were able to bring back much information about theģ shape and nature of A'Tuin and the elephants but this did not resolve fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the universe. The Great Turtle was a mere hypothesis until the day the small and secretive kingdom of Krull, whose rim-most mountains project out over the Rimfall, built a gantry 'and pulley arrangement at the tip of the most precipitous crag and lowered several oBservers over the Edge in a quartzwindowed brass vessel to peer through the mist veils. Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about. Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and startanned shoulders the disc of the World rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven. In a brain bigger than a city, with geological Slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.

Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination. Great A'Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked With meteor craters. 2 The Colour of Magic PROLOGUE In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part.

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