That turned out to be because the glaciers themselves were very big, and Nijel wasn’t very good at perspective. As the horses flew lower over the leading glacier, a huge bull heavily crevassed and scarred by moraine, it became apparent that one reason why the Ice Giants were known as the Ice Giants was because they were, well, giants.
The other was that they were made of ice.
A figure the size of a large house was crouched at the crest of the bull, urging it to greater efforts by means of a spike on a long pole. It was craggy, in fact it was more nearly faceted, and glinted green and blue in the light; there was a thin band of silver in its snowy locks, and its eyes were tiny and black and deep set, like lumps of coal.[24]
There was a splintering crash ahead as the leading glaciers smacked into a forest. Birds rattled up in panic. Snow and splinters rained down around Nijel as he galloped on the air alongside the giant. >‘Yes. That’s right. You’ve got it exactly.’
Conina and Creosote exchanged glances. Nijel remained sitting proudly in the saddle, a faint smile on his face.
‘Is your geese giving you trouble?’ said the Seriph.
‘Geas,’ said Nijel calmly. ‘It’s not giving me trouble, it’s just that I must do something brave before I die.’
‘That’s it though,’ said Creosote. ‘That’s the whole rather sad point. You’ll do something brave, and then you’ll die.’
‘What alternative have we got?’ said Nijel.
They considered this.
‘I don’t think I’m much good at explaining,’ said Conina, in a small voice.
‘I am,’ said Nijel, firmly. ‘I’m always having to explain.’
The scattered particles of what had been Rincewind’s mind pulled themselves together and drifted up through the layers of dark unconsciousness like a three-day corpse rising to the surface.
It probed its most recent memories, in much the same way that one might scratch a fresh scab.
He could recall something about a staff, and a pain so intense that it appeared to insert a chisel between every cell in his body and hammer on it repeatedly.
He remembered the staff fleeing, dragging him after it. And then there had been that dreadful bit where Death had appeared and reached past him, and the staff had twisted and become suddenly alive and Death had said, IPSLORE THE RED, I HAVE YOU NOW.
And now there was this.
By the feel of it Rincewind was lying on sand. It was very cold.
He took the risk of seeing something horrible and opened his eyes.
The first thing he saw was his left arm and, surprisingly, his hand. It was its normal grubby self. He had expected to see a stump.
It seemed to be night-time. The beach, or whatever it was, stretched on towards a line of distant low mountains, under night sky frosted with a million white stars.
A little closer to him there was a rough line in the silvery sand. He lifted his head slightly and saw the scatter of molten droplets. They were octiron, a metal so intrinsically magical that no forge on the Disc could even warm it up.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘We won, then.’
He flopped down again.
After a while his right hand came up automatically and patted the top of his head. Then it patted the sides of his head. Then it began to grope, with increasing urgency, in the sand around him.
Eventually it must have communicated its concern to the rest of Rincewind, because he pulled himself upright and said, ‘Oh, bugger.’
There seemed to be no hat anywhere. But he could see a small white shape lying very still in the sand a little way away and, further off -
A column of daylight.
It hummed and swayed in the air, a three-dimensional hole into somewhere else. Occasional flurries of snow blew out of it. He could see skewed images in the light, that might be buildings or landscapes warped by the weird curvature. But he couldn’t see them very clearly, because of the tall, brooding shadows that surrounded it.
The human mind is an astonishing thing. It can operate on several levels at once. And, in fact, while Rincewind had been wasting his intellect in groaning and looking for his hat, an inner part of his brain had been observing, assessing, analysing and comparing.